He looked disbelieving. I was the one who’d put the machete there, and now I wanted to worry about whether or not he ripped out his own intestines? It was all very confusing, and he was losing a decent amount of blood. I sighed again, more heavily this time.

  “Yeah, all your friends are dead. Maybe you’re not, if you tell me how to find my stuff and I help you get that thing out without doing any major damage.”

  He snorted and pointed toward the hills to the west. There, not far away, was the mouth of a low cave. Then, making eye contact the whole time, he reached down and yanked the machete out of his own stomach.

  He was dead before he hit the ground. “Great,” I said, as I walked forward and took the machete away from his corpse. “And I’m sure your well-timed suicide has nothing to do with the caves being home to something that’s going to try to eat my ass, right?”

  Being dead, he didn’t reply. I considered the virtues of kicking him a few times, just for the comfort of it, and decided that harassing the dead wasn’t worth my time. Not when I had other things to do. Sighing one last time, I turned to face the cave.

  Time to get this over with.

  Four

  “No one ever really dies. We live on in the memories of our children, and it’s down to us to make sure that we’re remembered kindly.”

  —Alexander Healy

  Heading into a dark, unfamiliar cave in a dark, only semi-familiar dimension, because that’s a great plan

  I paused outside the cave to dig bullets out of my pocket—not the best bullet storage location, but when you don’t have a pack and need to move while you can still get it back, you make do with what’s available—and reload my revolvers. Whatever was waiting inside here would be susceptible to bullets if it was somehow immune to stabbing. Weird damage immunities like “fire” and “blood loss” only really crop up in that fantasy game my grandkids like, the one where they pretend to be elf warriors who seduce dragons or whatever.

  Here’s a tip: do not attempt to seduce a dragon. They don’t have the right pheromones, and they think humans are gross. Which, to be fair, we kind of are. Lots of fluids in a human.

  I wanted to keep my fluids where they were, which was why going into this cave without a light or a guide was probably not the best idea I’d ever had. Still, it was so far from the worst that it was fantastic by comparison, and so, after a moment to wish I still had any grenades, I gripped my new machete and stepped inside.

  The cave was dark, as expected, although not as dark as expected; glowing fungus stuck to the walls, almost matching the colors of the sky outside—greens and blues and soft whites. It wasn’t proper lighting, more like Christmas lights strung around the edges of a room, but it was enough that I could see the outlines of the things around me, rocks jutting up from the cave floor, the walls themselves. The air smelled stale and musty, like a basement that had been closed off for too long. I paused once I was a few steps inside, listening intently. Nothing moved.

  Wasting charms is never a good idea, but I was going to have to be redone once I got home anyway, since I’d burned through all my gates, and that meant I didn’t need to be as frugal as I normally would. I slipped the first two fingers of my free hand under the strap of my tank top and pressed the small star I knew was tattooed there. “Light, please.”

  None of my tattoos actually have a verbal component—they’re all intent—but sometimes saying what I want out loud helps. I closed my eyes for a moment.

  There are two kinds of light spell that can be embedded in ink. The little ones give you a nice, easy, long-lasting glow, but it’s better if you give your eyes time to adjust. The big ones are more like a sudden nuclear flash. There is no letting your eyes adjust. They’re either closed when you trigger the effect, or you’re going to be walking into walls for a while. I can power both, but the second kind knock me on my ass for a couple of hours after the adrenaline wears off, and they’re really a last resort kind of thing.

  Naga frequently reminds me that both types of light spell pull electrolytes and sugars out of my system, which can lead to seizures, rapid heartbeat, and unconsciousness if I don’t take steps to correct it and could presumably eventually kill me. That’s not the goal most of the time, so I’m as careful as I can be while dealing with situations that sometimes require me to write checks my body doesn’t understand how to cash. Once I found my pack, I could take a few packets of the powder that’s supposed to put things back to normal. It was just a matter of finding the pack.

  When I opened my eyes, my entire body was glowing a soft white, like one of those weird glow sticks that are so popular with the kids. The cave, thus revealed, was a pretty standard representative of its kind, although the ground was smoother than it would have been naturally; someone or something had been moving through here for a long time, long enough to wear a path into the ground. The only real question was whether it had been the charming gentlemen who’d welcomed me to this dimension, or whether it was some sort of local monster my last friend had been hoping to feed me to.

  Well, nothing like a little caving to liven up an already too-lively night. I started walking deeper inside, machete at the ready, watching for any sign of movement.

  About twenty yards from the entrance, I had it, as something that looked like a hellbender if a hellbender were the size of a portable toilet stomped out of the shadows and opened its mouth in silent threat display. Its teeth were tiny nubs in its gummy jaws; it looked like it was built to eat larger bugs than any I’d seen on this world, which didn’t make me optimistic about the depths of the cave. I was usually in and out, exterior only, when I had to pass through here. While I knew there were no big predators left in the open, there could be giant bugs in the depths of the earth. Why the hell not? Everybody seems to love a giant bug.

