“No, no, stay as you are,” he said. “This will go easier if you don’t move.”

  Okay. That was a little ominous. I raised my eyebrows and just watched him, until he offered the last bromeliad to me.

  “You want to get the sap into your system if you can,” he said. “It will help.”

  “I love these flowers,” I said, and closed my fingers around the stem, barely wincing as the thorns bit into my skin. The pain only lasted for a second before it was followed by the soothing peace of bromeliad toxins, washing all my little aches away. I felt like I could breathe more easily. It was like going from sober to pleasantly drunk without needing to do any swallowing.

  “Alice.” I looked to the sound of Thomas’ voice. “Alice, I want you to remember that you consented to this, but you can still tell me ‘no’ at any point. You are allowed to ask me to stop.”

  “I know,” I mumbled.

  “Do you? Because I don’t care how much you think this is the only way, I’m not going to proceed if you don’t want me to.”

  “I want to have more time,” I said. “I want to have more time with you, and with the kids, and I want to see you have time with the kids. I want to have more kids.”

  “Not while you’re this inebriated, dear,” said Thomas, sounding faintly amused.

  Sally had been unpacking the box while we were talking, laying out an array of tools and vessels around us. Thomas turned to face the room, raising his hands.

  “You have known me by many names,” he said. “And those names were necessary and good, for this place, for this time. We are leaving them all behind today, along with all bargains, all crimes, all rivalries. If this succeeds, we will be free of here, and those of us who came here from other worlds can hopefully go home. Those who were born here can find places to settle where the air is still good and the ground is still fertile.”

  “What if we’re not wanted?” demanded a voice.

  “We weren’t wanted here, and we did okay,” said Sally. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll survive. That’s what we do. That’s what we’ve always done. We’ve survived.”

  “I’m going to release the spells outside this room now,” continued Thomas. “It will not be safe to leave here after I’ve done that. If something alarms you, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stay. The translation charm will not extend beyond this room. The air will not extend beyond this room.”

  “We’ll be fine,” said a voice I recognized as Lyn.

  “Not everyone will,” said Thomas. “Stay inside.”

  A general murmur of assent met what wasn’t really a request by any definition of the word; he reached down, and Sally handed him a lit candle I hadn’t seen her lighting. Everything was sort of fuzzy. I wasn’t tracking well. Thomas blew the candle out, and the air in the room got brighter, somehow, like we were on a plane that had just fully pressurized. The murmuring got louder.

  “It is done,” he said, handing the candle back to Sally. Then he turned to me. “Can you still hear me?”

  I could. I smiled and nodded.

  “Can I have the flower back?”

  I frowned, pulling it a little closer to myself.

  He sighed. “Alice, I needed you slightly anesthetized, not too drugged to understand simple requests. If you don’t give me that flower back, you’ll keep forcing further doses of sap into your bloodstream, and you won’t be able to stay awake through the necessary procedure. Please give it back.”

  He sounded very serious, and like this was very important. I sighed and let go.

  “Thank you,” he said, whisking the crushed flower away before taking my hands in his. “I’m going to begin by peeling off a portion of the pneuma. This should allow me to strengthen the effects already in play and begin attempting to construct a door. I won’t take more than I could pull from an ordinary traveler. Nod if you understand.”

  I nodded.

  “Boss?” asked Sally, unsure.

  “This is what I did to you when you first arrived,” he said. “It won’t hurt her too badly.”

  “I said he could,” I said, voice gone dreamy.

  “Yes, you did,” Thomas said. “Sally, I know you’re concerned, but I promise you, I explained as much as I could before we reached this point. I can’t be sure of what will happen as we continue; I’ve never removed this much from one person before, and yes, it could hurt her. Magic has a cost. It could hurt me, too. I have to get us out of here, and this is the only chance we have left at this point.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t either,” he said, with deep regret, and still holding my hands, he pulled.

  The human body is full of things we can’t see. The air in our lungs, the sugar in our blood, the electricity in our cells. The feeling of Thomas pulling wasn’t like a physical thing, but it was a physical thing at the same time; there was no other way to wrap my head around it. He was using a mechanism I didn’t have and thus couldn’t fully tense against, like having him try to suck the air out of me during a kiss, or somehow drain the glucose from my veins.

  It ached. It ached and it burned, even through the bromeliad haze. The pain was enough to make the fog less dense, and I surfaced a bit toward unwilling sobriety, flashing him and Sally a quick smile as the pulling and pressure finally faded away.

  “That’s not so bad,” I said.

  “That was just the first layer,” Thomas replied, expression going grim. “It may have been less of a torture to remove it all on one go.”

  Meaning the flensing Naga had been doing might not have been the worst possible option. I forced myself to relax again, this time keeping my eyes open and staring up at the ceiling. It was covered in a mosaic pattern of abstract shapes and chunks of colored glass, and I couldn’t quite understand it, but I was still effectively high enough from the sap that I just knew that if I did, everything would make sense.

  “Again,” said Thomas, and squeezed my hands.

