Unfortunately, when you were inside the thing, you felt like you were wearing a jumpsuit made of foil.

  “The key to this sort of mission is observation,” he said. “We follow a trail, and we try to find people who look out of place – they might be stranded companions. When we discover a living traveler, we watch to determine if they’re a cultist or one of the unwillingly infected. Usually the cultists are easy to find – they don’t bother trying to blend in, they pick up clothing and accessories as they go along like birds attracted to shiny things, and they react aggressively when they see obvious outsiders like us. But sometimes they’re more subtle. More than one agent has been hurt because they approached someone they thought was an innocent traveler, who turned out to be a cultist.”

  “How many cultists are there?” I asked. “Out traveling around?”

  “We can’t be sure,” Sorlyn said. “There are fewer missionaries than victims, since ideally they infect multiple people each. We think there are a few dozen cultists actively traveling, at least. Maybe scores. Certainly not hundreds, or we’d see more of them and their work. We do encounter the cultists fairly often, but then, the Sleeperhold is situated close to their world of origin, and, also, we’re out looking. If you spend time searching for wasp’s nests and poking them with sticks, you get stung a lot more often than the average person.” He shrugged. “It won’t be long before we leave the local array, though, and then the odds of running into a cultist diminish greatly. Not that the multiverse doesn’t teem with other dangers.”

  Zax had been traveling though those dangers for a long time. “Noted. I’m ready when you are.”

  At that point, I’d been at the Sleeperhold for two hundred days, give or take. That meant Zax was hundreds of realities ahead of me, if he was still out there alive and breathing at all. We had a lot of ground to cover, and I was eager to burn through the worlds.

  I won’t give you a detailed account of every world we passed through in our journey, or even a brief account. I can see why Zax kept such meticulous records of his travels, but Sleepers do things differently – we gather information, but the data is logged in the sleepercar database, not jotted down in a journal. I’ll mention the especially interesting or important ones, and if you want to know about all the worlds we visited, you can read the logs in the sleepercar; I copied them into this lovely digital journal, in their very own folder.

  During the first part of the trip, traveling back over known worlds to reach that city of silent towers where Zax and I parted ways, we seldom even stepped out of the sleepercar – just sat with the stealth mode activated for a moment, then continued on through twenty-one minute intervals in the void. There were plenty of worlds I didn’t even see, since we kept the dome opaque during those brief transitions. Sorlyn had to be unconscious for most of the trip, of course, since his unconsciousness was powering the vehicle, and in the intervals between worlds I read digital books translated into the language of the Sleepers – children’s books, since I was still learning how to read it. I took naps. I played video games. It was not tremendously exciting.

  Every fifteenth world or so we’d stop, get out, and stretch our legs. I did see some lovely places that way, known destinations in the chariot’s database selected as rest stops because of their safety. We paused on a floating platform on a placid sea the dark blue of ink; a place where the ground looked like clouds, but was actually fragrant foam that supported our weight; a gazebo on the shell of a dead tortoise the size of an island, resting on a dry seabed; an abandoned bunker behind a waterfall; a tiny domed garden on an asteroid.

  There were a few places we stopped that were safe, but… unnerving. I especially remember stepping out onto the corpse of a tusked humanoid creature a hundred meters long, laying supine in mud, and crawling with scavenger insects the size of small dogs, all digging into his flesh, which smelled not of rot, but like some sweet spice. The bugs were terrifying, all mandibles and spiked limbs, but didn’t take any notice of us, except to veer out of our way. Sorlyn said the going theory was that we were so alien the scavengers didn’t register us as potential threats or food.

  Eventually we reached the world of silent towers where I’d been stranded. I was prepared to have a strong emotional reaction, or even a panic attack, but I didn’t feel much at all – testament to the rehabilitative powers of therapy. I was surprised to see a big change: the silent towers now all sported gigantic banners in solid colors hanging on their sides, most of them blue or red, but with a smattering of yellow. Every tower had just one banner, and I said, “What does that mean?”

  “No idea,” Sorlyn said. “The worlds we visit aren’t static, though. We make notes about what to expect, but sometimes there are changes, big and small. Add a notation to the database that this place isn’t as abandoned as it looks, all right?”

  One of my jobs on the mission was keeping the atlas of known worlds up to date, so I quickly entered a few lines about the new development. There were still no signs of inhabitants, though, so after a little poking around, we went to pick up Zax’s trail.

  I had contact lenses that allowed me to see worm-trails, and the dome of the sleepercar was also made of a material that revealed them. I haven’t really described worm-trails, I guess, but they’re gross: these squiggly silver lines in the air, about the thickness of my little finger, but they have an irregular, organic shape to them. They look like the intestines of some tiny animal, strung out through the air, around chest or head height. They mark a fundamental violation of space-time… and we leave one behind us wherever we go, too. My head passed through the trails on a few occasions, and when that happened, I always felt bad – a sudden spike of headache, a dizzy spell, blurred vision, or a whiff of something acidic that wasn’t there. Once I realized the cause, I was more careful to avoid touching them. I think the worm-trails were degrading reality in their presence, making everything a little more wrong.