  Almost as much as they love giant snakes. The universe is full of giant snakes. Earth got off easy, since most of our snakes are too small to swallow people, but not everywhere has been that lucky. And some snakes are very nice people, not interested in eating anyone they can carry on a conversation with.

  I have yet to meet a giant bug, except for maybe the Madhura, who I would classify as “a very nice person.” Sarah and Angela don’t count. They’re biologically cuckoos, but they’re culturally human in all the ways that matter.

  And that’s probably a shitty way to talk about assimilation, but since their actual species is made up entirely of assholes who mostly want to kill or absorb everyone they meet, I can’t feel too bad about it. I don’t like bugs. Never have, never will.

  The salamander continued to show me the dark, faintly glowing inside of its mouth, cautioning me not to come any closer. Since it didn’t look like it was sitting on a trove of ill-gotten goods, I nodded politely and kept walking. It wasn’t a big enough threat, even in the dark, to explain the smirk on the last jerk’s face just before he spilled his own guts out on the ground; I couldn’t lower my guard.

  The cave grew closer and darker around me as I made my way deeper, and when something moved in the shadows, I understood why the dying man had thought it was a good idea to send me in here. The creature that abruptly loomed out at me was easily three times the size of the salamander and armored like a clawed tank. The closest earth equivalent I could come up with was a burrowing crayfish, albeit one the size of a bull elephant. Each of its claws was the length of my leg.

  With that kind of natural armor, this was the fabled “immune to both bullets and stabbing” variety of fucker. It charged forward, claws waving, and made a horrifying bubbling noise deep in the cavernous gape of its throat. At least it didn’t have a lot in the way of teeth. I leapt aside, taking refuge in the one advantage of being the smaller combatant in the unexpected fight: I was substantially faster and more agile. That was a good thing.

  There weren’t many good things in this situation as I could see them. I didn’t have any grenades. Even if I had, setting off grenades underground is never an awesome way to stay alive, and so I tend to avoid it when I can. Until I found my things, I didn’t have access to anything bigger than what I was carrying, and luring this fucker into the open didn’t seem like it was the world’s best idea as far as survival goes. For all that my tattoos can be used to hold effects of various sizes, none of them are as impressive as summoning fire out of nothing or freezing enemies in their tracks. That would be a whole extra set of upgrades, and I don’t think my system could sustain them.

  So I was pretty much screwed. Well, shit. It lunged again, and I jumped again, grabbing a rocky outcropping and trying to plan my next move. It waved its claws in a threatening fashion. I paused.

  For all that it was enormous and covered in irregular protruding spikes, it really did look like a crawdad. Its armor was segmented, with clear divisions between the plates. If I could get myself above it, I might be able to do something. I started eyeing the various rocks with a more assessing eye, trying to figure out how I could get close enough to the ceiling to grab for some of the dangling formations that hung suspended there. I’ve never been able to remember which ones are the stalactites and which are the stalagmites, but I know that both are formed slowly, one drop of lime-rich water at a time, and back on Earth, damaging them can get you into serious trouble.

  This wasn’t Earth, and as I began my series of carefully timed leaps, I was grateful for that fact. Every landing was a jarring thud and a frantic scramble to get a handhold without dropping my new machete, which was going to be absolutely key to surviving today’s stupid Healy trick. The crawdad continued pursuing me, waving its claws and gurgling unpleasantly. I wanted to avoid being caught at any cost, since one solid snap of those claws could have me down a limb, or possibly down an entire torso. I like my torso. It’s where I keep my lungs.

  After eight leaps and two near-misses, I was above the crawdad, which reared and waved its claws at me. I shot it in the eye. It roared and dropped back down level with the ground, no longer quite as invested in trying to threaten the biting thing on the ceiling. It wasn’t going anywhere, just not trying to climb after me, and under the circumstances, I’d take it.

  I watched carefully as it circled, and when it passed directly beneath me for the third time, I dropped onto its back, machete held in front of me with the point facing downward.

  One of the things people tend to forget when they’re listing off my admittedly eclectic list of skills: I started out with a slingshot and a row of glass bottles, and if you missed the target too many times, that was it, you were down for the day. I’m not the best shot in the world, but most of the time, when I’m aiming for something, I’ll hit it. And that goes for knives, too.

  I hit the crawdad’s back with a bone-rattling thud, the blade of my machete going right between the plates of armor covering its head and its torso. At the same time, spiky bits of shell went into the flesh of my thighs and calves. The crawdad bellowed. I screamed, shoving the machete farther down. Creature like this, it had to have some kind of ganglia connecting its front end to its back end, even though it wouldn’t have a spinal cord, since it didn’t have a spine. If I could sever that . . .

  Twisting the machete got me another bellow, and the crawdad’s thrashing got less severe. The spikes jammed into my legs didn’t get less sharp, and the pain was incredible, but I stayed where I was. Hurting myself and losing however much blood I was going to lose when I pulled myself free wouldn’t do me any good if I then had to try and fight this thing again while already injured. No, I had to finish this now. I twisted the machete again. There was no bellow this time, only a pained, burbling exhalation, and the crawdad stopped moving.

