We didn’t see a significant sign of Zax until hundreds of worlds beyond the mansion, when we met Laini.

  We landed on a balcony inside one of the domes of the Dionysius Society. (Dionysius, I gather, was some kind of local god of revelry, though no one actually worships him in a literal sense in that world anymore. They’re just posthuman hedonists.) There was a woman there, with short black hair, wearing bits of feathers and furs and not much else, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the clouds and their crackling electrical storms. We kept the dome opaque so she couldn’t see us. Zax’s trail looped and scrawled over and over itself, going in and out of this area dozens of times. We’d seen similar paths in some other especially pleasant worlds, where it was clear he’d stayed as long as he could manage to remain awake.

  The Lector’s trail was here, too, but it was shorter, just a few steps from the balcony before it vanished again.

  “That woman is out of place,” Sorlyn said, pointing to the display on the dash.

  I hadn’t noticed – I was daydreaming about what Zax had done in this place, which seemed to be all about music and dancing. But, yes, the sensitive array of detectors on the chariot had picked up unusual signatures in that woman: she was from another world, one with higher levels of ambient radiation, of a different variety than the baseline here. That was usually a sure sign of a stranded companion.

  I opened the dome. From her point of view, it would look like I rose up out of nothing. She turned around, leaned on the balcony, and raised an eyebrow at me. Her face was a bit pinched, but pretty, and her eyes were a startling green. She said something, but I couldn’t understand her, and just shrugged and shook my head. She sighed, then crooked a finger, beckoning.

  I climbed out of the sleepercar and walked over, and she grabbed me by the collar, pulled me close, and kissed me on the lips, her tongue darting into my mouth.

  I pulled back, frowning – was that just the local norm for a greeting, or should I feel attacked? She laughed at the look on my face, and kept talking, and after a moment, I could understand her, the words going from meaningless syllables to sense in an instant:

  “–understand me now? If you’d bothered to say anything at all to me I could have learned your language, and I wouldn’t have had to stick my tongue in your mouth, though really, you should feel lucky.”

  I stared at her. “You just gave me the linguistic virus.”

  She grinned, then blew smoke in my face. “The gift of tongues, lady. The gift of my tongue. You’re welcome.”

  In the end, Laini wasn’t much help, beyond giving me her gift – but it’s hard to overstate how significant acquiring the virus was. I could take it back to the Sleeperhold myself now. Sorlyn and I debated whether we should return, but we knew Toros was likely behind us, and we’d speak to him soon enough. I spat into numerous specimen containers, just to have additional samples of the virus. I even kissed Sorlyn – his mouth was surprisingly sweet and soft; I’d expected it to be like kissing a hole in a rock wall – to give him the gift, so we could talk to Laini together.

  Like I said: she wasn’t much help. Zax had rescued her forty or fifty worlds before this one, a place of hellish subterranean engines. (I remembered that world: darkness, screams, the stink of sulfur. We hadn’t lingered.) They’d traveled together for that month or two, and when they got here, they’d had a lot of fun, but she’d made some new friends, and decided this was a good place to settle, and – shrug. She blew more smoke. “We decided it was time to part ways. I’m grateful and all, but everything I went through, I just wanted to settle down.”

  We asked how long ago they’d parted ways, and she didn’t have a good answer. “Time isn’t, like, a thing they worry about here? You sleep when you’re tired, you wake when you wake, and it’s always party-o-clock. But I mean, yeah, it’s been a while.”

  “What about the Lector?”

  She frowned. “That crazy guy Zax wouldn’t shut up about? What about him?”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “What are you talking about? Zax stranded his ass like a million worlds ago.”

  “We think he’s pursuing Zax.”

  “How’s he doing that? No, never mind, I don’t care. I didn’t see him, or at least, I didn’t notice him. I wouldn’t have noticed you if I hadn’t been out here on the balcony at the right time. Though I do come out here a lot. It’s the spot where me and Zax arrived, and when the music and the people get to be too much and I need a break, this is… just where my feet take me.”

  “We are part of an organization devoted to protecting the multiverse,” Sorlyn said. “We are always on the lookout for experienced travelers to aid in our work–”

  “Pass.” She dropped her cigarette butt, and it disassembled itself into nothing before it hit the floor. Was there some kind of nanotech utility fog in this place? “I’ve done enough work in my life. If you see Zax again, tell him Laini said ‘What’s up.’ She went down the steps, back to the crush of moving bodies, and disappeared from sight.

  We couldn’t follow the end of Zax’s trail – flying the sleepercar into that crowd would have been messy and disruptive – but we detected only three adjacent worlds from this location, and got lucky on the second hit, picking up Zax’s trail in a world with a reddish sun, where we floated around on a sludgy, viscous ocean of something that didn’t look like water. Zax’s trail was very brief there – he must have taken a sedative soon after arrival, and who could blame him? It wasn’t very hospitable. The chariot picked up immense life signs under the surface, but they didn’t pick upon us, fortunately.

