I’d forgotten we even had that – we hardly ever needed to use it. Once I turned the display on, I saw a blip – and then another blip, as Toros appeared near us – and spun the shuttle around.

  There was a space station behind us, a series of cylindrical habitats linked together, with light shining through the windows. Some sections of the station were broken and exposed to space, but others were whole. “Zax must have woken up inside there. Should we board?”

  Sorlyn nodded. “There must be a docking bay of some kind for a shuttle from their planet. If their equipment is still working…” He disconnected his diadem and joined me in the front seat, doing things to the console I’d never seen before.

  “I thought you taught me everything you knew about driving these?” I said.

  He smiled. “There’s not enough time in the world for me to teach you everything I know. We have a suite of tools that scan through known technological systems and attempt to interface with alien systems. They can adapt, adjust, and learn, and while they don’t work on everything, this doesn’t seem wildly unlike tech we’ve seen in other worlds… Ah ha. There.”

  He figured out how to talk to the station, and we matched its lazy rotation and hooked ourselves into a docking bay at the end of one cylinder. They were much bigger up close. We radioed Toros, who told us to proceed carefully, and that he’d stay outside. “That’s in case something in here kills you,” Toros said. “Then only half the expedition will die.”

  “It’s always good to have a contingency plan.” I took the staff with me, collapsed. I wasn’t going to walk around unarmed again.

  In the end, there wasn’t anything dangerous on the station, though something had clearly gone wrong at some point – the walls were streaked with soot in places, and you don’t want fire in space stations. Apart from Zax and the Lector’s worm-trails, there were other signs of recent habitation, too – empty food containers, wadded heaps of blankets, things like that. It looked like someone had stayed here for a while.

  There was also something new. “Toros,” Sorlyn said on our comms. “We’ve got a third trail here. Smooth, like the Lector’s.”

  “He’s made more of the serum?” Toros crackled. “Who did he give it to?”

  “Maybe the Lector picked up another helper, like Polly,” I said. “Or maybe–”

  “Oh, what’s this?” Sorlyn was poking at a console on the wall. “We’ve got video and audio surveillance recordings here.”

  Oh, Zax. Later I read about what happened on that horrible station in his journal, but before that, I saw it. There was a lot of footage, but we could speed through most of it, slowing it down to real-time when some interaction was happening.

  The Lector arrived on the station first, and soon took control of its systems. From there, he was able to capture Zax, and his friend Minna – my first sight of her, all pigtails and overalls – and Vicki, their crystal intelligence companion, what Polly called a “magic ring”. We heard the Lector threaten to jettison Minna from the station if Zax didn’t comply, and… Zax complied. Of course he did. He cares about his friends. He cares about other people more than himself. We fast-forwarded through endless lab tests and procedures, but eventually the Lector must have gotten what he wanted, because he drugged Zax, and he flickered out and away – solo. Poor Zax, alone again.

  Minna was still on the station, though, and the Lector forced her to help him with his work. While the Lector produced more quantities of his serum, Minna somehow… grew a new Polly, from a sample of the fungal creature the Lector had saved.

  “That is not OK,” I said. “I killed that thing.”

  “This Minna is a marvel,” Sorlyn said. “The Lector boasts of his brilliance, and he is very intelligent, but Minna just… quietly works miracles of biological science.”

  Minna clearly had hopes that the new Polly would be less violent than its predecessor, and at first it was, but the Lector had a way to transfer the original Polly’s consciousness to the new one. I had to look away as New Polly viciously taunted Minna. Then the Lector packed up a case full of equipment, and vial after vial of serum, and New Polly locked Minna in a glass box. Then her tormentors departed that reality, leaving her behind.

  I turned and looked at the glass box behind us in the lab. Empty. Back on the screen, we saw Minna extend tendrils like vines from her fingernails to slip through cracks and escape the box, and then she opened a cavity in her own body, and drew out a tiny vial of… something. “Did she steal some serum?” Sorlyn said. “Clever, clever.”

  But Minna didn’t toss back the potion. She got to work, instead, and it became clear that she’d actually stolen some of Zax’s blood, since she used the machines to reproduce it, and then started to experiment on herself. “The Lector called her a biotech lab with feet,” I said. “He wasn’t far wrong.”

  We watched as Minna injected herself with things, and then her fingers fell off, and she grew new ones. She never seemed frustrated, just focused. “Is she… Sorlyn, she’s not trying to make serum. She’s trying to change herself, I think.”

  A day after she got out of that box, Minna settled herself down on the floor, and closed her eyes – and vanished. “The third trail,” I said. “The third trail is Minna. She changed herself to be like Zax, to travel naturally, without a potion, but also without a worm! She must have made her own body produce the same chemical the worm does!”

  “This is not good,” Toros said over the radio. “If the cult finds out, and discovers a way to reproduce that power, to scale up production…”

  “The cult isn’t anywhere near here,” Sorlyn pointed out. “We’re over a thousand worlds from our best guess about their home world.”

  “Yes,” Toros said, “but if all goes well, we’re going to bring Minna back to the Sleeperhold, and we must be careful when we do.”

