PRAISE FOR TIM PRATT

  “Part high adventure and part travelogue of alien locales, this sci-fi romp has plenty of YA crossover appeal and will prove just the thing for mature readers who appreciate a classic Golden Age vibe.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “Readers will sympathize with Zax and his fellow travelers as they are yanked into new worlds every few pages or even every few sentences. Pratt’s skillful worldbuilding will appeal to sf fans.”

  – Library Journal

  “This is a gentle, slightly old-fashioned picaresque that made me think of Doctor Who, or characters created by Douglas Adams. It’s welcome escapist fare in these stressful times.”

  – The Guardian

  “High stakes action.”

  – Locus

  “A compelling tale reminiscent of the episodic explorations of Doctor Who... Pratt uses his rich imagination to craft a vast variety of possibilities.”

  – Booklist

  “Tim Pratt is in the vanguard of the next generation of master American fantasists.”

  – Jay Lake, John W Campbell Award-winning author of Into the Gardens of Sweet Night

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  JOURNALS OF ZAXONY DELATREE

  Doors of Sleep

  THE AXIOM SERIES

  The Wrong Stars

  The Dreaming Stars

  The Forbidden Stars

  The Alien Stars and Other Novellas

  The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

  Briarpatch

  Heirs of Grace

  The Deep Woods

  Blood Engines

  Poison Sleep

  Dead Reign

  Spell Games

  Bone Shop

  Broken Mirrors

  Grim Tides

  Bride of Death

  Lady of Misrule

  Queen of Nothing

  Closing Doors

  ANGRY ROBOT

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11, Shepperton House

  89 Shepperton Road

  London N1 3DF

  UK

  angryrobotbooks.com

  twitter.com/angryrobotbooks

  What’s behind door number 2?

  An Angry Robot paperback original, 2022

  Copyright © Tim Pratt 2022

  Cover by Kieryn Tyler

  Edited by Simon Spanton and Robin Triggs

  Set in Meridien

  All rights reserved. Tim Pratt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.

  ISBN 978 0 85766 942 1

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 943 8

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Ltd.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the indomitable Molly

  Contents

  Unicorns • Absent Friends • Sleeperhold • The Cult of the Worm • Necessary Context • Worm Sign • Gigantopithecus or Something • A Fork in the Road

  Ana

  Into the Woods • A Vile Vial • Silver Cylinders • Single Combat • Pustule • Enter Zaveta of the Broken Wheel

  Ana

  A Knife to the Throat • A New Companion • Starfall Galleria • Comets • Beauty Renewed • An Altercation • Zaveta Learns About Drones

  Ana

  Jailbreak • Zaveta Learns About Zippers • Teeming with Teeth • Fifteen or Twenty Worlds Away • A Melee • Two Trails in the Garden

  Ana

  A Folly • On the Proper Preparation of Tea • Wormspeech • Zax Unbuttons His Shirt • For the Prisoner • A Love Story • The Broken Mind • Zaveta Gets a Message

  Ana

  Bindings • A Mind Fortress • Enter the Prisoner • Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree • Cracks in the Wall • The Message • Let Your Cultist Be Your Guide

  Ana

  The Brood • Zaveta Discovers Pistols • A Discourse on Death • Zax of the Thousand Worlds • Cryovolcano • The Prisoner’s Pitch

  Ana

  Vast and Ancient • The Secret Origin of All Reality • Pressing • Reverse Panopticon • Terminal Utilitarianism • Pilgrimage • Enter the Trypophile

  Ana

  Zaveta Gets Sedated • The Benefits of Faith • The Lineage of the Worm • Breaches • A Message Delayed • Toros Tells a Tale • The Final Solution

  Ana

  Sanctuary Moon • Zaveta Wakes Up • Enter Vicki and Minna • Tactically Sound • Rusting Radio Telescopes • The Wormwood • An Ultimatum

  Ana

  A Total Lack of Clever Plans • Parley • A Sacrifice • Zaveta Meets the Pilgrim • Final Dispensations • A Tricky Thing • The First Breach • A Happy Ending

  Ana

  Recoveries • Love Is Little Yellow Flowers • What Worlds May Come

  Acknowledgments

  Unicorns • Absent Friends • Sleeperhold • The Cult of the Worm • Necessary Context • Worm Sign • Gigantopithecus or Something • A Fork in the Road

  How far I’ve come, and how little I have to show for it.

  I’m writing this with a sparkly pen in a notebook I found in a heap of wreckage that used to be a two-story house. There’s a picture of a glittery unicorn with disturbingly human eyes and a toothy grin on the cover, and about half the pages are full of looping handwritten scrawls in pink and purple ink. I can’t read the words, of course, since my linguistic virus only works on speech, not writing, but the genre is pretty clear: this was a diary, probably a teenager’s, or the local equivalent. (The last few pages are full of block letters and underlines. Maybe they saw this war coming. Or maybe the emphasis is about something else entirely). Fortunately, the original writer only used the front of each page in the journal, not the back, so when I flip the journal upside down, poof: a whole book of blank pages for me to fill.