  We moved on, to a world of trees, heavy with blue fruit. I now know that’s the world where Zax met Minna, but at the time it held no special significance, and we just followed his trail, and flickered on. Next came the remains of a burned forest, thickening with new growth, vegetation taking over abandoned buildings; then a jungle of beguiling scents; a world of gardens atop towers; a paradise with a waterfall and a pool where we took the opportunity to quickly rinse off our travel-grime; a city of purple brick buildings with old corpses sprawled everywhere, dead of some horrible violence; and then a desert; and then… I read about all those worlds in Zax’s journal, too, so it’s like I experienced them twice already, and I don’t feel a need to dwell in them a third time.

  The next place where something important happened was the crystal world, which was very nearly the last world I ever got to see.

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

  I’d never traveled with another Sleeper before, and wasn’t sure how it would work, but Zaveta had a plan. She curled up next to the bound cultist, and once Zaveta was asleep, I fed the cultist – “My name is Ephedra” – one of my dwindling supply of sedatives. Then I sent myself to sleep, and followed Ephedra’s worm-trail.

  I woke to an oddly buzzing sort of wailing, the cries of distress coming from some distance off to the right. We were in the woods, a damp and mossy place, ripe with the scent of rot and wet soil. I sat up right on the edge of a big hole, maybe four meters deep, gouged out of the ground – recently, to judge by the heaps of damp piled on all sides. I saw an earthworm wriggling in one heap of dirt, and looked away.

  The cultist was facedown on the ground, and Zaveta was sitting on her again.

  “Did she try to run?” I asked.

  “No,” Zaveta said. “This is just more comfortable.”

  The wailing intensified, and I realized it was many voices. “Where is that noise coming from?”

  “I have not done any reconnaissance,” Zaveta said. “But once your linguistic virus begins to parse it–”

  I nodded as the noise became words. “They’re crying out for help and food and water.”

  Zaveta nodded. “The Prisoner said there would be people in need of assistance in this world.” She gestured toward the hole. “This is a mass grave, waiting to be filled, I think. There is already one body inside.”

  I went to the edge and looked down, and it took a moment for me to see what she meant, but then I realized that shape wasn’t a root poking out of the edge of the hole, but a foot. “Oh, no, how awful–”

  The foot twitched.

  I slid down the slope into the hole and started scrabbling wildly at the dirt. A moment later, Zaveta followed – she’d taken the time to tie a rope around a tree, so we could climb back out again, something that hadn’t even occurred to me – and soon realized what I was doing. She asked no questions, just pitched in. We cleared away dirt with our hands, and once we’d uncovered two-thirds of the person – it looked like a child – Zaveta pulled her the rest of the way out, dirt cascading.

  She stared up at us, humanoid, but not human: her body was wrapped in soft, translucent wings, and she had two large, red, faceted eyes widely-spaced on her face, with a cluster of three smaller eyes in the center of her forehead. She made buzzing sounds of distress and confusion, then collected herself enough to speak words. “What is happening? Why have you awakened me out of season? Where are my brood-mates?”

  The distant wailing increased in intensity, and she leapt up, howling. “Harvesters!” She tried to clamber out of the hole, but slid back down in a shower of dirt. I tried to help her up, and she flung herself away from me like my touch had burned her. “Please don’t take me!”

  “Quiet, little one.” Zaveta was all open hands and soothing tones. “We mean you no harm.”

  “We found you in this hole, and only wanted to help,” I said.

  “Who are these harvesters you mentioned?” Zaveta said.

  “What… The harvesters, everyone knows…” Her voice was high-pitched, with strange vibrato around the edges, tonally the same as those crying out for help elsewhere in the forest.

  “We come from a faraway land,” I said. “We don’t understand what’s happening here, but if you explain, we might be able to help you.” At that moment, I forgot all about the Prisoner, the Cult of the Worm, the Sleeperhold, the greater mission, everything – I just saw a person afraid, in need of help, and that became my focus.

  “Start with why you were buried in this hole,” Zaveta said. “Did someone put you here?”

  “Buried?” She shook her head. “We are the sleeping brood. We burrow, and hibernate, and emerge every fourteen cycles to reclaim our dominion, until it is time to burrow again. But the harvesters, who sleep only for one night at a time, they look for us, and dig us up, and – and–” She began to scrabble furiously in the dirt, making little holes, moving to another section, making more, and moving on again. She seemed to be waking up more, becoming sharper and brighter. If you slept for fourteen cycles – however long that was – it probably took a minute to shake off the lassitude, especially if it wasn’t your time to wake yet. “The harvesters kill the males, and trap the females. They took my brood! They took us all! All but me!” She threw herself down in the bottom of the hole and began to wail.

  “Please be quiet,” Zaveta said. “Or these harvesters will realize they missed you.”

  The girl didn’t seem to hear, but kept crying out. Her wings shifted, wrapping around her body more completely. Zaveta glanced at me, then jerked her head toward the rope. We scrambled up out of the exhumed burrow, in time to hear crashing nearby in the forest, along with deeper, more guttural shouts. Not the sound of the brood. The sound of the harvesters, then. The cultist was sitting on the ground by the hole. She could have escaped, but hadn’t bothered.

