There was so much about this place I didn’t know or understand. “Is there still life in this world that didn’t arrive via the crossroads?” I asked.

  “Nothing very sophisticated: plants and some smaller creatures and the like,” said Thomas. “This world has been dying since before my arrival. It’s not capable of sustaining much life without magical aid. And without a healthy membrane and pneuma to protect it, it’s not generating enough magic to provide the necessary aid. This is an . . . oasis, of sorts, a place of relative stability.”

  “Only because you made it one,” said Sally. “We’re not sure whether any of this world’s original inhabitants have survived to be pains in our asses. The oldest people we’ve been able to find all had stories like ours, about falling through the barrier after their bargains went sour. It may be that the locals hide better, or that people don’t tend to live that long here—”

  “But we think we’re an entire world, or at least an entire continent, of exiles,” said Thomas. “I think that I, being British, may seem like an exemplar of an ethos that says, ‘Well, you weren’t using it right, so we took it,’ but in this specific case, that doesn’t seem to be the situation. When I arrived, this territory was being fought over by three different warlords, each of whom had originated in a different dimension, none of whom could communicate with the others. Granting them the ability to converse didn’t solve anything. They’re all long dead, of course, but their descendants still hold their territories as best they can, and all of them would like to reclaim the territory we’ve carved from the bodies of their own.”

  I nodded. “Gotcha. Anyone but Thomas here when all this was going down?”

  Sally snorted. “Some of the guards come from really, really long-lived species, and they remember what it was like before Thomas became Autarch,” she said. “But boss is the only one who decided to stop aging for funsies. The rest of us keep on getting older at a normal rate. Whatever you’ve been doing hasn’t been an option.”

  “And it will no longer be an option for Alice, after this,” said Thomas firmly. “That is finished, thank you.”

  I bristled a little at the imperious note in his tone—I’ve never liked being told what to do—but even if I could convince him not to punish Naga for helping me, he was right. “I don’t need it anymore,” I said. “I’ve only been going through rejuvenation to keep me capable of navigating worlds long enough to find my way back to you.”

  Sally looked interested. “Is this something ordinary people like me can do?”

  “No,” said Thomas and I together. I took a deep breath and repeated more gently, “No. It only worked for me because . . . because I have a very high tolerance for pain. I’m afraid it wouldn’t work for just anyone. And we don’t have any of the necessary equipment here. I’m aging just like you are right now.”

  “I’ll keep my own charm in place until we’re back to where we were when I left home,” said Thomas. “But then I’ll release that as well, and we can grow old together. My days as Autarch will end when I can no longer hold this territory, and I cede it to my heir.”

  “Your heir?” I knew Thomas hadn’t been engaged in any activities that could result in him fathering any more children since getting to this dimension, but he could have adopted some. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Mostly because he hadn’t been able to be there for our children, and I’m just selfish enough not to want someone else to have had that time with him. What? I’m allowed to be flawed.

  “Yes, my publicly acknowledged firstborn,” he said. “Some of the people here are physically compatible, but their children, when children occur, are officially announced as mine. Ser is officially my heir, and I doubt his mother and I would have been compatible if I had been inclined to try, which I was not.”

  “Around here, you can found a dynasty if you hook up with someone you’re capable of reproducing with and pass things on to your kids,” Sally explained. “That means it’s mostly only the assholes who have kids, because the rest of us are limited to one, maybe two members of our species. I’m the first human chick to touch down in decades, and even if the boss hadn’t been pining for what we all thought was a dead woman, we would never have worked out. Scuttled a lot of hopes that the next Autarch would somehow look like this one, let me tell you.” She sounded deeply amused by how wrong the people had been to be hopeful for some stability.

  I nodded. “So these are the descendants of people who made bargains that got them banished, and did so in sufficient numbers that they could build a gene pool capable of sustaining multiple generations?”

  “Bingo.” She touched her nose.

  “And these warlords are pissed?”

  “Because of you,” said Sally.

  I blinked. “Come again?”

  “Not directly,” said Thomas. “As Sally mentioned, our neighbors have been attempting to beat us to new arrivals for some time now, and there had been a sufficient gap between the last and yourself that they’ve been growing anxious. They are rather worse at keeping their people alive than I am, as they will persist in making war on one another whenever the opportunity arises, and we simply defend ourselves.”

  “Lucky for us, assholes never learned to play nice with the other children, or to share,” said Sally. “If they formed an alliance of all three, we’d be completely screwed. They could overrun us in no time. But they haven’t all realized how many of our defenses are down, and they’re still being careful.”

  “Those are the standing effects that you were powering with the bits of pneuma you peeled off the newcomers?” I asked, glancing to Thomas. He nodded. “Cool. I assume they were part of what was keeping you safe from these people up until now. Can you peel off the pneuma that’s stuck to me and use it to get things back up and running?”

  Thomas looked uncomfortable. “If you’re sure you wouldn’t take it as a violation of your trust, I suppose I could . . .”

  “Will knives be involved?”

  He looked horrified. “No!”

