As long as we could keep them from being eaten by giant moles, that is.

  After the elderly came Sally, and together, we helped the more delicate members of the company onto the rock, the amputees and the actively unwell, and the three pregnant women currently traveling with us. They murmured thanks and moved to join the others, and we turned to getting the rest of the group to safety.

  Thomas was the last up. Thomas was always the one left guarding our rear, no matter how dire the situation; these people were his responsibility, and he wasn’t willing to get himself to safety while they were still in danger. That, at least, was something I could understand, even if I didn’t like it. Grasping the rope with both hands, he walked along the side of the rock, finding his footing with an ease born of long practice. Sally was already bending to help him the rest of the way, and I let her, retreating to pick up my pack.

  “Alice,” said Thomas, as soon as he was standing on his own again. “We need to have a conversation.”

  “Can it wait until we make camp?” I asked. “Assuming we’re sleeping here tonight.”

  He and Sally exchanged one of those complicated tactical looks that I was coming to genuinely loathe. This might have been easier to deal with if I had been afraid she was sleeping with him. At least that’s a situation we’re culturally prepared for. This, though . . . there isn’t a word for “I’m jealous you got to be my husband’s right-hand woman for years while I was alone, and I don’t like that you seem to know each other so well when I sometimes feel like he doesn’t know me at all anymore.” It’s not envy, and it’s not jealousy, and it’s not anything I can articulate without sounding like I’m whining, and I hate it.

  Believe me, if that word existed, I would have found it by now.

  “We don’t know what this dimension is like at night,” said Thomas, finally, “but the same can be said for the next one on our list, and that one, we know, has intelligent inhabitants, which could make things even more difficult.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said. The list Helen had given us before we left Ithaca ended with a run of possible settlement dimensions, and the next one down was one of the more promising. According to her notes, it was occupied by a species of intelligent felinoids who had previously made contact and interbred with Lilu. One of the larger groups of refugees, the Murrays, had Lilu blood; they might be able to find cultural commonalities that would make our next stop a good home for them.

  If so, we could cut our group from a hundred to about twenty in one swoop, which would make the dimensional crossings faster, cleaner, and less exhausting for Thomas. We’d be able to get the rest of these people settled in a matter of months, if we could offload the remaining Murrays. Or maybe we’d get really lucky, and they’d all want to stay. We could be done in a matter of days, if luck was on our side.

  “It would be safest if we stayed here,” said Thomas. “We have a defensible location, and enough food to make it to morning without needing to go hunting or gathering.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Sally.

  “Well, I do,” I said, and moved to retrieve my railroad spike, wrapping the rope idly around my arm. “Get the word out, and we’ll pitch camp before the sun goes down.”

  “We should still be careful,” cautioned Thomas.

  “There’s that word again,” I said dourly, and walked away.

  Three

  “First rule of dealing with Alice: never tell her to be careful. The more you tell her to be careful, the less she’s going to be, because she hates it that much. I don’t even think she does it on purpose. She’s just stubborn by nature.”

  —Mary Dunlavy

  Setting up a tent, alone, on top of a big rock in an unfamiliar dimension. Which is not a new occurrence, strange as that might seem

  THERE’S A TRICK TO pitching a tent when you can’t drive your tentpoles into anything, and weirdly enough, it comes down, again, to railroad spikes. Tying the ropes to the spikes can create enough of a counterweight to get the whole structure up and stable.

  I’m an old hand when it comes to setting up camp. I got the tent I was hopefully going to be sharing with Thomas up by myself, in less than ten minutes, set the mice free to perform whatever rituals they thought would make the space safer for us to spend the night in, and went looking for people who needed help setting up their own shelter.

  I found plenty. Most of these folks had never been expected to make their own decisions before our cross-dimensional march began, much less had the luxury of worrying about things like “something soft to sleep on” and “not getting rained out.” They’d lived where their warlords told them to, slept where their warlords told them to sleep, and used what they were given rather than putting anything together for themselves. Now that they were my responsibility—well, Thomas’s responsibility, but that made them half-mine as far as I was concerned—they were learning about those things, and they needed their hands held a lot of the time.

  It wasn’t long before a veritable tent city had sprung up on top of the rock. Children ran between makeshift shelters, shrieking and throwing balls of wadded-up fabric back and forth. They could find something to play with no matter where we were. I envied that about them. The sun was dipping lower in the sky, and campfires were starting to wink on like tiny stars as people settled in and started preparing their dinners.

  And Thomas still hadn’t come to find me.

  Our tent was set up near the center of the cluster, and not by design; I would have preferred to be closer to the edge, where I could play sentry and be sure nothing was going to get to the children or the elderly without going through me first. But these people saw Thomas as their savior, and me as his beloved wife. They wanted to be close to us, which meant we would always wind up dead in the middle when something like this happened.

  One more reason to be eager to get them wherever it was they were going to wind up. We’d never have any real privacy until we did.

  I looked around the bustling encampment, trying to find any sign of him, and when I didn’t, I shook my head, grabbed a lantern, and went back into the tent.