  I used to have an amazing digital journal, slim and weatherproof, with endlessly scrolling “pages” that I could never fill. I could write in that journal with a stylus or my fingertip, or even dictate and watch my words appear in print (once my absent friend Vicki showed me how to turn that feature on). In that book, I chronicled my journey through over a thousand worlds, my adventures, my failures (numerous), and my triumphs (fewer, and maybe pointless in the long run). Now that book of wonders is lost.

  Just like me.

  I can’t possibly recap everything that’s happened since the last time I wrote. I don’t even feel up to filling in the time since the attack on the Sleeperhold, when I was forced out into the lonely vastness of the multiverse again. But here’s a little context, in case anyone ever finds this, and can actually read it.

  My name is Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree. I was born in a place called the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies, where I worked as a harmonizer, devoted to helping people find fulfillment in their personal lives while also contributing to the betterment of society as a whole. When I was twenty-two years old (probably about four years ago, though birthdays are hard to track for reasons that will become obvious), I went to sleep one night in my familiar bed, and woke up in an alien and hostile world.

  Ever since then, that’s been my life. If I fall asleep, or otherwise lose consciousness, I leave the universe I’m in, and wake to find myself somewhere else. Sometimes I open my eyes in cities, or gardens, or deserts; tundra or jungles; space stations or caverns or undersea domes. I’ve found myself in worlds populated by humans at every stage of cultural development, from hunter-gatherer to techno-utopian, and in worlds populated by intelligent entities that aren’t human anymore, or that never were. That said, my destinations aren’t totally random: I never end up in the vacuum of space, or on a world where the atmosphere is toxic, or the temperature hot enough to melt lead – people with my condition (and, yes, there are others) never travel to realities that can’t support our form of life, though it’s not always comfortable. There’s some form of basic self-preservation built in to the ability.

  I do, however, often find myself in empty, devastated places, like this one… though rarely worlds where the ruination is so recent. There is still ash raining down outside these broken windows.

  There are advantages. I can always escape my problems, as simply as falling asleep… but the problem is, I can’t retrace my steps. I can’t return to worlds where I’ve already been, because the force within me seeks the new, driving me always to unseen worlds. That was my life for years. Then I met a group called the Sleepers, who created technology that does allow travelers to return to worlds they’ve visited before, using a special vehicle. That’s life-changing. That’s world changing.

  Unfortunately, not long after I met the Sleepers, everything fell apart, and now I’m friendless and alone again, flung into the multiverse, traveling on foot, only able to go forward, and never back. (I usually try to stay optimistic, but I’m dirty and hungry and lonely, so this isn’t my best day.)

  I’ve been to a lot of worlds since I developed my condition. This is World 130
5, I think, give or take a few. I used to keep meticulous track, but, since I last wrote, I passed through a lot of worlds very quickly, some familiar and some not. I was also distracted by various astonishing revelations, and also by kissing my long lost true love, who (as you may have gathered) has since been lost again.

  I’ve picked up some advantages in the course of my journeys, in worlds even more technologically advanced than my birthplace. The linguistic virus was the first and most vital, since it allows me to understand and converse in most spoken languages, assuming my vocal apparatus is capable of making the right sounds. More recently I’ve had procedures to change the structure of my brain, which in effect means I can stay awake indefinitely. I still have to rest, but I just sort of… zone out, sleeping with only one hemisphere of my brain at a time, like some migratory birds do during long flights. I don’t dream, of course, but since this all started, I’d stopped dreaming anyway. Being able to stay awake as long as I like vastly improved my lot – before that, I could never spend more than five or six days in a given world before sleep forced me away, and I could only manage that with terrifying quantities of stimulants.

  Those procedures, along with certain meditation techniques, also allow me to fall asleep at will – in the old days, if I wanted to escape a world, I had to depend on fast-acting sedatives, and that’s not good for your long-term health. In theory, with my new skills, I could just settle down in some nice corner of reality, barring unexpected head injuries. In practice, though, I’ve been on the run since the attack on the Sleeperhold separated me from my friends.

  Oh, yes, I can make friends. If someone falls asleep in my arms, they can travel with me to new worlds… at least until I lose consciousness without them, or they decide they want to stay behind. My friend Minna, who knows more about biology than anyone I’ve ever met, found a way to duplicate my ability, allowing her to travel with me even if we didn’t fall asleep together… but I haven’t seen her since the day the Sleeperhold fell. I hope she survived. That she’s out there somewhere in the tangle of worlds, fighting for what she believes in, like I am. I know we may never find each other again. I haven’t given up hope – she’s surprised me in the past – but for now I don’t have the luxury of worrying about it. I’m focused on other things. Survival, of course… but survival isn’t enough. Everything is better if you have a goal.

  I have been hunted before. Pursued through the multiverse by someone who meant me harm. I didn’t like that much. This time, I’m the one doing the hunting. I’m going after the people who destroyed the Sleeperhold, the place that should have been my new home. They tore me away from my friends, from Vicki and Minna and Winsome and Toros and Sorlyn and the Pilgrim… and Ana. Most of all, Ana. Finding her once was astonishing. Finding her a second time was a miracle. I know I can’t expect to find her again.