  “Then it’s fine. Honestly. Maybe we can get your security a little more up to snuff.” I looked to Sally. “Any of these people marching on us right now?”

  “The Haspers, to the west,” she said. “They’re a nasty bunch. Not that any of the neighbors are nice, but they and the O’Vera to the south are the worst of a bad lot. I think because neither of them are mammalian. They don’t necessarily view things the same way we do. When they got their hands on new arrivals, they used them for dinner, not for breeding stock. Which may have been an improvement, considering our other neighbors, but I’m happier not knowing for sure.”

  “How long do we have until they get here?”

  “A few hours. Maybe a day, at the most,” she said.

  “Then you must have a lot of preparations you need to make.” I looked to Thomas. “I’m going back to your room so you can finish this without any more distractions. Come get me when you’re ready.”

  And then I walked away, before he could protest. I needed some time to think.

  Fourteen

  “Yes. Yes, it was too much to ask. Raising your daughter to think that her only value is in sitting pretty and pristine on a shelf somewhere doesn’t get you a functional person, it gets you a monster in waiting.”

  —Laura Campbell

  Sitting on the same bed, no longer naked, and somewhat annoyingly alone, because sometimes being an adult means putting duty first

  The smell of the bromeliads was almost pleasant now that I understood where they had come from and why they been tended with such care. A lot of things are like that. They can seem off-putting or even bad until you get the proper context, and then they become vital and exactly as they’re supposed to be. I left the window open.

  There was still enough sap in my system that the pollen alone wasn’t going to be enough to knock me out. I’ve never understood the mechanism by which swamp bromeliads do the things they do. I know some of the more insular cryptid communities use them in place of any more modern form of anesthesia, and it seems to work well enough. Thomas had probably saved a lot of lives by keeping those seeds in his wallet. And he probably kept that window closed and sealed whenever he had Autarch stuff to do.

  I folded my hands under my head, on top of the pillow, and stared at the ceiling, allowing my mind to drift. It was probably for the best that I had this time alone: I needed it to sort through everything that had happened, and everything I’d learned. I’d always expected this moment, if it ever came, to feel like I was finished. Like I’d done everything I was supposed to do and could stop now. It was like as soon as Thomas disappeared, I had thrown out my old, ever-vague life plan and replaced it with a simple list of bullet points: One: Find a way out of my home dimension. Well, I’d managed that, and then I’d done it over and over again—lather, rinse, repeat— until one day I’d looked around and realized the only real anchors I had left were a dead girl, a house that wasn’t mine, a forest that loved me, and a colony of talking mice. My family was . . . well, they were people who were related to me, and I liked them, even loved them, but I didn’t know them. They weren’t enough to make me stay.

  Two: Find Thomas. That was the one that had seemed impossible for a long time, and I’d been starting to lose hope when Annie found me at the Red Angel. It was a wild coincidence to base the rest of my life on, but being a Healy, I’ve learned to trust the wild coincidences. Grandpa used to say the family’s luck didn’t work that way before Dad brought Mom home from the carnival, but once he did . . . things just fell into place around her. Sometimes good things, like finding a dead babysitter who would stay with us forever. Sometimes bad things, like whatever eventually killed her. Always things that were just on the far edge of improbability.

  I inherited my luck from my mother, and I passed it on to my kids, and it’s kept us alive almost as many times as it’s put us into extreme danger, and it was a big part of why I’d been able to keep looking for so long. Not just the last-minute saves and the pieces of evidence falling into my lap at the exact right moment, but the conviction that I wouldn’t be doing as well as I was if he wasn’t still out there for me to find. My luck wouldn’t have allowed me to keep going at that point.

  So now I’d managed both the first and second points on my three-point list. Only the third was left: Get home.

  But I didn’t know what that meant anymore.

  I had always expected to find him and have him tell me we were going back to Buckley immediately. Would he even want that now? He had a life here, a community. Was I offering him anything he hadn’t already grieved over and left behind? Sure, our family didn’t have the mixed feelings about him that they did about me. How could they? He’d been missing longer than most of them had been alive. They’d be willing to welcome him with open arms, and Thomas . . . Thomas had always wanted a family.

  I had one. I had my parents, and my grandparents, and Mary, and the Campbells, and all the weird aunts and uncles my parents collected before I was born, and even though my childhood had been marred by tragedies, I’d grown up never questioning whether I was loved. Family was like air. It was just there, until it wasn’t, but you never questioned its existence.

  Thomas didn’t grow up the same way. He’d been an orphan from the time he was young enough for that to be a defining attribute, growing up in the communal dormitories of the Covenant’s training center at Penton Hall. That upbringing was supposed to leave the young soldiers devoted to each other, a brother- and sisterhood of zealots, but Thomas had begun manifesting sorcery at an early age. Spending all your time trying to hide the fact that you were setting the sheets on fire when you slept led to a certain amount of isolation from your peers. He’d been an outsider, even within the Covenant, which should have been his home and heart and harbor.

