Sally blinked. “I thought he was with you.”

  “You came to our tent and told him there was a problem,” I said. “He left right away. Didn’t you see him?”

  “Yeah, but . . .” She paused. “Aw, fuck.”

  Still gripping her spear—which was part weapon, part security blanket, part teddy bear as far as she was concerned—Sally spun and ran out of the tent, leaving me behind. I was getting real tired of that. I sighed heavily, drew my revolvers, and followed.

  The camp was quiet. The sound of leathery wings passed by again overhead, and I looked up, slow and easy. Bats hunt by sound. Because of that, they always know where you’re going to be; they can echolocate your new location before you finish figuring out where it’s going to be. Bats seem a lot like sorcery, when you get right down to it. I don’t understand them, and I’m not sure anyone really does.

  The night was otherwise silent. No birds or hunting predators; only the crackle of untended fires, the whistle of the wind across the plain, and the occasional beat of wings from overhead. The air was cool and pleasant. It would have been nice out, if not for the omnipresent threat of a giant flying rodent swooping down and taking off with me.

  It was a shame this world didn’t have any known intelligent inhabitants. I would have loved the chance to get my hands on a few biology textbooks, just to find out whether this was an “all megafauna, all the time” reality, or whether it just liked really, really big rodents.

  Sally was right, though. At this size, my guns weren’t going to do me a lot of good. They’d probably be able to convince the bat that I was too much trouble to eat, but they wouldn’t knock it out of the sky. Still, that was something, and as a creature that ran entirely on instinct, it wasn’t as likely to redouble its attack if I hurt it as a thinking creature would have been. I moved quickly, eyes on the sky, waiting for the bat to show itself.

  It didn’t do me the honor. Fucker.

  Thomas could take care of himself. All sorcerers are elementalists at their core—that seems to be the main thing distinguishing them from all the other types of human witch—and Thomas’s element was fire. If he’d been able to pull on this world’s pneuma enough to pin down the mole, he could definitely pull on it enough to make a few sparks. Add that to the campfires burning everywhere, and well. If the bat attempted to mess with him, it would get to be the guest of honor at a very exclusive barbecue.

  Problem: Thomas was our only sorcerer. None of the rest of us had any talent for channeling magical energy. I was blocked from even benefitting from the stuff, thanks to having been used as a channel for the spell that broke us out of the bottle dimension, nearly killing me in the process. (Thomas would contest the “nearly,” since my heart stopped at one point and had to be shocked back into a normal rhythm. Thomas can be a little conservative sometimes.) If he used the pneuma he’d been able to draw from this dimension to set the bat on fire, we’d be stuck here longer before he could open another gateway, and we’d risk running into even more bats. Not good.

  So no, we didn’t want Thomas to be the one dealing with this if there was any possible alternative. I kept working my way through the camp, back to our tent—and more importantly, my pack.

  With a flap of heavy leather wings, the bat soared into view. I opened fire immediately, and true to Sally’s prediction, the thing kept flying. But it shrieked, the sound high-pitched enough to hurt my ears, and banked, heading back the other way. My bullets might only feel like beestings to something that size, but no one likes being stung by a bee.

  “Thomas?” I pushed open the flap of our tent and stuck my head inside. No wayward husband. I hadn’t really been expecting him; wherever he’d gone off to after getting separated from Sally, it wouldn’t make sense for him to come right back here.

  The mice were still in the middle of their ritual, tiny voices raised in celebration. They didn’t even pause to mark my arrival, which meant they were probably at a delicate point in the recitation. I holstered my guns and moved to open my pack, digging quickly through its contents before finding what I needed and straightening up again.

  “There’s going to be a big boom in a few minutes,” I said. “Don’t get alarmed. It’s just me doing my job.”

  The mice cheered and went back to what they’d been doing, my comment already dismissed. I smiled and let myself out of the tent. Sometimes it’s nice when things stay predictable. Giant bats eat people; talking pantheistic rodents care more about religious rituals than they do about explosions; if I’m around, something’s going to blow up.