  “May I engage in violence, Zax?” Zaveta said.

  “I… If there’s no other way…”

  Ephedra laughed. “If you’re the sort of warrior the Sleeperhold boasts, no wonder it fell so easily.”

  Zaveta kicked her, but almost absent-mindedly. “Zax. These people are slavers. They will be here in a moment. They mean that child harm. In this case, striking first is self-defense.”

  She was right. I told her so. Then I reached into my bag, and took out something I’d grabbed during the battle of Sleeperhold, taken from a mysteriously disabled robot sentry: a small sidearm, gleaming metal with a black molded grip and a short barrel, with a triangular bit of dark metal poking out of the end. “Are there cannons where you’re from?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard of them,” Zaveta said. “Stone-throwers, like catapults mixed with fireworks. They use them in the south. I hear they’re as likely to blow up and kill the operators as knock down a wall.”

  I showed her the pistol. “This… is a bit like a cannon. But small. And quieter.”

  “You must teach me to use it sometime,” Zaveta said. “You go right, and I’ll go left. We’ll strike as many as we can unawares.” She grabbed the cultist by the arm and dragged her, squawking, into the brush.

  I withdrew into the trees, too, and crouched, watching the trees beyond the hole. My hands were shaking, but I took deep breaths, and tried to still my mind, using some of the same meditation techniques I’d once used to help me relax, before Minna altered my neural architecture to let me fall asleep at will. I actually didn’t know if this weapon was much like a cannon. I knew that Toros believed in capturing the cultists alive, though more for purposes of interrogation than mercy, so I hoped it was non-lethal. I should have tested it on a tree or something, but I didn’t know how many charges it had.

  The harvesters burst into view, surrounding the hole. There were five of them, dressed in ragged clothes and carrying truncheons. They were humanoid, but with piggish snouts and pointed ears high on their heads. I imagined them snuffling along the ground, smelling for the burrowers. Digging them up. Enslaving them. A couple of them had lengths of wood with loops of wire at one end – catch-poles, meant for snaring the brood.

  One of the harvesters shouted, pointing into the hole, and then they began to laugh, great guffawing snorts. They were delighting in that tiny creature’s pain. I took aim at the nearest slaver, not trusting my skill as a marksperson, and pulled the trigger.

  I heard a faint crackle, and smelled ozone, and then the slaver stiffened and dropped to the ground, spasming. Had I shocked him with electricity, or stunned him into partial paralysis, or induced a seizure? I didn’t know, but as the others turned to look at their fallen comrade, I shot another, and then a third.

  Unfortunately, I must have made some noise in the bushes, or maybe they just smelled me, because the two that remained split apart, circling the pit, to flank me.

  Zaveta slid out of the bushes behind one of them, slit his throat, and kicked him to the ground, so fast and fluid it was like watching a dance. I fired at the other one, quick, before she could kill him, too. I didn’t know if my weapon was doing lethal damage or not, but Zaveta definitely was. I stepped out of the bushes while Zaveta stooped to look over the ones I’d knocked down. She slapped one in the face, then pinched him viciously, then slapped him again. He groaned but didn’t wake up.

  She rose, seemingly satisfied. “Your small cannon is most effective. They have restraints on their belts, for their captives. We can bind rather than kill if you wish to let them live.”

  “Thank you.” I didn’t look at the one she’d killed.

  She shrugged. “When we free the little one’s brood-mates, they may not approve of the mercy you showed their captors.”

  I nodded. “Death is just… it’s the end of everything, Zaveta. Maybe these people could change. See the error of their ways, reform, devote themselves to justice. I’ve seen it happen. Death just closes the door on all those possibilities.”

  “You must come from a world where death is less common than it is in mine,” Zaveta said. I started to object, but she held up a hand. “Don’t misunderstand. I envy you that. I wish I had been born in a world where life was so precious. I am trying to live in your way, now, for I am your companion, and your friend.”

  I realized then that she could have killed them all, or at least grievously wounded them, in the time it took for me to line up my first shot. She was trying.

  She looked me in the eye. “You are Zax of the Thousand Worlds. That is your name of renown, bestowed by me, renown to renown, as is the custom in my homeland. You have survived so long, killing so few, and that is a remarkable feat, worthy of note.”

  I cleared my throat. “That’s… thank you, Zaveta of the Broken Wheel. I am honored.”

  “And I’m disgusted!” Ephedra called from the trees.

  The child had fallen silent during the violence, but she began howling again, and Zaveta called out: “Little one! The harvesters are vanquished. Come help us secure them.”

  The wailing stopped, and the child crawled out. (If she was a child; maybe her people were just small. Even Zax of the Thousand Worlds can get tripped up by assumptions.) She looked in wonder at the fallen slavers. We showed her how to use the harvester’s own shackles to bind them. Zaveta took a set of manacles and disappeared into the bushes, then returned with the cultist, now with chains on her ankles – she could still walk, but she wouldn’t be able to run. She hadn’t shown any inclination to run so far, but Zaveta hadn’t lived so long in her harsh world by being unnecessarily trusting.