  Great. It was either dead or dying, and either way, it wasn’t going to be trying to scissor me in half. That was good enough for me. I pulled a knife from inside my shirt and bent forward, following the gently glowing curve of my thigh to where it pressed against the crawdad’s shell. The spikes had been faintly hooked, which made sense; they were both natural armor and a method of gathering food. If something attacked the crawdad and left pieces of itself behind, the crawdad could pick those pieces off later and eat them. Disgusting, but effective.

  Pulling the spikes out would have caused further damage and blood loss, and some of them were too close to my femoral artery for me to feel comfortable messing with them in the field. Better to just leave them where they were for right now. Bending close, I was able to slice them off, one by one, as close to the skin as possible. After about five minutes of exceptionally painful personal surgery, I was able to dismount from the crawdad without leaving any major parts of myself behind. Under the circumstances, I was willing to call that a win.

  I did pause to scowl at the shell of the thing before I yanked my machete free. “Thanks for playing,” I said to the corpse, almost chipperly, and turned to head deeper in.

  I was limping now, thanks to the spikes embedded in my legs. They were effectively plugging the holes they had made, and only a little blood leaked from each wound. There were enough of them that it was still a problem, and I was starting to feel woozy by the time the tunnel bent and I found myself confronted with Aladdin’s cave of wonders.

  This gang had been jumping tourists for a while, and this was apparently their favorite place to stow their ill-gotten gains. My pack was near the front of the pile, and nothing appeared to menace or attack me as I stepped forward and reclaimed it, settling it back on my shoulder with a feeling of the utmost relief. This bag was never supposed to be parted from me, much less stolen and stowed in another dimension.

  The bags I’d been sent to retrieve were nearby. I grabbed those as well, taking a moment to scan the remainder of the pile before I activated my passage home.

  Some of these things had clearly been here for a long, long time. Guess there wasn’t much of a local market for these items, since they couldn’t be used as weapons, smoked, or drunk. I paused at the sight of a large leather map roll next to a stack of old books held together by a leather book strap that looked a lot like the ones I’d used when I was in college. They weren’t local make. Meaning they’d been swiped from a trans-dimensional tourist, and they might contain something relevant. After a momentary inner debate about whether it was stealing when those things had enough grime on them to have been down here for years, I grabbed them both, hooking the map roll over my shoulder and tucking the books under my arm before pressing the first two fingers of my right hand against my last remaining doorway tattoo.

  “All right,” I said, as I closed my eyes. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  * * *

  The world blurred. The world shifted. The sound of carnival rides whirling and singing their electronic songs to themselves suddenly rose in my ears, accompanied by the sugared-oil scent of funnel cake. I opened my eyes on the midway of the Campbell Family Carnival, Laura in front of me, both of us somewhere in her teens, her thrusting a corndog in my direction. She had a smile on her familiar, beloved face, which dimmed a bit as she looked at me.

  “You’re not my Alice right now, are you?” she asked.

  This was another moment I remembered, and that question put everything else into context. We’d been seventeen, me hopelessly in love with Thomas Price—and utterly convinced that it was hopeless. He was engaged to a woman from the Covenant, and I was just the useless local teenager who’d gone and nearly gotten herself cored out from the inside by a predatory alkabyiftiris slime. He was never going to love me the way I loved him.

  When this had actually happened, I had been utterly baffled by Laura’s statement, which had come entirely out of nowhere, and made no sense at all. Now, looking back across a gulf of decades, it made all the sense in the world: Laura was an umbramancer. They may be the least well-understood of the naturally occurring types of human magic user. They can see the future. They can talk to ghosts, even the kind who don’t normally have the strength to make themselves manifest in the material world. They mostly work in wards and protections, out of self-defense; Laura had been fending off unwanted spirits since we were just kids.

  And apparently, they could also tell when their best friends were possessed, however briefly, by their selves from the future.

  “What?” I asked, in the voice of my innocent teenage self, the girl who had been completely baffled by this moment, the girl who had no reason to think anything was happening.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Laura, and handed me the corndog. “Whatever’s bad enough to make you do something like this, it’s probably bad enough that you really need a corndog.”

  “Um, okay,” I said, and took a bite.

  We walked along the midway, Laura shooting little worried glances at me that I appreciated now, in what was for her the future, but had baffled me utterly when this had been our shared present. Context changes everything.

  The corndog was hot, savory, and far less confusing. We walked, and I ate, and the carousel music played, and overall, it was a much more pleasant flashback than most of them tended to be.

  “Come on,” she said, beckoning me toward a tent. “Darkness will help the transition.”

  We stepped inside, and everything went black, as the temperature rose by at least six degrees, the air growing suddenly humid and ripe with the smell of snake. I opened my eyes, which had still been closed in the present if not the past, on the dim, familiar confines of my bedroom in the dimension where I currently spent . . . not the majority of my time, but the majority of the time when not actively in transit from one world to another. This was my home base, as much as I had one, and the place I returned to, always. If I only had one crossing charm left, it brought me here, not back to Buckley.