My friend who, as soon as he had the opportunity, started lying to me, intentionally steering me away from the path most likely to reunite me with my husband, keeping me from my children until they became adults with their own lives and their own children and no need or desire to have me around.

  My friend, who let me spend fifty years thinking maybe everyone I loved was right when they told me I was chasing a ghost, that I was never going to find him because he wasn’t out there anymore. My friend who—and this is the best part—convinced me to let him have me skinned alive over and over again so he could collect the magical membrane that adhered to my skin every time I pushed my way through the wall between dimensions.

  Yeah. Great guy, Naga. I almost wish I hadn’t let Thomas kill him. Only almost, and only because the more time I have to think about what he did to me—to us—the more I wish I’d been able to kill him myself.

  But that’s water under the temporal bridge. I went the direction Naga didn’t want me going, and I found Thomas, just like I always said I was going to. Thanks to the wonders of magic, he was almost the same physical age he’d been when he vanished. I would have been happy married to a man in his nineties, but being able to skip that in favor of us both being young enough to survive getting out of the bottle dimension had been a bonus. So we were finally together, and we were going to get our happy ending, right? Right?

  Wrong. So, so wrong. Because while he’d been locked in that bottle dimension, Thomas had essentially become a dynastic warlord, with a whole community of people who depended on him. All of them were either victims of their own crossroads bargains or descended from victims, and none of them deserved to be left behind to die there. Meaning that when we’d managed to get out, we’d done it with just over three hundred refugees in tow, and none of them had been equipped to strike out on their own.

  Some friends of mine from Ithaca, Helen and Phoebe, had offered to give us a helping hand, in the form of supplies, various charms that would boost Thomas’s natural ability to open doors between worlds, and a map that would help us get the ones who could go home back to their original dimensions, and find places where the ones who didn’t have anywhere to go back to could settle down and figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. And that’s what we’d been doing. Hence the megafauna parade and tentacle party.

  We’d managed to shed nearly two hundred people during the trip, returning them to their homes or finding places where they wouldn’t encroach on other intelligent life, and I was exhausted. With more than a hundred people left to resettle, it was starting to feel like this was another quest that was never going to end, and Thomas and I were never going to have a moment to ourselves.

  “I got it!” shouted a female voice, heavy with a Maine accent, right before a human woman in her early twenties ran past me, a spear clutched in both hands. I snapped upright, gripping my guns, and watched her run. The tentacles between us weren’t thrashing anymore; something seemed to be pinning them to the ground, where they strained against the unseen force.

  I glanced to the side. There was Thomas, hands raised and face set in a grimace as he focused his sorcery on keeping the thing from hitting Sally. A small, unpleasant part of me pointed out that if he could do that, he could have been doing it before, but hadn’t bothered when I’d been the one in danger. I shoved that part down as hard as I could. The fact that I’d been chasing a fairy tale ending for fifty years didn’t mean anybody owed me one. It certainly didn’t mean Thomas could be blamed for saving the girl who had become his daughter in all but literal blood rather than his still semi-unfamiliar wife.

  It didn’t. It couldn’t. It was unfair of me to think that it did, and so I wasn’t going to think that, no matter how hard circumstances tried to make me.

  Sally leapt, spear held overhead in a classic javelineer’s pose, and stabbed viciously downward. There was an offended bellow from the pit—the first sound we’d heard since the tentacles erupted from the ground—and they began to retreat, leaving Sally stumbling back from the edge of the hole, spear still clutched in both hands.

  Panting, she turned to face me, a small, cocky smile on her face. “Thanks for the assist,” she said, and strolled back toward where Thomas was standing. His hands weren’t raised anymore. They were resting on his knees as he bent forward, panting slightly. Every dimension we went to had a different pneuma, and the pneuma was what fueled his magic.