  No one else had emerged from their tents, all of them being somewhat smarter than that. I walked with my eyes on the sky, heading for the edge of the encampment. The farther I got from the fires, the darker it became. The sky was an unending blaze of stars above me, bright in that way that only preindustrial dimensions can ever manage. I was going to miss those skies once we were home for keeps. Not enough to make this trip last any longer than it absolutely had to, but still . . .

  The first time I’d been able to catch my breath and look at a sky like that, I’d been in some unnamed backwater dimension two jumps from Ithaca, chasing down a bounty Naga had assigned to me. The man in question had robbed an important family back on his home world and somehow done a runner across dimensions, trying to disappear. Maybe that would have been allowed, except that he’d stolen some fairly important family heirlooms, and the people they actually belonged to wanted them back, along with a side order of punishment for the thief. They’d been paying Naga, and Naga hadn’t been paying me, exactly, more letting me do him a favor in exchange for his continuing to fund my fruitless search for my husband.

  Those memories were less comforting now than they’d been when I truly believed Naga was on my side, but they had been pleasant enough while they were happening. The bounties had given me something limited and achievable to focus on rather than spending all my time and energy thinking about the thing I couldn’t seem to achieve, and the money Naga got for sending me on side trips funded more tattoos and more weapons for me to take with me when I got back on the main mission.

  Only now I had to question every choice I’d made during those fifty years. Had I been hunting criminals, or had I been dragging innocent people and runaways to their dooms? Was I a bounty hunter or a hired thug? Either would explain the way some people reacted when they saw me, but only the first would help me sleep at night.

  Still, I loved an untouched sky. I made it past the edge of the tent line, spread my arms, and began walking in a slow circle, eyes still turned upward. I wanted to attract attention, not be caught unawares. Just to up the ante, I started whistling, the sound low and carrying in the calm night air. Any hunter nearby wouldn’t be able to resist.

  Indeed, there was a flap of wings as the bat—or another like it, but hopefully the same one that had been stalking me before—began to loop lazily overhead. I amended my hopes. This was definitely the same bat. It was keeping its distance because I’d taught it I might be dangerous, but as I continued to walk and whistle, it swooped closer with each pass, clearly thinking I hadn’t seen it.

  That was good. I kept up my circles, waiting for it to work up the nerve to make an attack.

  When it did, it was fast enough that it very nearly caught me off-guard. It went into a sharp dive, mouth open, arrowing straight toward me like it was going to swallow me in one bite, even though it wasn’t quite large enough for that. It wasn’t the primary hunting strategy employed by Earth bats, which usually preferred to snatch things out of the air, and I was briefly glad we were dealing with giant monster bats instead of giant monster owls. Owls come equipped with special feathers that let them fly without making a sound. We would have lost people before we knew what was going on, and more, this little tactic would have been suicidal, not slightly risky.

  The bat dove. I hit the ground, yanking the pin from the grenade in my hand and tossing it straight into the bat’s open mouth as I fell. Its jaw snapped shut, and I would have sworn it looked surprised by the offering, startled enough by my weird behavior not to go for a second immediate swoop.

  It didn’t spit the grenade out. That was good. I covered my head with my arms but didn’t get off the ground or run, not wanting to make myself a better target.

  Which was, naturally, when Sally and Thomas emerged from the tent line, saw me, and ran in my direction. “Alice!” shouted Thomas.

  The bat wheeled and flew off closer to the two. Fucker was still looking for a meal. I couldn’t blame it for that—instinct and all—but given the size of the explosive it had just swallowed, I didn’t want it getting too near the tents. “Dammit,” I muttered, rolling to my feet and waving my arms in the air as I hopped up and down. “Here! Over here! I’m defenseless and alone!”

  The bat banked back around, clearly seeing me as the easier target. Good bat. Thomas stopped running, grabbing Sally’s arm and pulling her to a halt along with him as he realized I was actually up to something. Better husband.

  I stopped waving and ran away from the tents, as fast as I could.