  Toros, the leader of the Sleepers, calls our enemy the Cult of the Worm. We know a few things: their members can travel the multiverse, just like we can. They infect other people with that curse as well. (They infected me, though indirectly.) There are lots of cultists – we don’t know how many – and they’re organized. We think we know their goal: to tear apart the fabric of the multiverse, which is to say, to destroy everything. What we don’t know is why. Toros told me that all attempts at interrogation have failed, mostly for lack of a common language.

  But I can speak anyone’s language, and now I’m chasing them down, trying to track the cult to its origin point. When travelers – like the cultists, or like me – move through the multiverse, we leave traces of damage, fissures in the fabric of space and time, and the Sleepers can detect those. We call them worm-trails, because they look like thin, organic, twisting lines in the air – the bodies of worms, or their tunnels. Invisible to the naked eye, but not to me.

  The Sleepers taught me how to follow those wounds in reality. I can see my own trail, stretching out behind me – and it’s disgusting to even think about it, unspooling behind me at chest-height with every step I take – but I can’t follow it, because I can’t go back. I can follow someone else’s trail, though. (As long as it doesn’t pass through worlds I’ve visited before, but with so many worlds, that’s unlikely to be an issue.) How, in all the vastness of the multiverse, can I possibly hope to end up in the right place? The Sleepers discovered there’s a natural tendency for travelers to follow an existing fissure into a world that’s been visited previously – the way a river follows the path of least resistance. That explains how my old friend turned nemesis the Lector pursued me unerringly through so many worlds, once upon a time. It’s the same method I’m using to follow the cult. If you bed down beneath the terminus of a worm-trail, you always pick up the same trail on the other side.

  Another benefit is, Toros thinks following a worm-trail does less damage to the fabric of reality than breaking new ground – you’re traveling along an existing fissure rather than making a new one. I hope that’s true. I’ve been to so many worlds already. Done so much harm, when all I’ve ever wanted to do was help.

  After the attack on the Sleeperhold, I was lost, wandering, going from world to world – but then I found a thread. Specifically, I found a fresh corpse, in a desolate and seemingly uninhabited world: a humanoid, dressed in a motley combination of clothing, with a pack of survival supplies. The worm-trail in the air above them proved he was a traveler. Judging by the vomit beside him and the froth on his lips, he’d eaten something poisonous. You can never be too careful when it comes to consuming the flora of strange worlds.

  I searched the body and found the mark on his hip, a diamond-shaped arrangement of dots, seemingly burned in with a hot iron:

  I rubbed my chest, just above my own heart. The Sleepers call that mark worm-sign, and while they can’t be sure the mark appears on every cultist, it appears on all those they’ve caught, sometimes tattooed, sometimes branded, sometimes gouged and scarred. I knew then this was no unwilling traveler like myself, but a member of the Cult of the Worm.

  I made and acted on a plan in that same moment. I knew where that cultist had ended up, so I decided to see where he’d come from. Since then, I’ve been methodically tracking his worm-trail, through world after world. Eventually I’ll find the place he came from: the homeworld of the Cult of the Worm.

  That was the plan the Sleepers were working on before the attack: to track the cult to its root. Just because the Sleepers were attacked doesn’t mean it’s a bad plan. It might mean it’s a great plan, since the cult went to such violent lengths to stop it. If the others survived, Minna and Vicki and the Pilgrim and Sorlyn and Ana (my Ana)… then maybe we’re all following different paths, left by different people, cultists or victims like me, and maybe… maybe… we’ll track those threads back to their common point of origin. We’ll find the place where the cult began. We’ll figure out why they’re set on destroying the multiverse. We’ll find a way to stop them.

  “We”. Such a beautiful word. I hope I get to be a “we” again, instead of just an “I”. I hope my friends are still out there, alive, doing the work.

  I hope I get to see them again.

  Sorry. That ended up being… rather a lot of context. I’ll try to focus more on the immediate situation from here on. I first started keeping a journal as a scientific record of my travels, but it soon became a way to reflect on my experiences, develop insights, synthesize knowledge, and generally figure out what in the worlds is going on, and what I’m going to do about it. It’s also a very cheap and only marginally effective form of therapy, as demonstrated above.

  It does feel good to have a pen in my hand, even an oversized one with sparkly purple ink. It’s so easy to get distracted by the minutiae of trying not to be eaten by monsters, or dying of exposure, or being dissected by alien scientists. Writing things down reminds me I have a purpose beyond mere survival. That’s nice.

  So. I awoke here, on world 1305 (approximate), underneath a bandstand in a park, and when I crawled out of the leaf-mulch and dirt, the first thing I saw was a huge gazebo, and the gazebo was on fire. The town square was generally in bad shape, with the dirt torn up in a way that suggested tanks or something similar had recently rolled through, though no tanks were in evidence, and there were no corpses, which was a nice change. The sky was dark with smoke, and the noonday sun (just the one, so far) was faintly visible through the haze.