  Thomas is a sorcerer, a form of naturally occurring human witch who can tap into the pneuma of a world and use it to make the laws of physics sit, stay, roll over, and play dead. When we were together the first time, he mostly used it to move things from one place to another, start small fires, and occasionally keep me from falling out of bed when we got too enthusiastic. What’s the point of being able to move things with your mind if you can’t use it to keep your wife from bruising her ass on the floor, right?

  Well, his time in the bottle dimension, where there was no native pneuma to draw on, had forced him to become a lot more innovative, and a lot more efficient about how he used power. Moving to a new dimension might throw him off-balance for a little bit, hence the panting, but once he recovered, he could do more with less than he had ever been able to accomplish before. Hence simple telekinesis becoming “I can restrain a whole-ass tentacle monster before it eats anybody.” It was a pretty nice upgrade, all things considered.

  The guards lowered their spears, turning to make reassuring noises to the other refugees as I holstered my pistols and cautiously approached the edge of the hole. Thomas watched me warily but didn’t say anything. He knew better than to tell a Healy not to investigate a natural phenomenon.

  I climbed the jagged mound in the earth, careful of my footing, and peered into the opening. A wide tunnel seemed to lead to the surface, and judging by the sides, it had been dug out by the creature we’d seen before. “Sally? Did you see what was down here?”

  “Ayuh. Big round pink thing with a bunch of tentacles coming out around the edges.”

  “Uh-huh.” That matched what I was seeing, and I didn’t like it. I backed away from the hole, hands on my revolvers. “Thomas? We should be somewhere else now, if that’s cool by you. Don’t care whether it’s on top of a big rock or in the next dimension on the list, but I’m going to say this is not a good place for people to settle. Also going to say I have a decent idea why there isn’t any intelligent life around here.”

  “And why is that, dear?” There was a hard edge on the last word. He was annoyed. Well, that was nothing new. Not after the last six months.

  “Because that was a giant star-nosed mole, or the local equivalent, and I don’t think we want to be standing here when it burrows its way back,” I said. “Poking it in the snout surprised it enough to make it leave, but that doesn’t mean it’s staying gone. Moles are carnivores. The ones back home eat grubs and worms, and are about the size of my hand. The ones here—”

  “Would happily eat us, I’m sure,” he concluded. He took a deep breath and pressed two fingers to the inside of his left wrist, as if he were taking his own pulse. Which maybe he was. I’m no sorcerer. Even after fifty years of playing hide-and-seek across dimensions, half of how it works is a mystery to me.

  Not entirely because I didn’t try to learn. Naga wasn’t just taking my skin every time I came back to him for help: he was taking my memories, editing what I knew to make sure I’d keep being a good little dog and going where he wanted me. Eventually, I was sure, his pet Johrlac would have figured out a way to take Thomas and leave me running through the dimensions with no idea why. Johrlac are clever that way. There’s a reason nobody likes them.

  “I can’t get us out of here just yet,” he said finally, dropping his hand. “I’ll need about another hour. Sally? Can you find us a route to the top of that rock?”

  He gestured toward the low bluff I’d slammed into before. It was a semi-sheer rock face roughly eleven feet high—tall enough to keep us from attracting more moles, and also tall enough that half our party wouldn’t possibly be able to climb it, even if we’d had a way of securely anchoring our ropes to the top. Some of them were old, and about a third were children. Isn’t leading a group of interdimensional refugees to safety fun?

  “I can do it,” I said, as Sally said, “On it, boss,” and took off running along the line of the rock, clearly scouting for a place where the climb would be easier. Her gait was uneven, unusually so, and after a beat, I realized she wasn’t hurt, she was doing that on purpose.

  “She’s walking without rhythm so she won’t attract the worm,” I said, amused despite myself.

  Thomas was approaching me, no longer winded, still clearly annoyed. I straightened, ignoring the twinge in my back.