  We picked up Zax’s trail easily enough, and Sorlyn asked if I was ready. Zax was way ahead of us at this point, scores and scores of worlds beyond, but we planned to move quickly, a lot faster than he could have by following a natural sleep-andwake cycle. If Zax was still alive, and still traveling, we could catch up. We would.

  We did, eventually, but it took a lot longer than we expected, and the journey was a lot more fraught.

  Once we began to visit worlds that hadn’t been visited by any of the Sleepers before, we had to survey every one and take notes about the immediate area. I was all for just scribbling “ugly red mountain world” or whatever and rushing on to the next destination, but there were procedures and protocols, and Sorlyn insisted we follow them. “We have to make sure any Sleepers who come this way in the future know what to expect, as thoroughly as possible.” That meant, unless there were immediate dangers, we had to spend at least a few hours in every world, doing some basic surveying, atmospheric sampling, and other science. Most of that data was gathered automatically by the sleepercar, but some of it required personal intervention. Worlds that were inhabited or technologically advanced required even more data gathering, because they were potential resources for our group to use in the future.

  I was in a hurry to find Zax, but Sorlyn did not share my sense of urgency – or, at least, it didn’t overcome his other concerns. As the decidedly junior agent in that partnership, I had to defer to Sorlyn’s judgment. He’d been in the field for years – he was the first Sleeper Toros ever recruited – and I knew he was probably right, even as I ground my teeth and paced impatiently. (Looking back, I’m pretty sure Sorlyn thought Zax was dead at that point.) I had things Zax so desperately wanted – answers! A community! – and I wanted so much to give them to him. If I could have stolen the sleepercar and raced off into the multiverse headlong after Zax, I would have been tempted. But my partner was also the engine and the navigation system.

  To be safe, we followed Zax’s worm-trail from its point of entry to its point of exit, which meant skimming along in the stealthed sleepercar, hovering over the ground, avoiding local dangers. Sometimes he didn’t go far, but in any halfway hospitable world, he tended to walk miles, and sometimes even took local transport. I was heartened every time we followed his trail from start to finish, because it meant Zax was alive.

  Trying to reconstruct what he might have done – did he eat at that restaurant, trade at that bazaar, kill that weird dead monster in the bushes? – took up a lot of my imagination. Having read Zax’s account of his own travels now, I know my speculations were seldom on the mark. I think back on places he wrote about, and I’m surprised at how I passed obliviously through worlds that were deeply significant to him, though it’s also nice to know we were in the same places, months apart. We both ate fish in the world of pastel jellyfish-things floating in the wind. We both found the place with the flesh-and-bone lighthouse with the living eye at the top especially memorable, though Sorlyn and I didn’t stay long enough to see the people in diving suits emerge from the sea, or to enjoy their hospitality. We both found what Zax’s journal called the “land of the terrible terrariums” horrifying on an almost existential level; Sorlyn had to stop me from breaking open the containment facilities and letting all the poor creatures loose. (Toros has a pretty strict non-intervention policy, outside of rescuing stranded companions, who are in worlds where they don’t belong, anyway. He wants to protect the multiverse as a whole, not meddle with individual lives on individual worlds.)

  Sorlyn and I quite enjoyed the beautiful campus and the automated food court on the world where Zax met that monster the Lector, though we had no idea who the Lector was, or what wonders that world secretly held. That was the place where, all unknown to us, Zax acquired the linguistic virus, which turned out to be his most potent secret weapon, and the reason Toros was so excited when we finally brought Zax to the Sleeperhold. Being able to talk to people everywhere he went is what kept Zax alive so long. It was an edge no Sleeper possessed, and it changed everything for Zax.

  But us? We just noted the Lector’s world as, “Technologically advanced, non-aggressive local sapients, makes an ideal rest stop”. How many other game-changing miracles have we breezed unknowingly past? Even back in my world, almost as advanced as that one, there were wilderness areas, deserts, tundra, and swamps. Going so swiftly, we might note a world as a pristine garden, unaware of a thriving spaceport just over the horizon. All we get is glimpses, and particularly with my impatience driving us onward, our glimpses were always short.

  We were certainly moving much faster than Zax was, even with all the surveying and data-gathering… but it’s not like Zax was holding still, waiting for us. He was still going forward, too. Even if we crossed through two or three worlds in the time it took him to traverse one, the gap remained wide. The lines on my mental graph estimating when we might intersect with Zax kept getting farther and farther apart the more time I spent trying to calculate them. “Sorlyn,” I said, “at this rate, catching up with Zax could take months.”

  “If we’re lucky,” he said.

  We weren’t lucky. It didn’t take months. It took years.

  It wouldn’t have been so long, but there were some complications. Once, when we were probably within twenty or thirty worlds of Zax, I picked up some horrible illness, and Sorlyn was afraid I’d die. The tech we had at our disposal in the sleepercar didn’t help, and we had to backtrack all the way to a post-scarcity techno-utopia where there was a small Sleeper outpost so the locals could treat me. I spent six precious weeks recuperating from what turned out, ironically, to be a nasty parasitic infection; at least the doctors were excited to have something novel to study. I was a medical marvel, with an entirely alien bug in my guts, and I’m told they wrote papers about me. Not that I could read them. Fortunately, that particular bug wasn’t compatible with their local biology, so I didn’t bring them a whole new vector of infection.