  This time the pain was more immediate, and substantially more intense, like he was peeling the skin off of a fresh sunburn. By the time he stopped and the pressure passed, every inch of me felt like it was on fire, and the comforting haze of the bromeliads was completely gone.

  I lifted my head and stared at him. “Are we done?” That still hadn’t been so bad. I’d gone through a lot worse. I could—

  “No,” he said, sorrowfully. “I am so sorry, Alice, but I need more, or we’re not going to be able to open a door out of here. Attacking this barrier is like trying to bore through solid steel with a needle.”

  “Always thought magic would be flashier,” said Sally. “Not just you scrunching up your face like you’re constipated while you break a woman’s fingers.”

  “Can’t all be glamorous, I guess,” I said, trying to sound flippant, and not like I wanted to call the whole thing off. “How many more layers we got?”

  “Quite a few,” said Thomas. “I’ve peeled off as much as I could get from any five other arrivals. I could stop now; I could restore all the barriers, rebuild my shield around what’s left of the membrane, and still power this world for a year off what I’ve gathered.”

  “Or you could pull the pin like we both know you need to.” I smiled. “Come on, buddy. I want my little red wagon.”

  “I love you,” he said, voice soft, and leaned in to kiss my forehead before he pulled again.

  The pain was immediate, and as big as any pain I’d ever felt before in my life. It made being skinned alive seem like child’s play, and in a flash of sudden, horrifying clarity, I understood that while Naga had absolutely been torturing me, it probably had been the most merciful way to go about things. My head snapped back, eyes open and staring at the ceiling, and the picture came into sudden, horrible focus.

  Snakes. The shapes around the outside of the design were snakes. Snakes with the upper bodies of humans, because I was looking at a frieze of Naga’s people.

  This must have been their original world. They had started here, in this dead place, before moving to Empusa, which explained why they were so interested in dimensional travel and the way worlds could interact and intersect. Which meant Naga’s real crime wasn’t hurting me; it was how long he’d persisted in doing it. He’d known this place existed all along. He could have sent me here the first time I asked him for help. Or maybe he hadn’t known. Maybe it was lost information, or his people thought their dimension had died so long ago that it had surely rotted into nothing by now.

  But he’d been so firm on the idea that I couldn’t go this way, that the worlds I’d find in this direction wouldn’t support life. Had he been trying to keep me from this world in specific, or had he believed its decay would have spoiled more than just Cornale? Had he been trying to protect his investment?

  Everything was starting to take on a new context, and I didn’t like any of it. And then I couldn’t think about any of it anymore because the pain was too intense; every nerve was on fire, and my heart was hammering harder than I had ever felt it before, pounding against the inside of my chest like it was hoping to escape. I couldn’t breathe.

  The pain slackened off for a moment, and I tasted peppermint. Forcing my eyes open—when had they closed? I didn’t remember closing them—I blinked blearily through stress-induced black spots on my vision at Thomas, who was holding a tube of peppermint glucose gel to my lips, forcing it into my mouth.

  “Just breathe and swallow, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re doing fantastically.”

  “No, she’s not,” protested Sally. “She looks like she’s about to have a heart attack. Are you trying to become a widower? Like, you got so used to thinking of yourself that way that now you need to make it true?”

  “I would prefer not to kill my wife,” said Thomas, removing the empty tube and dropping it to the floor. “But she made it very clear that I was to do whatever I had to in order to get us out of here, and that at least one of us had to make it home.”

  No, I thought. I changed my mind. We can stay here until the ground dissolves under our feet, we can rotate in the void together, we can be stardust, but I don’t want to die.

  Sadly, humans aren’t mind readers, and I couldn’t speak. I closed my eyes again as Thomas stepped closer, and the pulling sensation resumed, followed, in what could have been an hour or could have been an instant, by the searing, all-consuming pain.

  It wasn’t burning. I’ve been burnt before, and this wasn’t that. It wasn’t freezing, either. It was like . . . rotting and being roasted by the sun in the same moment, the harsh, tingling blaze of radiation ripping through my body, and it was agony, and if trauma leaves scars no one can see, this was going to leave a scar the size of my entire body. Assuming I lived that long. Assuming this didn’t kill me. Please don’t let this kill me. Thomas was as traumatized as I was, just in different ways, and he didn’t deserve to start his journey home by killing me, not when he’d waited this long.

  Not when we’d both waited this long. The universe doesn’t actually listen to prayers, and while I’ve been to plenty of dimensions I would call hells if pressed, I’ve never seen a single heaven; I don’t know if there’s a god, or more than one god, or anyone listening beyond forces like the crossroads, who we really wish wouldn’t listen at all. I still prayed as I lay there burning but not burning, rotting on a cellular level, coming apart and collapsing in on myself like a black hole.

  I prayed to no one and nothing and everything. I prayed to the gods the mice had always so fervently believed my ancestors to be. And I prayed for three things.

  I prayed that we’d get out of here.

  I prayed that I would survive this.