  “I could have found a way up,” I said. “I have a lot more experience with scouting runs in parallel dimensions than Sally does.” Sally was incredibly skilled at wilderness survival, even for a girl from small-town Maine, but then, she’d been stranded in a hostile bottle dimension full of people who wanted to kill her for the better part of a decade. I, on the other hand, was a bounty hunter feared across multiple dimensions and recognized in dozens more, who’d been skipping world to world for fifty years. There was no question which of us was better equipped to navigate unfamiliar terrain.

  “Maybe so, but as she’s not the one who got slammed into the side of a cliff five minutes ago, I thought it was better if I sent her off while I took care of you.” He frowned, and I fought the urge to squirm. I always felt about two feet tall when he looked at me that way. “When are you going to learn that you’re not indestructible anymore?”

  “I was never indestructible,” I protested. “I don’t act like I am.”

  He didn’t say a word. Just looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and waited.

  The silence stretched between us until it became unbearable, and I blurted, “Okay, so maybe I got a little careless when it came to my personal safety, but if I couldn’t patch myself up, Naga could do it for me, and anyway, it was all so I could keep looking for you.”

  The refugees were keeping their distance. They were smart enough to know when they didn’t want to be in the middle of something. Hell, I was smart enough to know I didn’t want to be in the middle of this, and yet here I was, stuck in a happy ending that involved a really annoying amount of yelling.

  “Considering that I didn’t ask you to come find me, I’d thank you to stop reminding me how much damage you did to yourself while you were trying!”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t ask you to sell your soul to the crossroads for my sake, so I guess we’re both going to be a little bit annoyed, okay?”

  “Alice . . .” He sighed heavily. “I’m just asking you to please be careful. You can’t receive magical healing right now. You might never be able to again. That means any injuries you get will have to heal the traditional way, and I don’t want you to be hurt.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Yes. That’s all I’m asking you to do.”

  “You’re asking me to be careful, and you don’t see anything wrong with that?”

  Thomas hesitated for a moment. Then he grimaced, his own words finally catching up with him. “Alice, I didn’t mean—”

  “I think I have a pretty decent idea of what you meant. Try to keep your people from moving around too much. We wouldn’t want to get another mole when Sally’s not here to chase it away.”

  I turned and stalked in the opposite direction from Sally, hugging the rock wall as closely as I could without falling into a predictable gait. This time, I was the one who didn’t look back.

  Two

  “Nothing wrong with having a temper. Oh, it can be inconvenient at times, and it’s on you to learn how to manage it, but if you won’t fight for yourself in this world, who’s going to do the fighting for you?”

  —Enid Healy

  Storming off alone in an unfamiliar, megafauna-rich dimension, because that’s a good idea

  I STARTED TO COOL down before I reached the end of the rock, which looked about a hundred feet long in every direction, like a big skipping stone plopped down in the middle of an otherwise relatively flat plain. This was a very Earth-similar dimension, based on what we’d seen so far, which was why it had been such a surprise when the giant mole popped out of the ground. I was just glad it hadn’t managed to chow down on anyone before it was driven away. Wouldn’t want to make the local fauna sick.

  Not that we would, most likely. Dimensions are laid out such that it’s actually really difficult to force your way into a world completely hostile to your specific form of life. Oh, we were probably allergic to a lot of things in this dimension, and I wouldn’t want to catch a cold here—I caught a cold on Ithaca once, and I had to avoid worlds with human populations for a good six months to keep myself from possibly starting a pandemic—but the base structure of our proteins was almost certainly safe for the local megafauna. Bad for us, good for them.

  Of course, the opposite was also true, so if we had to set up camp here for a little while, we could always have a megafauna barbecue to help rebuild our strength.

  Every dimension is different. I know I say that a lot, but that’s because it’s true, and it’s not something that can be safely forgotten. Repetition is the key to retention. Every dimension is different, and that means every dimension deals with energy exchanges differently. Sometimes, we could shove our collective way through the pneuma of a new world, step through, and find Thomas, our resident taxi service, already prepared to go again. Other times, we’d arrive in a new place and he’d be so tapped out, he needed days to recover. His record so far, in both directions, was five minutes versus eight days. This world seemed likely to fall somewhere in the middle. Most of them do.

