“Odysseus, the first one. He was the king of Ithaca, and his story was so beloved that our sages carried it to all the nearby worlds, including your own. His name has been retired since his death, but we use it still, for the faithful, and the lucky, and the foolish.” She smiled at me. “You’ve earned it. Now go.”

  “Okay,” I said, still not quite sure what she was talking about, but not really in the mood to argue, since it sounded like she was saying the Odyssey had actually happened in the dimension next door to our own, and that was more than I felt equipped to deal with right now. Besides, I was standing up, and that alone felt amazing. I walked toward the mouth of the tent, pushed it open, and stepped out into the daylight.

  We were still on Cornale; that was obvious from the dry, cracked land around us, which looked like a verdant paradise after the dimension with no name. This world wasn’t dead yet, and maybe now it wasn’t going to be, since we’d managed to excise the parasitic influence of the dead world from its pneuma. This was all very confusing and made me feel more like a cell in the body of something much, much larger than I liked. I wanted to go home where I could be to scale with the problems around me, and they might be big and terrible, but they’d be comprehensible.

  The people we’d evacuated with us had set up a campsite, and they mingled with Ithacan satyrs, perfectly at ease in this new place. Children ran by, shrieking with laughter. It was almost like being back at the carnival if the carnival had been mostly made up of cryptids. Although—out here—everyone was a cryptid. Earth’s science hadn’t verified the existence of anyone here except for me, Thomas, and Sally, and Earth’s science said Thomas and I were both much older than we actually were.

  Sally was the first to spot me. She was standing near a firepit talking to several of the guards, leaning on her still-present polearm, when her eyes went wide.

  “Boss! Boss!” she yelled, without taking her eyes off of me. “She’s awake!”

  She didn’t move, just stayed where she was and pointed as Thomas emerged from another tent that had been constructed nearby. He turned to follow her finger, then broke into a run, heading directly for me. I braced for impact.

  It didn’t come. He slowed when he was still several feet away, stopping when he was just barely within arm’s reach, and stared at me, swallowing hard enough that I automatically followed the movement of his throat. I blinked. The cameo tattoo was gone, meaning its effect had been canceled or discharged. He was aging again. We both were.

  That was nice. The way he was looking at me wasn’t, particularly. Maybe there was something wrong with me that I hadn’t seen yet. “I got something on my face?” I asked, trying to sound light and disarming. I didn’t do a very good job of it. If anything, I sounded scared out of my wits, which wasn’t far from the truth. Maybe he’d been so sure that I was going to die that he was disappointed that I hadn’t. Maybe—

  He lurched abruptly forward and wrapped his arms around me before I could finish the thought, jerking me against him and kissing me deeply. I stiffened for a moment, startled, then relaxed and kissed him back. The embrace lasted for what felt like several minutes before Sally said, from closer than I necessarily liked, “Okay, she’s moving under her own power. Do you have to try to suck her face off when the rest of us are watching? Some of us don’t have any good options for a girlfriend unless we want to get with one of the goat ladies, and we’d rather you got a room.”

  Thomas broke off enough to turn and glare at her, not letting go of me. I started laughing. Sally smirked.

  “Thought that might make you let go enough for her to tell us what’s up,” she said. “Helen wants us to get moving by dark. The locals are apparently getting a little grumpy about us being out here, and their leadership doesn’t understand enough dimensional theory to get why this is technically a rescue mission for their whole world.”

  “I’m ready to go when the rest of you are,” I said. “I feel fine.”

  Thomas glanced at me, anxiety in his eyes. “Truly?”

  “Okay, that’s enough of that.” I planted my hands on his chest and pushed myself free of his embrace. “You don’t get to keep giving me funny looks and asking if I’m okay without telling me what you think is wrong. I know I had a heart attack, I know I stopped breathing, and I know Sally broke several of my ribs during CPR. I also know that Phoebe patched all those things up and fixed the damage from the stroke I apparently also had. She says I shouldn’t be subjected to any more magical healing for a while, which is fine, since you can’t do it, I can’t do it, and we’re going the fuck home as soon as we finish getting all these people back where they belong. I’m not really seeing what the problem is.”

  Thomas looked down. I raised my eyebrows.

  “Not making this any easier on yourself by making me wait for answers,” I said. “Actually making it harder.”

  “Okay, if Mommy and Daddy are going to be fighting, I’m going to be elsewhere,” said Sally. “Call me if you decide to murder each other. I want to watch.”

  “She’s much less deferential now that she doesn’t have to depend on me for her existence,” said Thomas. He didn’t sound sorry about that.

  “Yeah, I can really see that, with how deferentially she was always speaking to you before,” I said. “Now tell me what the hell is going on, and why you can kiss me but not look at me.”

  “Magic can be very taxing,” he said, slowly. “It costs the caster in some way, generally.”

  “I know. It’s why I was passed out from low blood sugar when Sally found me. Half my pack is effectively self-rescue medications for after I’ve crashed my system too far out of whack.”