  And then he’d come to Buckley, and my father had hated him, and my grandparents had been wary of him, and I’d fallen in love with him practically from the moment we met, creating a weird tangle of relationships that had chafed at us all. But despite all that, we’d found our way to something that seemed stable. I think he was more excited to find out I was pregnant than I was. Which made a certain amount of sense—I was the one who was going to be grounded from hunting for weeks, if not months, and kept out of my beloved forest until I was no longer in danger of giving birth in a bromeliad patch—but was also an illustration of how much of his life he’d spent searching for a family he could count on.

  So maybe he wasn’t going to want to go back to Buckley. Maybe he’d want to stay here. Or maybe he’d want to go to Portland and settle someplace near the grandkids. I understand people do that all the time. But I didn’t want to live in the Pacific Northwest. I wanted to live in the hand of my forest, letting the familiar shape of the world ease me into a future where I didn’t have to keep running just to stay ahead of my own terror.

  That was the problem. I’d never thought about any of this. I’d never thought beyond finding Thomas, confirming he still wanted to be with me, and maybe, on the days when my mind was really wandering, making it back to the house and letting him stand in his own living room, letting him see that I might have failed to keep our children safe, but I’d kept our home safe. I couldn’t think beyond that point because there’d been no way of knowing how he would react. Would he reject me for letting our family fall apart in my desperate need to bring him home? Would he say I’d done the right thing and put his arms around me and tell me I’d done a good job, but I was allowed to rest now, I didn’t have to keep running forever?

  I was allowed to rest.

  The ceiling wasn’t doing anything interesting, so I closed my eyes and lay there quietly until I heard the door open. A lot had changed in fifty years, but Thomas still had the same basic stride: it’s something that doesn’t change much without an injury or other skeletal alteration. I didn’t move.

  “Alice?” he asked softly, after a few seconds of silence had passed. “Are you awake?”

  “Strange place, alone, not currently drugged; of course, I am,” I said. “Did you finish your meeting?”

  “We did. You didn’t have to leave, you know.” The bed creaked as he sat down on the corner of the mattress, putting one hand on my calf. His palm was warm, as always. “You’re welcome in any of my meetings.”

  “And I appreciate that, but your people are going to need some time before they feel the same way, and I don’t want to undermine your authority more than I do by existing, so I figured it was best of me to opt out,” I said. “Plus Sally doesn’t seem to like me much just yet, and I want to give her as much time as possible.” Both of which were true.

  He laughed a little. “When did you get so reasonable?”

  “Oh, I’m not,” I said. “I’m extremely unreasonable about most things. But until we figure out how to get out of here, and get all your people out in the process, I figure I should at least pretend I’m not going to make your life harder.”

  “You don’t approve.”

  “Oh, for—” I rolled onto my side and opened my eyes, propping myself up with one elbow. “You don’t approve of me going and getting myself skinned alive so I could survive long enough to have this might-be-a-fight, still-finding-out with you, I don’t approve of you deciding the only way you could save the people who got thrown into your backyard by the crossroads was by claiming as much territory as you could for England, God, and St. George. I think we both have some decent reasons to be a little annoyed right now. I’m still less annoyed than I am euphoric, and I can’t quite believe I’m here, and you’re here, and we’re both here together.”

  “I’m having my own difficulty believing any of this is real,” said Thomas, hand tightening on my calf. “It seems a little too convenient to be believable.”

  “What, that we both found ways to stop aging until we could get back to each other and go on with our lives?” I shrugged. “I always suspected it would be a possibility for you, if you thought of it in time, and as the years went by, I had to put more and more faith in the idea that you would have thought of it in time—that you’d want to come home as much as I wanted you to.”

  “I did,” he said. “Of course I did.”

  “Honestly, it wouldn’t have changed anything if you hadn’t. I still would have kept going, because finding your grave would at least mean knowing you were at rest, and besides, once I knew you were dead, I’d be free to go home, strap twenty pounds of C-4 to my chest, and head for Penton Hall. Show the Covenant why they should have made sure we were dead before they declared our family line extinct.”

  Thomas blinked, slowly, like he was trying to process that. Finally, he asked, “You would have killed yourself if I had died before you?”

  “No. Yes. Maybe.” I flopped back down on to the bed. “I’m feeling sort of unmoored right now because this is all I’ve been trying to accomplish for fifty fucking years, and now it’s done, it’s over, I found you, good show, gold star Alice and here’s your little red wagon. And now I have absolutely no idea what happens next.”

  The last word was more petulant than I intended it to be, the protest of someone much younger being told that it was time to eat their vegetables and go to bed. To my surprise and mild annoyance, Thomas began laughing.

  I pushed myself onto my elbows again, glaring at him. “Hey. Wife, right here, reunited after way too damn long. Stop laughing at me if you want to get naked again any time soon.”

  “I’m sorry.” He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes, still laughing. He had it mostly under control by the time he put his glasses back on and schooled his face into an expression of relative solemnity as he looked at me. “You have my sincere apologies. I wasn’t attempting to make fun of you. I was simply reacting to the absurdity of the situation. Could you ever, in all your contemplations of the possible future, have placed us here? In this place, under these circumstances?”