The sound of voices drifted up from below as I approached. I paused, slowing and intentionally softening my footsteps.

  “—sign of her?”

  That was Thomas, familiar British accent making the question sound more sophisticated than a simple location check. Even when I was mad at him, I would never get tired of hearing that voice. Just being able to hear it was a gift. When he’d disappeared, he hadn’t been in a position to leave any recordings behind. Oh, I’d had the mice, but that wasn’t the same. They could repeat his words, not the way he’d actually said things.

  “None so far, boss.” Sally had found her way back to the group without being eaten by anything, then. Good, I guess.

  I didn’t like the way I’d been reacting to her. I knew what a lot of people would say: that I was jealous of another woman spending so much time with the man I loved, but it wasn’t that at all. Sally was Thomas’s surrogate daughter if she was anything; she was definitely his family at this point, in an immutable, undeniable way. Plus she didn’t like men like that, as she had been very careful to inform me on several occasions. Even if he hadn’t been old enough to be her father’s father, he would have been the wrong gender to catch her attention.

  No, my irritation around Sally was entirely down to the fact that she and Thomas knew each other in a way he and I no longer really did. I’d had fifty years to figure out how to live without him, and yeah, getting him back had always been the goal, but on the occasions when I’d thought about what that was going to look like—rarer and rarer as time had gone on, and the mission had become more and more central to my relationship with the world—I’d never had a clear plan beyond “Thomas will come home and we’ll go back to Buckley and everything will be normal again.”

  Only “normal” had never been an option, not for us, and it wasn’t like our old normal was really something to aspire to. For one thing, “normal” had always meant “Thomas is trapped inside the house and can’t go anywhere.” On some level, I’d always known that getting him back would involve either fighting or deceiving the crossroads, and he’d be able to go outside again. I’d even been excited about that sometimes, imagining him playing catch with our son, back when Kevin had been young enough for that sort of thing, or teaching our daughter to ride a horse. But pleasant flights of fantasy about pastoral activities were not the same thing as facing the reality of a Thomas who could go anywhere he wanted.

  For one thing, he could see how careless I was with my own safety, and he didn’t like it. He hadn’t liked it before we became a couple, but he hadn’t been in any position to tell me what to do back then; I’d been someone else’s responsibility. So while he’d occasionally grumbled about it, he’d never outright told me to be more careful. And then, once we’d been officially together, all my risks had been taken where he couldn’t see them, and he’d been able to pretend they weren’t happening. Which brought us to now, when he could actually watch me throwing myself bodily into danger, and he didn’t approve. Not one bit.

  But somehow, when Sally did it, it was fine. When Sally wanted to charge the monster without thinking twice, he didn’t bat an eye. His standards were different when I was the one risking my life, and I didn’t like it.

  And yeah, I was jealous. I was jealous of the years she got with him while I was trying to convince myself he was still alive; I was jealous she knew him as he was now rather than trying to reconcile that person with her memories of the man he was back then. So it was safe to say I had some baggage, where Sally’s relationship with Thomas was concerned.

  Thomas sighed. I could picture him, glasses held between the first two fingers of his hand and palm across his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “Alice won’t be seen if she doesn’t want to be. Did you find a way for us to get everyone up top?”

  “No,” admitted Sally. “Did find a big hole, though. Bigger than the mole made. I don’t think it’s the only thing hunting around here.”

  “Well, isn’t that delightful news,” asked Thomas. “I can start telekinetically boosting people up, but if I have to draw on that much pneuma, it’s going to delay our getting out of here by a day or more.”

  “And we don’t know what comes out to hunt at night,” said Sally. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

  Right. I’d been eavesdropping long enough. I picked my pace back up, stopping at the edge of the rock to look down at the group. “I found a way up,” I said, giving no sign that I’d been listening.

  The small cluster of mice standing on Thomas’s shoulder cheered. There were four of them, each wearing a different livery. Leave it to the mice to have figured out Sally was family while Thomas was still trying to pretend that he wasn’t planning to bring her home with us forever.

  Thomas himself lifted his head, lowering his hand—across his eyes, as I’d predicted—and sliding his glasses back on before he offered me a wan, somewhat strained smile. Even with the tension around his eyes and the exhaustion in his posture, seeing him smile made me want to jump down from the rock, put my arms around him, and kiss him until I forgot why I’d stormed off in the first place.

  The first thing that attracted me to Thomas Price was the fact that I knew I wasn’t supposed to be attracted to him. He was Covenant; he couldn’t be trusted. Oh, and my father hated him. Put together, those things made him the perfect man.

  And then I got to spend time with him, got to know him, and figured out there was more to having a crush on someone—to falling in love with someone—than pissing off your parents. It didn’t hurt that he was the best-looking man I’d ever seen, and while I’ve seen a lot more men since then, I stand by that assessment. Tall, with brown hair and blue eyes, cheekbones that could cut glass, and tattoos covering most of the skin from his collarbones down, but honestly, it was his hands that did it for me. Thomas’s hands are long-fingered, quick and clever, and from the first time I saw them, I thought they’d been designed for holding me.