  The mice had pulled a bunch of fabric scraps, sticks, and rocks into a rough circle and were putting on some sort of complicated pantomime. I stopped, blinking, as I reviewed the rituals I knew were normally performed around this time. Nothing sprang to mind. Finally, I asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Priestess!” exalted one of my mice, and the other three joined in, all four of them cheering jubilantly at my return.

  “Well, at least you’re glad to see me.” I hung my lantern from the hook on the central pole, filling the tent with a diffuse yellow glow. “So what’s the ritual? I don’t recognize it.”

  “This is the Holy Rite of A Spotter Is Better Than the Alternative, Priestess,” said the mouse in Sally’s livery. “It is a newer mystery but still considered essential to understanding the relationship between the Precise Priestess and her consort!”

  So one of the rituals about Annie and her Sam, then. Huh. “Why’s he not a god yet?” I asked.

  “Priestess?”

  “Sam’s a good boy, and he’s devoted to my granddaughter like a dog’s devoted to a bone. He’s not going anywhere any time soon. So why’s he a consort and not a god?”

  “When the clergy of the Precise Priestess did begin to discuss his deification, she did appear before them most wrathful, and say, lo, ‘I Want Him To Stick Around, You Meddling Rodents, and You Marrying Us Off Before He’s Even Met My Siblings Won’t Help.’ This caused a Theological Debate among the colony, and we agreed that as each new god or priestess is either born to the family or Pledged to them, we could wait to decide his godhood until he had Pledged properly.”

  The other mice murmured agreement. I snorted.

  “Glad to see that you can take feedback from the family,” I said. “What about Sally?”

  The mice looked perplexed. “The Conscripted Priestess has already been Pledged.”

  “I wonder if she’s aware of that,” said Thomas.

  I turned, and he was standing behind me, just inside the tent, looking unsure, like he wasn’t confident he’d be welcomed. I straightened, standing to meet him.

  “Guess you found the tent,” I said. “I put it up by myself. I was real careful.”

  “Alice—” he began.

  “You know how I feel about that word,” I snapped. “My father always told me to be careful.”

  “Because your father—and oh God, I can’t believe I’m saying something that makes it sound like I agreed with him, about anything, ever, but—your father loved you, and he didn’t want you getting hurt.”

  “Guess you found the wrong tent,” I said, and moved to push past him to the exit.

  He grabbed my shoulders before I made it more than a few steps.

  “Alice, please,” he said.

  I turned until we were eye to eye, my jaw set in a stubborn line. He looked back at me, nowhere near so stubborn. His own expression was more one of raw confusion, discomfort and desire warring for possession of his face.

  “I spent fifty years thinking I was never going to see you again,” he said, miserably. “Fifty years imagining you alone, abandoned, hating me for leaving you . . . my only comfort was knowing that my deal with the crossroads precluded you making any deals of your own, and even that was a cold comfort, because it was possible the crossroads might declare my exile meant our agreement was fulfilled and they could do whatever they wanted. Fifty years of assassins wearing your face, coming to kill me because they could, because they’d been told it would wipe their own slates clean, sometimes just because they wanted to. Fifty years of missing you.”

  “I had fifty years of missing you too,” I said, my own voice stiff.

  “You had fifty years and a purpose,” he said. “You were going to find me if it killed you. I didn’t have that. I couldn’t get out. You might as well have been dead, for all the chance there was of me seeing you again. And then, sweet miracle, you fell out of the sky into my own backyard! You were there, alive and still looking for me. You wanted to be with me, after everything. After all the bad decisions, after leaving you, you still wanted me.”

  “I still do,” I said, almost in a whisper.

  “I thought I was never going to see you again,” he said, and took the hand off my left shoulder, moving to cup my cheek instead. Instinctively, I leaned into his touch. “Can you blame me for not wanting to see you hurt?”

  “You don’t tell Sally to be careful.” It sounded petulant even to my own ears. I didn’t pull away.

  “Sally is careful, compared to you,” he said. “She doesn’t consider herself indestructible. She knows she can be hurt, and she knows that if she is, it could take her a long time to heal. When she throws herself at something, it’s because she’s already looked at the options and decided on the one that carries the least risk. She’s being tactical.”

  “You’re saying I’m not a tactical thinker?”

  “No, darling, I’m saying you spent so long being able to bounce back from absolutely anything that you’ve forgotten what it means to have consequences for your actions. Your body can’t handle magical healing right now.”

  “We didn’t have magical healing back in Buckley.”

  “No, we didn’t. Remember how much time you spent injured, or recovering? Remember how long you were too weak to go to the woods after the slime attacked you?”

  I did, unfortunately. I turned my face away, hoping he wouldn’t see the way I winced.

  It was a futile hope. Thomas had always paid too much attention to the things I least wanted him to be paying attention to.

  “I remember how hard it was on you, and how much you hated it.” He ran his thumb along the line of my cheekbone, palm still cupping my face. “I remember how much I wanted to help, and how I wasn’t allowed. I think it hurt us both, seeing you like that, and I’m sorry, but I never want to see you like that again. If that means reminding you that you’re as mortal as the rest of us, I won’t be able to help myself.”