  “And magic would do something similar if you were built to channel it.” He took my hand and began leading me toward a collapsible bench someone had set up nearby. Like most Ithacan designs, it had an air of the classical Greek about it, while also being made of canvas and lightweight metal. I’ve never been entirely clear on their overall tech level. It seems to be rustic but post-Industrial Revolution, whatever form it took in their world. “Magic, cast too far beyond the caster’s capability, or channeling too much power, can do permanent damage.”

  “This is a lot of talking that doesn’t involve giving me a simple answer to the simple question I asked you,” I said, as we sat. “What’s wrong?”

  “The spell was channeled through you, as I removed the pneuma. The price that had to be paid . . . I didn’t pay it.”

  “So what, did my face melt off or something?”

  “No. You’ve aged. Not too much!” he added quickly, apparently anticipating shouting or something of the like. “No more than a decade by my estimation.”

  “Okay.” I shrugged. “Just means no one’s going to look at us funny when we get home. I mean, you’re clearly in your early thirties. It would have been weird.”

  He blinked slowly. “You’re not upset?”

  “Sweetheart, I’m well into my eighties. Physically nineteen or physically twenty-nine, I’m in incredible shape for my age, and we’re both alive, which is more than we expected yesterday, or whatever day it was we went to your throne room to do something massively stupid. We get to go home. After we find safe places for all these people, we get to go home, together.”

  “With Sally.”

  “With Sally, yes. I already accepted the fact that you went and picked up a kid while I wasn’t looking. Given that her best friend is apparently running around with our granddaughter and her parents probably think she’s dead by now, I think we have to keep her. That’s fine. Kevin’s house has a lot of rooms, and so does our place back in Buckley.”

  Thomas laughed, and kept laughing as he leaned over, draped his arms around my shoulders, and rested his forehead against my own. I smiled and leaned into him.

  “You were quite mad when the crossroads took me, and you’re quite mad now, and I have never been more grateful to be going home with you,” he said.

  “I’m glad, because you’re not going anywhere else,” I said, and kissed him like I meant it, and everything was good between us. After fifty years, more broken bones than I could count, and hundreds of dead ends, everything was finally good.

  * * *

  With Helen directing everyone, we had the camp torn down and packed up well before sunset, then followed her through the wastes toward the point where we’d be making the crossing to the next world in line. I had to admit that the Ithacan method of travel was more pleasant than my own. Instead of crashing through dimensions with the equivalent of a sledgehammer, Helen and Phoebe had a whole group of what they called cartographers, each of whom carried a set of tools that allowed them to calibrate the thickness of the dimensional walls. They knew precisely where we had to go to meet the least resistance, then painted temporary runes on rocks gathered from the surrounding area and used them to build a rough circle we could all pass through.

  The stones stayed behind where, Helen assured me, the runes would dissolve in less than a day. Someone who happened upon them before then would be able to copy whatever remained if they were quick about it, but the mere act of being activated would degrade the runes enough to render them useless.

  I was pretty sure that didn’t work as well as Helen thought it did, which would explain why there were echoes of Ithacan runes in so many of the dimensions I’d seen, but that was an argument for another time. For now, we just needed to get away from Cornale before the locals ate us.

  Unlike the pain and screaming of escaping the bottle universe, or even the shove and effort of crossing on my own, this was painless and almost straightforward. Helen and Phoebe set the circle, two of their cartographers activated the runes, and a section of the air turned hazy and faintly reflective, like the heat haze off a summer highway. One by one, we walked through and left Cornale—and the grave of a dead dimension—behind.

  Twenty-one

  “I just want her to live long enough to figure out what makes her happy. I just want her to be free.”

  —Jonathan Healy

  Ithaca, a week later

  Moving at a pace set by the slowest members of our company meant that it had taken us the better part of a week to make it from Cornale back to Ithaca, where the fields around Helen and Phoebe’s house became a vibrant array of tents and temporary campsites as our many refugees made themselves . . . not at home, exactly, but as comfortable as they could be. Most of them had never seen this much green in their lives, and watching the children stare in awe at every flower and butterfly made me oddly glad that we had started with Cornale, where at least the landscape was a little bit comprehensible to them. We were easing them into a healthier existence.

  We were easing all of us into a healthier existence. One where Sally slept with both eyes closed. One where I slept at all, curled against my husband, both of us waking up every time the other so much as sneezed. One where Thomas could feed on the pneuma of a healthy world, rebuilding depleted reserves so fundamental that he should never have been able to access, much less empty, them. We were healing.

  “You’re sure about this?” asked Sally, who looked much more like an Earth girl in her early twenties now that she had showered, combed her hair, and traded her battle leathers for a simple Ithacan shift. She still carried that spear like it was her favorite teddy bear. I’d even seen her sleeping with it, one leg wrapped around the pole like she thought someone was going to try to steal it in the night. She might not be wearing her trauma as obviously as some of the others, but she was still wearing it.

  “We’re quite sure,” said Thomas, voice gone prim and tight, the way it always did when he couldn’t even disapprove of something, because he was too busy being openly outraged by it. He took my hand and squeezed it tightly, eyes still on Sally. “This needs to be done before we can move on, and we’ve been imposing on our hosts for long enough.”