  That’s something I worry about – are we carrying contaminants from one world to the next? Toros has a theory that the worm that causes interdimensional travel also provides some sort of immune-system boost, because the infected don’t fall prey to alien viruses, parasites, fungi, or allergens. I’d been shot up with every immunity-boosting bit of tech Colubra had at her disposal, too, but it wasn’t perfect, especially as we encountered new worlds, and that wasn’t the last time we fell behind because I got sick, though it was the worst. I sanitize my hands a lot, keep my distance, and don’t cough on the locals – it’s the best I can do. If we are carrying micro-organisms from one world to the next, I can only hope they have a hard time surviving in an alien ecosystem they weren’t evolved for.

  I confess, there were times during that stretch when I almost gave up hope of ever seeing Zax again… but his trail just kept going! He never died, and he’d survived for so long, through hundreds of worlds. Sorlyn became a little obsessed with Zax and his longevity, especially once he beat Sorlyn’s own record of about four-hundred unassisted transitions. That meant Sorlyn never lost interest in the mission, at least. He did take the opportunity to go back to the Sleeperhold during my long recovery, and told me work was proceeding – they’d found three new travelers and a few companions and recruited them, and acquired a lot of automated defenses, including robot sentries. Toros was narrowing down our sense of the cult’s territory, and building small outposts closer to their point of origin, building that defensive wall, though it was still more holes than not. There’d been no further attacks, which made him worry the cult was marshaling its forces, too. He encouraged us to keep up with our journey. He wasn’t obsessed with Zax like Sorlyn was, but he was getting curious about this implausibly lucky traveler.

  We’d followed Zax through more than five hundred worlds by the time we reached the hospital – where our entire understanding of the rules of multiverse travel were totally upended, so that screwed with our heads. A while after that, we found Winsome, which wasn’t bad, not at all, but it did eat up a lot of time. And then… we met Polly, and that was very bad indeed.

  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

  I handed Zaveta my spectacles so she could see the two trails in the air. Fortunately, they began in different places, so we could tell which one we’d been following originally, but the two ran parallel for a bit through the garden before the new one veered off in another direction.

  She grunted and handed me my glasses back. “I wish I could tell how old these are,” I said. “A cultist could have been here years ago, or an hour ago.” I reached out, as if to touch the new head-height trail, but my fingers passed through the twisting strand without any sensation at all. These pinpricks of damage to the structure of reality don’t generally have effects you can feel, though Toros says there are places where the harm is greater, and there are holes in those worlds – breaches where even people uninfected with the parasite can transition from one reality to the next. He says maybe those spots are thinner anyway, or more vulnerable, or “closer” in some metaspatial sense to their adjacent worlds, so the damage wrought by the parasite in such locations is especially grievous. I’ve never seen a breach personally, but I believe his account. No one I’ve met knows more about the multiverse than Toros does.

  Or did. I didn’t know for sure if Toros had even survived the assault on Sleeperhold. He may have even been the main target.

  “Let’s investigate the new trail,” Zaveta said. “Perhaps we’ll find some sign of the traveler who left it. We have time. I couldn’t fall asleep yet anyway, and Wormhold is not going anywhere.”

  I cocked my head. “Wormhold?”

  She shrugged. “It seems an apt name for the stronghold of this Cult of the Worm.”

  I didn’t much like the similarity of that name to Sleeperhold, but there was a certain symmetry there, too, wasn’t there? “All right, but let’s go quietly… in case it’s very recent.”

  The new worm-trail meandered through the garden, toward a small lake – really just an oversized pond – with a small round island in the center. The tiny land mass was connected to the shore on all sides by five evenly spaced arching bridges that looked like they were made of blue glass. From above, the island and the bridges would have formed the shape of a beautiful flower, with petals surrounding a center. The island was thickly wooded, and unusually wild compared to the rest of the garden, with ragged branches that dangled streamers of moss, and no sign of pruning or other care. I squinted. “Is that some kind of structure, among the trees?”

  Zaveta grunted. “Small. A stone fort or watchtower, but falling down. A ruin. Why would there be a ruin here, in a place so organized?”

  “People decorate their gardens with all sorts of unusual things, including deliberate bits of wildness or decay. I think a ruin like that is called a folly – it’s not actually old, just made to look that way. It creates a sense of contrast with the rest of the garden, I guess.” We walked closer. “I was once on the grounds of a great estate where the owners had a filthy person in rags kept penned in a steep-sided muddy hole. He wallowed in the mud and shouted obscenities at passers-by. I offered to help him escape, but he explained that he wasn’t a prisoner. He’d been hired by the Anax – the local rich person or people, I assume – to provide some color and entertainment for visitors. He assured me he’d be well compensated once his seven-year term of service was up. He offered me a cigarette and a prophecy, and I declined both.”