  And he did. For years, he did. And then he left me, through no desire of his own, and I spent all the time between now and then just trying to get to a place where he could hold me again. It was all I’d ever wanted. I’d expected it to be enough. I didn’t know what I was going to do if it wasn’t.

  “If you head along the rock that way,” I pointed, “and go around the corner, there’s a crack about twenty feet further on, with some good handholds above it. I tossed a glow stick in there, and saw a massive wood louse, but that was it. I don’t think there’s anything waiting for a quick snack. I can drop a rope over the side and help people up if they get to the crack.”

  “That would be lovely,” he said, and moved closer, stretching his arms as far up as they would go while rising onto his tiptoes at the same time. Catching my cue, I dropped to my stomach, stretching my own arms toward his. By straining, we could brush our fingertips against each other. The mice promptly ran along his arm and onto mine, cheering as they made their way to my shoulder. Thomas stepped back again. “They were asking after you,” he said, by way of explanation. “I thought you might like some company while we all get topside.”

  “Always glad to see the mice,” I said, and pushed myself back to my feet, trying to ignore the tiny cheers as the mice grabbed hold of my hair to steady themselves. Their tiny claws dug into my skin, not hard enough to draw blood, and the sensation was familiar enough to bring a smile to my face.

  Thomas answered my smile with one of his own, apparently taking my expression as a sign that I wasn’t angry anymore. Well, maybe I wasn’t. We had things to work on, but staying mad wouldn’t do me any good. I waved down at him. “See you in a minute?”

  “Certainly,” he said. It would take time to get everyone moving, especially with the need to keep them pressed against the rock wall and stepping without falling into a rhythm, but at this point, we were all old hats at hurrying our little caravan along. Sally was already gesturing people into position. Thomas continued to watch me even as I backed up and turned to walk back the way I’d come, but he didn’t ask me to stop, and in the end, I just kept moving.

  * * *

  Okay, so maybe being reunited with my true love after fifty years apart wasn’t as easy or as much like a romance novel as I’d always hoped it was going to be, but I wasn’t sorry I’d done it. I was sorry it had taken so much longer than it needed to, but even with our little frictions and sharp edges, having Thomas back in my life was the only thing I’d wanted for so long that I couldn’t imagine being sorry to have found him.

  Would it have been nice to have a reunion that didn’t feature a massive band of cross-dimensional refugees? Sure. Would it have been even nicer if we’d been able to park most of them in one spot while we took the warriors and scouts with us for a quick, surgical search of available dimensions? Absolutely. Unfortunately, the amount of effort involved in keeping a door open for a large group, while immense, was less than the effort of opening a smaller door twice and then a third door for the aforementioned group. Plus not every universe touched on every other. We could go six or seven dimensions before we found a good place to drop people off, and trying to double back that far could have had serious consequences for Thomas’s health—all assuming the local equivalent of the giant moles didn’t come along and eat our people while they were waiting for us. No, efficiency and conserving our limited resources meant everyone came with us, much as it sucked. And it did suck.

  The mice moved from my shoulder to my pack, where they began the Aeslin equivalent of Bible study, quietly discussing the day’s events as they codified them into what would become formal scripture. Yes, Aeslin mice can be quiet. It doesn’t come easily for them: their preferred volume is much closer to a shout than a whisper. But they’re very small creatures in a very large world, and they know how to keep their voices down if it means not getting eaten.

  It’s always a treat when the Aeslin choose to communicate at something less than a shriek. According to my oldest granddaughter, Verity, I’m one of the few people they’ll do that for. I’d say it’s because they adore me, but really, it’s because a lot of the places I went while I was looking for Thomas weren’t very safe, and mice who didn’t learn to keep quiet sometimes didn’t make it back to the colony.

  I regret every single one of them. The Aeslin trust us. That’s why they worship us. And for them, dying in the service of their gods is something to aspire to. They don’t usually martyr themselves, but every time I came home with an opening in my little traveling colony, there had been no shortage of volunteers to take the place of the mice I’d lost. And over time, the mice who’d managed to survive a trip or two started teaching the others the trick to it.

  Half the Aeslin call me the Noisy Priestess. My clergy split when Thomas vanished, making me the only member of the family with two separate sets of rituals and catechisms. The other half of the mice call me the Pilgrim Priestess. I don’t know whether the two branches will reunite when we get home, or whether they’re going to stay as they are and found a third branch of my faith. I hope they’ll reunite.

  I’d like everyone to be reunited if they can be.

  Thomas’s clergy call him the God of Empty Rooms and Cold Regrets. They used to call him the God of Inconvenient Timing, but he didn’t get a separate branch of the faith when they changed his name. I’m not sure whether I should feel flattered or he should feel cheated. As far as I can tell, neither is he.

  We started this journey with a member from each branch of my faith, a member of his clergy, and a novice who had yet to declare for any specific set of sacred rituals. The first three have stayed the same—Aeslin rarely change faiths once they don their livery. The fourth, however, now calls herself the first Priest of the Conscripted Priestess, and has been since before we left Ithaca. Sally really made an impression when she gave the then-novice a piece of her waffle sandwich. The mice always recognize family when they see it.