  I turned my head to kiss his palm, then straightened, meeting his eyes again. “I don’t like how you’ve started telling me what to do. I’m not one of your subjects. I don’t take orders from you.”

  “And I’m sorry about that, too. Why don’t we make an agreement, you and I? I’ll do my best not to give orders—I’m unlearning the habit of autocracy, just like you’re unlearning the habit of throwing yourself into danger like a woman who never expects to have backup again—and you’ll do your best not to get hurt. You’re the most precious thing in the world to me, Alice. That you were able to stay in one piece long enough to find me and bring me home is a miracle. Losing you now would be . . .” Thomas stopped and shook his head, finally pulling his hand away. “I can’t even think about it. Please, for the sake of my heart, can you try?”

  It all made too much sense when he put it that way. I looked at the wall of the tent and sighed. “I can try,” I said, and looked back to him. “But you need to remember that I’m your wife, not one of your people to order around, and at this point, I have more experience with dimensional travel than you do.”

  Sure, my experience was full of unexpected holes, thanks to Naga’s pet telepaths digging out whatever information he thought would be too inconvenient for me to have, but it was still experience. While Thomas had been in one hostile death world dimension for fifty years, I’d been running through hundreds of them, and I hadn’t died. That sort of track record had to be good for something.

  “All right,” he said, and smiled. I hesitated, then smiled back. “May I kiss you?”

  “Always,” I said, and he wrapped his arms around me, bent me slightly backward, and kissed me.

  Every time we kissed, it was like coming home. It was tempting to think that it had always been that way, and to be fair, I could remember some pretty scorching kisses from the years before his disappearance. The first time I’d come to his house to tell him how I felt, when I’d been absolutely sure I was going to be dead by the end of the week; the night he’d found me rinsing ghoul guts out of my hair in the downstairs bathroom and suggested we might do a better job of keeping our relationship from attracting the attention of the local gossips if we just went ahead and made it official; the night Kevin had been conceived. But there had been a lot of mundane, everyday kisses, too. More of those than the memorable ones, I was sure.

  These days, though . . . absence makes the heart grow fonder, and fifty years had been enough time for my heart to go from “fond” to “absolutely obsessed.” Every kiss was the best kiss anyone had shared since the invention of kissing, and made me regret how few opportunities we had for time alone while shepherding a large group of pan-dimensional refugees to their new home. He made my knees go weak and my pulse rate spike, and it was reassuring that I could still do the same to him.

  Thomas pulled back to study my face, eyes slightly glazed, like he was deliberating between painting my portrait and devouring me whole. I made a small, inquisitive noise and pressed my body against his, feeling the length of him like a promise of things we almost certainly wouldn’t be able to do tonight.

  As if summoned by the thought, someone clapped their hands outside the tent.

  “Hey, boss?” called Sally. “Something that looks a lot like a giant bat just tried to take off with one of the kids. Think you might want to get out here.”

  Thomas sighed heavily, and leaned in to kiss me one more time, briefly, before he stepped back. “Duty calls,” he said. “I love you.”

  Then he was gone, ducking out of the tent into the evening air. I stayed where I was for a long moment, panting and aching with the need for him to come back, shout “false alarm,” and throw me to the floor. He didn’t come back.

  The mice cheered.

  * * *

  When I stepped out of the tent, the camp was virtually deserted. Fires still burned, lighting up the night in flickering orange, but the people were gone. I approached the nearest tent, sticking my head inside, and was met with the sight of four people—two adults, two children—huddled in the center. They all looked up as the fabric rustled, their eyes wide and alarmed, then slumped back down. One of the adults gestured for me to get out.

  I got out.

  There was no sign of Thomas or Sally. I still had my revolvers, and the knives inside my shirt, but nothing bigger than that; if this was a serious threat, I was a sitting duck. Hopefully, that meant we weren’t dealing with anything major.

  Something flew by overhead, flapping wings creating a heavy sound, like canvas snapping in the wind. I glanced up, but it was already gone. Right. Sally had said it was a giant bat. I just hoped it hadn’t managed to carry anyone off before they all got under cover and out of the target environment. I kept walking, now turning to keep my eyes on the sky.

  Bats are fast. They can strike almost before the eye can follow. They’re far from the fastest things in the multiverse, however, and after you’ve shot a striking snake before it could hit you, a bat just doesn’t seem all that frightening. Besides, it might not be sure I was a good prey animal yet, and if it made another exploratory pass, I was going to put some holes in its wings.

  I was so busy focusing on the sky that the hands grabbing my arm from the side caught me by surprise as Sally dragged me into the tent where she’d taken cover. I squawked, cutting the sound off as soon as I realized what was happening, and turned to glare at her.

  “Sorry,” she said, unrepentantly. “Boss is off making sure the kids’re all under cover. He’ll be pissed if I let you get carted off because you wanted to go big-game hunting with a peashooter.”

  “My guns are not peashooters,” I objected.

  “Bat the size of a horse? They might as well be.” She shrugged. “If it’s the nastiest thing we have to worry about tonight, we’ll be fine. Boss just needs to get some sleep so he can refill his tank, and then we’re off to the next world on the line.”

  “Where is he?”