  And I prayed this was the journey that finally ended with my family in one piece, after so many years of being broken. Setting a bone doesn’t heal it. It gives it a chance. It creates the possibility of healing, and I wanted that possibility more than I wanted anything else in the world. I didn’t want Thomas to kill me trying to save us all, as much because I didn’t want to die as because I didn’t want him to carry the burden of having killed me. I wanted us to go home together, and to see him see our family.

  And then the pain somehow, mysteriously, impossibly, got even bigger and even brighter, burning through the entire universe, and I wasn’t praying anymore. I wasn’t wanting anything anymore, except for the pain to stop. Nothing else would make things okay. Only the pain stopping would fix anything.

  I didn’t know whether my eyes were open or closed; everything was blackness either way, so profoundly dark that the possibility of light seemed like a lie. There was a vast shattering sound, like someone had struck a mirror the size of a ballroom wall with a hammer, and like any broken mirror, it rained down around us in slicing shards, and I was ripped open, laid bare before the uncaring universe. The pain got even bigger, now searing and crushing at the same time, and then, mercifully, it stopped, and so did I.

  * * *

  And then, against all reason and logic and reasonable, logical outcomes of the situation, I woke up, and if that’s surprising to you, imagine how it felt to me. I mean, at first, it felt like falling down a rabbit hole through comforting numbness, dropping like my namesake into the unending dark that lay at the center of all things. I fell, and the pain fell away, so far behind me that it couldn’t possibly catch me again.

  Only then the fall began to slow, and I began to remember that I had a body, or my body began to remember that it had a me. It began with a low, numbing ache that spread through all my limbs in near synchronicity, which I realized after a moment was the blood beginning to circulate again. Apparently, at some point, it had stopped, which was probably why the hurting had gone away. Human people need blood circulation to be alive, and for a little while there, I might not have been.

  That was fun. Well, no, that was absolutely horrifying, and I didn’t like it one little bit, but dead people don’t get to have opinions about things unless they come back as ghosts, and now that I knew where Thomas was, I didn’t need to start a haunting. It would still be good to know for sure whether he got out, whether he’d been able to yank enough pneuma off of me to use me like the grenade I was, but not good enough to justify coming back and hanging out the way Mary and Rose had done. If I was finished, let me be finished. Let me rest.

  It had been a long, long time since I’d had anything resembling a proper nap.

  But the ache continued to spread through my body, until it reached my chest and became a splintering pain that seemed to ebb and flow with my breath, which was how I realized I was breathing. And if I was breathing, I wasn’t dead, and that was a little bit annoying, since I had just come to terms with the idea that I was finally done. I decided that annoyance was a good enough reason to wake up, and so I did.

  Opening my eyes, I found myself looking at Sally from a much closer distance than I would have expected. Her face was right up in mine, cheeks streaked with dirt and tears, hair tangled as she took a deep breath and leaned in toward me.

  The pain in my chest suddenly made a lot of sense. She’d been giving me CPR. But I was awake now, and I didn’t want anyone giving me CPR, especially not someone who’d been pretty unpleasant to me during our brief acquaintance.

  “. . . wait,” I said, or tried to, anyway. It came out as more of a croak.

  Sally heard me anyway. She stopped, staring down at me.

  “Are you alive?” she demanded.

  I took a deep breath again—or tried to. It seemed like nothing I wanted to accomplish was really working out for me. My chest refused to fully expand.

  My struggle must have shown in my face. Sally grimaced. “Sorry,” she said. “This was my first time doing CPR on a person, and not a training manikin. I think I may have broken a few ribs. It was an accident.”

  I glared at her and didn’t bother trying to sit up. Broken ribs suck, and since mine had already been cracked before she started with the compressions, at least one of them felt like it had given way. Normally, I’ve been lucky enough to avoid that particular scenario. But if what Thomas had been saying before was accurate, my luck, which was always unpredictable, had been temporarily stripped away when he removed the pneuma. Sitting up felt like it would be taking things a step too far, at least right now, and so I stayed where I was.

  It would have been polite to thank her, but that would have taken too much air. At least I could breathe normally. At least I wasn’t falling anymore.

  At least we had gotten out of there.

  “Alice, thank God,” said Thomas, suddenly appearing next to Sally. That makes it sound like he teleported or something, when really, he had just been outside my currently limited frame of vision. “You’re awake. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry . . .”

  “S’okay.” He looked like hell, as filthy as Sally, with more streaks in the dirt on his face, some from tears and some from frustrated wiping at the same while they were falling, resulting in a muddy palimpsest of a trauma I had managed to sleep—or maybe die—through. How did they get so dirty? Dimensional crossing wasn’t a form of mud wrestling. My lips were dry. I licked them, swallowed, and said, “Knew what I was doing.”

  “Well, I didn’t, and we are never, ever doing that again.”

  I snorted. “No,” I agreed. Then: “Happened?”

  Thomas took my hand and a deep breath, in that order. “We made it,” he said.

  I closed my eyes, relaxing as much as I could through the pain in my chest and the ache in my limbs. We made it out of that damned killing jar. We were going to make it home from wherever we were now. Everything else was extraneous.

  “You can sleep if you have to, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t if you don’t have to,” said Thomas, squeezing my hand. “Please.”