  I made it about ten feet before I felt the wind from the bat’s approach on the back of my neck, and knew that if this grenade was a dud, I was about to have a big problem.

  The grenade wasn’t a dud.

  I had a different problem. Namely, I had a massive bat less than a foot behind me when the grenade it had swallowed went off and the whole damned thing exploded, splashing bat guts and gore absolutely everywhere. The blast flung me forward to the rock. I managed to catch myself with my hands before gravity helped me catch myself with my face, and I lay there, as flat as I could make myself, while bat pattered down all around me in a thick, horrible rain.

  When it finished falling, I rolled onto my back, spitting out a bit of muscle that had somehow managed to wind up in my mouth, and started laughing.

  I was still laughing when Thomas and Sally reached me, Sally looking alarmed, Thomas looking resigned. He leaned down to offer me his hands, and I took them, letting him pull me to my feet. My boots slipped in the gore. I tightened my grip on Thomas, holding on until I was sure I wasn’t going to just fall down if I let go. Once I had my footing back, I released him and wiped the bat out of my eyes.

  “That was surprisingly fun,” I said. “Think there are going to be any more of those things?”

  “Try not to sound so happy about that idea, maybe,” said Sally dryly.

  “Ordinary bats live in colonies, although they generally hunt solo when not in a target rich environment,” said Thomas. “This is not a place where a bat would normally expect to find a solid meal. I think tonight’s guest was an opportunist more than anything else. We should set a watch, but chances are good that we won’t have any more visitors.”

  “Great,” I said. “Do we have enough water on hand for me to have a bath?”

  Sally rolled her eyes. “Woman explodes a bat all the hell over herself, and wants a bath.”

  “Well, yes. There’s blood in my hair.” I smiled at her, aware of how distressing the expression would be with the gore covering my face. “It gets sticky.”

  “It’s gross.”

  “You could have exploded the bat, if you’re that interested in me staying clean.”

  “I can’t even—” Sally threw her hands in the air, announced, “I’m going to go set watches,” and stalked off back toward the tents, leaving me and Thomas alone with the remains of blasted bat.

  I bent to retrieve one of the larger chunks, holding it up to show him. “Want a roast?”

  Thomas laughed, and everything was going to be okay.

  Four

  “Every journey has an ending. Sometimes they’re a new beginning at the same time. Sometimes they’re just where things . . . stop.”

  —Juniper Campbell

  Standing on a rock in an unfamiliar dimension, watching the sun come up

  THANKS TO MY PROXIMITY to the explosion, I was the only one covered in inside-out bat, meaning we only had to find enough clean water for me. Thomas was conserving magic, and thus couldn’t heat it at sorcerous speed, but everyone we approached was willing to let me set a pot on their campfire, especially once I started offering them pieces of fresh bat. It wasn’t long before about a quarter of the camp was spit-roasting bat bits for dinner while I shampooed guts out of my hair, and everyone who hadn’t received part of the first bat hoped that more of them would come along.

  Luckily for my hair, our water supply, and Thomas’s nerves, they didn’t. None of the members of Sally’s excellent watch spotted anything else in the sky above us, and the things they saw moving in the distance of the plains all stayed far enough away to be nothing more than dark smudges against the inky, star-streaked night. The hours passed peacefully, and I was able to rejoin Thomas in our tent for a few precious hours of being left alone.

  I was getting way too accustomed to having him with me when I went to bed, the sound of his heartbeat as familiar now as it had been when we’d been together back in Buckley, young and foolish and convinced that we could overcome absolutely anything, as long as we stayed together. And maybe we hadn’t been so wrong about that. After all, most of our problems seemed to come from us letting people keep us apart.

  Thomas wrapped his arms around me and kissed the crown of my still-damp head, and if I had any bad dreams, I didn’t remember them when I woke up. We rose to find the camp already halfway to being torn down, and sentries standing at the edge of the rock, watching anxiously as guinea pigs the size of elephants grazed in the tall grass of the plains below. I joined the watch briefly, shielding my eyes against the sun.