  Sorcerers like Thomas seem to occur everywhere there’s a pneuma, which is to say, everywhere that’s capable of sustaining life. Not intelligent life: life, full stop. Oh, sure, maybe there are worlds that haven’t progressed beyond single-celled organisms yet, but I’m sure even there, some of the protozoa have weird, inexplicable ways of speeding up their whatever the hell it is protozoa spend their time doing.

  If we ran into a sorcerer mole, I was going to be annoyed, right after I got over being so intrigued that I nearly got myself killed. Hey, I know myself pretty well. I’ve had more than seventy years to get familiar with my quirks, and they include being way too interested in things that want to murder me. Sure, for a while there, my natural curiosity got overridden by the burning desire to find my missing husband, but now that I have him—and occasionally question why I wanted him in the first place—what I always thought of as “normal” is starting to reassert itself.

  Thank God. I was pretty insufferable for a while there. Something about spending fifty years on a doomed quest messes with a lady’s head.

  The rock wall ended at a sharp, almost ninety-degree angle. I followed the turn, and found myself facing another long stretch of stone. This, at least, looked a little more eroded, and like we might be able to use it to boost the taller members of our company up to safety. Once they were on solid footing, they could help the rest up, and we could set up camp for however long we needed to be here.

  Which hopefully wouldn’t be too long. Sooner or later, some of the people we were supposed to be escorting to safety would stop panicking long enough to realize that for this place to sustain moles as big as the one we’d seen before, it would need to have something for those moles to eat. Moles do not live on menace and scaring the hell out of travelers alone. So what had our big, terrifying friend been eating? Were we talking earthworms the size of anacondas, or beetles as big as Saint Bernards? Or both?

  I’d be fine with the worms, honestly. Earthworms are pretty harmless. They eat things no one else wants, and they poop dirt. Hard to go wrong with earthworms. Beetles, on the other hand . . . some species of beetles are predatory.

  Yeah, it was a leap from “megafauna mole” to “giant insects,” but I’ve been to enough worlds with giant insects in them to have a pretty good idea of what kind of environment will spawn them, and this looked like a world where grubs the size of cows ate your shoes while you were trying to run away if ever I’d seen one.

  At least it wasn’t a giant spider world. I hate those. Giant spiders have absolutely no chill, and they can ruin everybody’s day in a hurry.

  The edge of the rock was rough, like it had been broken off too recently to have had time to erode. I trailed a hand along it as I walked, trying to puzzle out the geological forces at work. Maybe it had been pushed up from underground by something even bigger than the mole, or maybe it had been thrown here by some sort of an eruption. Erosion tends to be pretty consistent across dimensions with atmospheres, since there’s only so far the laws of physics can bend before a world loses the ability to sustain human life.

  About fifty feet from the corner, there was a crevice big enough for me to wedge a foot into. I peered carefully inside, reaching back to pull a glow stick out of my pack and cracking it before I moved any closer. The crack looked empty. Just to be sure, I tossed the glow stick into the crevice. It landed with a thump, and something that looked like a wood louse the size of a cat scuttled away.

  Nothing else moved. I stood perfectly still, counting to twenty, and when still nothing else moved, I wedged my foot into the crack and boosted myself up, feeling around for a handhold on the stone above me. There were several cracks driven deep into the structure, and after a little readjusting, I was able to climb all the way to the top of the rock.

  As I had hoped, it was smooth gray granite, dusted with patches of dirt but otherwise unremarkable. I dusted my hands against my knees and started walking across the stone toward where I’d left Thomas and the others. There was no sign of Sally. Maybe it was petty of me to hope that I’d managed to beat a girl young enough to be my grandkid, but I’ve never claimed not to be petty.