  Sally was going to have a lot more mice praising her name as soon as we got home, the lucky girl. At least she seemed to like them well enough, even if they were a little overwhelming when they all got going on one of their shared rituals. Wait until we got her back to Portland.

  The thought of Sally meeting the rest of the colony was enough to make me smile. I was still smiling as I reached the edge of the rock and peered into the crack I’d used to boost myself up. My glow stick hadn’t moved, making me think I was right about there being nothing down there but giant wood lice. Sure, they could be predatory in this dimension, but it seemed unlikely, and they hadn’t attacked me before.

  Climbing the side of the rock was as easy this time as it had been before, and nothing appeared to take a swipe at me. I shrugged off my pack when I reached the top, unzipping it to extract a length of rope and a railroad spike. Some people think toting railroad spikes around is a waste of carrying capacity, and to be fair, the things are pretty damn heavy. But I’ve encountered enough creatures with iron sensitivity to make me think that all those old stories about wicked fairies stealing kids probably have a root in reality. Not everyone who’s managed dimensional travel uses it for good, or even for morally neutral acts. So railroad spikes are useful if you need to fend off certain types of unpleasant neighbor, plus they don’t bend or break, and they make great mountain climbing anchors.

  I tied the rope around the spike, then bent and hammered it into a crack in the top of the rock, dropping the bulk of the rope down along the side. Sure, I’d offer a hand up for anyone who needed it, but a nice climbing rope is nothing to sneeze at.

  Straightening, I stepped back to wait.

  Moving a hundred people is never fast. Doing it when half of them are children, elderly, or in poor physical shape is . . . well, it’s just shy of glacial. I had plenty of time to study my surroundings while I waited.

  Seen from my vantage point atop the rock, the land around us was almost uniformly flat but not level; there were small bumps and ridges, and some surprisingly deep grooves. I squinted at them, trying to understand their shape, before I realized what I was seeing fit well with the presence of the unusually jagged rock. This was a floodplain. Something about the local weather encouraged a form of flash floods, cutting channels in the soil and either eroding it enough to free rocks like this one or—given the depth of some of those channels—just plain washing them in from some other region.

  It also explained the lack of trees. All the vegetation I could see was what I would have classified as a “grass” if I’d seen it on Earth, including something that looked a lot like bamboo, and something else with tall, fronded flowers that looked like horsetails and stood about twenty feet in the air. Mounds of earth similar to the one our mole had made dotted the landscape, pushed up through otherwise unbroken ground. There were no signs of civilization, or of anything I would recognize as a nomadic settlement.

  That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Even after all the time I’ve spent on the move, I have a human’s innate prejudices, and that includes recognizing bipeds as intelligent before I recognize anything else. I could be looking at the central metropolis of the mole empire and simply be unable to recognize it for the majestic thing it truly was. It’s a funny little twist of the brain that makes it hard for humans to look at things that don’t stand on two legs and talk with one mouth and see them as people. I’ve been working on it for years. I figure I’ll be working on it until the day I die.

  The sound of voices snapped me out of my contemplation of the landscape, and I turned to see Thomas leading the others to my rope. Sally was some distance back, helping one of the older Murrays stay on her feet.

  I moved to help as Thomas started boosting children up to me, one after another. People will have kids no matter where they are, if they have the biology necessary to do it, and the crossroads had only been throwing people from a few dozen worlds into their fancy killing jar. That meant a lot of compatible genes, and a lot of people decided to pass the time in the horrifying death world by getting it on. Mammals gonna mammal. Life wants to live, and for those of us with short lifespans and the capacity to reproduce, that means offspring. We live on in our descendants.

  These descendants had been born on a world that wasn’t dying only because it was technically already dead. Until we broke the killing jar and started our trek across the uninhabited dimensions of the multiverse, they had never known what it was to have enough food, water, or shelter. And in some ways, that was a good thing for us now. Oh, it’s never a good thing for kids to be hungry, or dehydrated, or exposed. But they didn’t complain when we asked them to walk miles under alien suns, and they didn’t scream or cry when unspeakable monsters burst out of the earth. It was like parts of them had been deadened by the horrors they’d already faced.

  Those parts were growing back, though, slowly but surely, keeping pace with the increasing roundness of their faces and the strength of their limbs. They had learned how to play even before we left Ithaca. Now, as I pulled them to the top of the rock, they glanced at me to see if I was worried about dangerous beasts, and when they saw no hint of caution in my face, they took off running, playing an elaborate game of chase and tag with rules only they seemed to know, rejoicing in the freedom to move without fear of dangers from below.

  I smiled and helped the next children in the line along, freeing them to join the game.

  After the children came the elderly, who promptly began dispersing themselves to stand sentry without being asked. They had belonged to different settlements and groups in the bottle dimension, but they had adjusted remarkably well to being one community, watching out for each other and prioritizing the health and safety of the group. They were going to be okay.