  “Can’t decide whether everything in this dimension is unreasonably large, or whether we’re unreasonably small for this dimension,” I said finally, turning away. Maybe we were the Aeslin mice here, too small to seem real to anything local. And maybe it wasn’t our problem, because we weren’t sticking around to play the residents of Lilliput.

  Thomas came up behind me, sliding his arms around my waist and pressing a kiss to the side of my neck. I leaned back against him. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” he said. “I’ve tapped into this dimension’s pneuma. I think I can get us out of here.”

  “You think, or you know? Because I have more grenades if we need to camp for another night.”

  He snorted and let me go, heading for a point toward the edge of the rock and producing a piece of chalk, starting to draw runes all over the stone at his feet. I helped a few people tear down their tents before joining him, and the crowd that had already begun to gather.

  His runes were forming a rough oval that was probably meant to be a circle. I didn’t say anything. The shape the runes formed didn’t matter half as much as the runes themselves, which was a good thing, since the man couldn’t draw a perfect circle to save his life, and I didn’t want to find out that we could access dimensions that were antithetical to humanity by bending an angle slightly wrong.

  When the last of the runes was drawn, he tucked the chalk into his pocket, stepped back, and raised his hands. That was all. There was no chanting, no mystical gesturing; just a heavily tattooed man standing with his hands up, like he wanted to frame the sunrise between them.

  I don’t think a sorcerer can control the sun. That’s a bit arrogant, even for me. But Thomas’s magic has always been most sympathetic to fire, and I had to assume that having a giant ball of flaming plasma rising right in front of him could only make it easier for him to grab hold of this world’s pneuma and pull like he thought his life depended on it.

  And maybe it did. All these crossings were starting to wear on him—as well they should. Dimensional membranes aren’t designed for this sort of thing. There’s a reason doors are usually opened by cults, groups of people working together who don’t care if they burn out a few brains in the process. The Johrlac have a slightly more survivable process: they use complicated equations, again worked by multiple people—mathematicians, in their case, instead of cultists or sorcerers—and they still have fatalities. Dimensions like Ithaca, or Empusa, where trade with nearby worlds is common . . . aren’t. They make up about one out of every fifty inhabited dimensions, and most of them don’t last long.

  Thomas’s sorcery was capable of grabbing hold of a door and prying it open. With the charms he had from Helen to channel and shape his magic, he could even do it reliably and according to the map they’d given us. What he couldn’t do was keep doing it forever. Sooner or later, he was going to burn himself out. Which was a big part of why we all had to travel together, and not count on him being in any shape to backtrack when we finally found a safe place for everyone to settle.

  I just hoped he wouldn’t hurt himself getting us there, and that we’d be someplace near Earth when he finally reached the point of exhaustion. I still had two of the beads I’d received from Naga, personal gateways that would be big enough for me, Thomas, and the mice, if it came down to that. But he wasn’t going to let me leave Sally, and all my grumbling aside, I wasn’t ready to abandon her. Even when we chafed on each other, she was growing on me. It just meant that when we finally did get home, we’d be staying put for a while.

  Oh, we’d been planning to do that anyway, for a lot of very good reasons. I just didn’t think we were going to have a choice.

  Slowly, the air in front of Thomas turned translucent, like a very thin slice of tomato or watermelon or something else that was as much water as tissue. It looked almost bruised, in a way that seemed antithetical to the world around it. He raised his hands higher. The bruise clarified, until we were looking through a gateway into another world, one that had actual trees and no visible giant guinea pigs.

  Thomas took a half-step back, hands still raised, and I fell in behind him, guns drawn, ready to interrupt anything that wanted to disrupt his concentration. Sally began to herd our charges through the gateway, moving them along as fast as she could. If he ever opened a door into an ambush, we’d be screwed, since our process didn’t allow for much scouting. That was part of why we’d stuck so tightly to Helen’s list. She might send us to worlds like this one, where the wildlife was more than happy to suck us down like bonbons, but she wouldn’t intentionally send us into danger.