  “Hospitality has no time limit,” said Helen, walking into camp with a bag of apples over one shoulder. She was promptly swarmed by the younger children, while the older ones held back and watched her with hungry eyes, wrapped in the developing shrouds of their own dignity. “But still, it’s nice to know that you don’t plan to stay forever. Phoebe thinks she’s almost finished charting a course that will touch on all the worlds and dimensions you need to visit in order to take the refugees home. It shouldn’t take you more than a year, moving at a reasonable pace, and there are a few worlds blended or empty enough to settle anyone who was born in the bottle and has nowhere else to go.”

  “A year, we can survive,” said Thomas, not letting go of my hand.

  “Especially if we’re going to get my things,” I agreed. “I’m going to need more ammo.” With no more flensings in my future and my body still not up to the strain of channeling magic, I was going to be limited to the weapons I had on hand for the foreseeable future, maybe forever. That didn’t really feel like a downgrade, since one of the weapons I had on hand now was Thomas.

  “And then we go home,” said Thomas. “To stay.”

  “If you never visit at all, we’ll be very annoyed at you,” said Helen, handing her bag of apples off to one of the older children to distribute. “Odysseus always comes back to Ithaca, after all.”

  “We only have two stops to make,” I said, before Helen could keep going down the Odysseus route. It made me vaguely uncomfortable, in a “I don’t want to do this for another ten years because you attracted the universe’s attention” sort of way. “Empusa, then Earth, and then we’ll be back for everyone, so we can start moving. You can watch them long enough for us to make the circuit, yeah?”

  “Of course,” said Helen. “Don’t be silly. Your charges will be safe.”

  “I’m coming with you,” said Sally.

  “It’s not advisable,” said Thomas. “Honestly, I’d be happy to skip the stop on Earth, if not for the fact that Alice refuses to go a full year without her clergy.”

  “The mice won’t take it well if I go silent for another year and they don’t have a witness with me,” I said. “I’ve already been gone longer than I intended to be, and I owe them the chance to get answers.”

  “Even so,” said Thomas. “It’s a risk.”

  “I know.” The risk was mostly that we’d be seen and lose the will to come back and continue what we needed to do, but I wasn’t kidding when I said I owed it to the mice. They had been with me faithfully for my entire life. Leaving them out of something this important wouldn’t just be unfair, it would be cruel.

  “All right,” said Helen, with a heavy sigh. “Be safe, you three. Be careful and be safe.”

  “Never learned how to be careful,” I said cheerfully. “But we’ll do our best.”

  Thomas laughed and let go of my hand, and we walked toward the transit circle that would allow us to chart a straight line to Empusa with the least power possible.

  Time to go talk to a snake.

  * * *

  The air in Naga’s compound was warm and moist, and all too familiar. We didn’t see anyone as we hurried down the hall to my room, where we set about ransacking the place, shoveling weapons, ammunition, and emergency supplies out of the primary dresser until my bag was filled to overflowing, then moving on to the duffels Sally and Thomas both carried.

  “Are you sure you want protein bars more than you want another change of clothing?” asked Thomas.

  “I can usually scavenge something to wear; something to eat and something to shoot can be a lot harder,” I said. “Priorities are good.”

  “If you’re not taking all these clothes, can I have some?” asked Sally. “Fluffy robes aren’t exactly my style.”

  “It’s not a robe, it’s a chiton, and sure,” I said, gesturing toward the appropriate dresser. “Knock yourself out.”

  Sally set about rummaging with the enthusiasm of someone who had spent the last of her teenage years in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, even leaning her spear against the wall as she looted my wardrobe. Even accounting for our collectively limited carrying capacity, she was able to find a few shirts and a pair of black leggings that fit her, which she changed into in the corner while Thomas politely averted his eyes. I kissed him on the cheek, picking up my pack.

  It rattled. I’d need to repack everything once we were finished, since it’s not actually safe to have a weapons cache that rattles. But that could happen after we finished dealing with our business here.

  “I’m good to go,” I said. “Sally, you want to stay here and keep going through things, or you want to come with us?”

  “Will I be allowed to join in the violence?”

  “No, probably not.”

  “I have quite a bit of pent-up aggression looking for a target, and the man who spent fifty years lying to and torturing my wife seems like an excellent outlet,” said Thomas, cracking his knuckles.

  Sally blanched. “I’m good, I’ll stay here.”

  “We don’t actually know that he was lying to me,” I said, leading Thomas to the door. “Maybe he didn’t know.”

  “You told me what you realized about the carvings on the ceiling,” said Thomas. “He’s a historian. Do you truly believe he didn’t know?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Even if he didn’t, there’s still the matter of skinning you alive and modifying your memories to keep you under his control. I won’t pretend I can forgive either one of those things. The two of them together . . . I’m sorry. This has to happen.”

  “I know.” I’d never be able to rest knowing that he was still out there, that he might decide to come for me after everything. This was the only way.

  We stepped out into the hall and started toward Naga’s office. If he wasn’t there now, he would be eventually, and we could wait for him until he came back. We were about halfway there when the feline tattoo artist stepped out of one of the smaller rooms and stopped, blinking. He looked genuinely surprised to see me.