  “You know,” I said, “if Minna can give herself the ability to travel like the sleepers do, maybe…”

  “Yes,” Sorlyn said. “She might be able to stop sleepers from traveling. That occurred to me, too.”

  “A cure,” Toros said.

  “What?” Durio said. “What did you say? Did you say a cure? What are we waiting for? Let’s go after her!”

  We pursued Minna, and Zax, and the Lector, and things got bad very quickly. Zax’s trail was just a blip in the first twenty or so worlds, like he landed and then took off from the same place, without taking so much as a single step in between. Later we found out that’s exactly what happened – the Lector gave Zax a cyclical sedative, so he’d sleep, travel, wake, sleep, travel, wake, over and over again, flung deeper into the multiverse. Minna’s trail and the Lector’s were indistinguishable, but it was clear she was following him in the world of ice that followed the space station.

  The next world was home to humanoid giants encrusted with lichen and vines… but their leader had a strange, high-tech crown on his craggy head, and we heard the locals talking about the Lector. Their world was the first conquest of the Collectorium, the foundation of the Moveable Empire. “He’s started his reign,” Toros said on the radio. “He conquered this world!”

  “He conquered one valley of this world for a brief interval,” Sorlyn said. “Let’s not get carried away. The Lector is a deluded megalomaniac. I don’t care how much technology he’s carrying or how smart he is – how much can he really accomplish? He’s one person.”

  One person could accomplish quite a lot, as we found in the next world, a city of topaz skyscrapers. There was a lot of new construction going on – clearly something devastating had happened to the place – and we saw more figures wearing those odd crowns. “Mind control,” Toros said. “The Lector is using force and coercion and mental domination to secure his rule.”

  “Again,” Sorlyn said, “it’s one city, and based on the level of technology, this is a world with lots of them. How long can his reign last without him here to secure it?”

  There were banners in that city, white flags with a stylized black tree of many branches. (We saw a lot more of those banners as we moved through the worlds of the Collectorium.) We flew invisibly among the towers until we reached some sort of military installation, and then we just stared. There were hundreds of new trails there, all smooth like the Lector’s. “He’s learned to make his serum at scale,” I said. “He raised an army here.”

  “He’s already done more damage to reality than the cult has managed in all its years of operation,” Toros said, horrified awe in his voice.

  “There’s a breach here,” Sorlyn said, peering at the console. “Small, just a few centimeters, and it appears to be underground, so it poses no immediate danger, at least not on this side, but… it’s there.”

  “A breach?” I said.

  “Those tears in reality we told you about,” Sorlyn explained. “Places where one world bleeds into another. Where people can get lost. Toros saw those breaches, on his homeworld, and the sleepercar can detect their presence. It’s what we’ve been worried about – enough people traveling, poking holes… making tears in the fabric of reality. This one is inside bedrock, and not big enough for much to pass through anyway, even if it’s in a more open space in the adjoining world.”

  “Still,” I said. “Can we do anything about it? To seal it up?”

  “Well,” Sorlyn began, but Toros interrupted. “We need to keep going. The Lector has to be stopped.”

  So we continued, into horror after horror. Some of the worlds appeared to be uninhabited, or at least uninhabited by thinking creatures, and the Lector and his army passed through those and left them mostly unscathed. But he left his mark on every world that was home to intelligent beings – we passed bomb sites, and rubble, and wreckage, much of it clearly fresh. The Lector wasn’t always ascendant, though. He conquered his local area, recruited new soldiers, placed a seneschal in command (always from another world, probably for sound tyrannical reasons), and then moved on with the bulk of his forces… but the worlds in his wake didn’t always stay conquered. On some, the locals had clearly taken back their homes, with the Lector’s banners torn down and shredded, the mind-controlling crowns smashed, the aliens executed. “He really thinks these worlds will remain under his heel after he leaves?” Sorlyn said.

  “He never sees evidence of failure,” I said. “He can’t go backwards, so he’ll never be disappointed. He’s like a virus, a wildfire, a natural disaster, tearing through these worlds. We have to stop him.”

  On some worlds, the fight for freedom was ongoing. We once appeared on the outskirts of a battle among humanoids with the heads of birds, slashing each other with beaks and talons and swords. In other worlds, though, especially low-tech ones, the Lector’s seneschals seemed to rule without opposition. I wanted to free the mine full of children laboring under the Lector’s banner, but Toros pointed out the hundreds of worm-trails, and said we had bigger concerns. I agreed, though I thought, Zax would have helped them.

  The less said about the cathedrals full of skeletons with gemstone eyes and hydraulic muscles the better. They were staunch loyalists of the Lector, having incorporated him into their religion, and we got out of that world quickly. The addition of those creatures – immune to pain, immune to fatigue, immune to death by dismemberment – to his army would make the Lector an even greater threat.

  We saw a world of treehouses. A basalt plain dotted with creepy pyramids. Hill forts, bombed to splinters, with dead blue people scattered everywhere. A sea full of flotsam. A burned evergreen forest. A city plaza with fountains, the buildings hung with Lector banners. Then, in a world of burning rivers, we found a poster nailed to a tree – a detailed drawing of Minna’s face, with incomprehensible alien text underneath.

  Sorlyn climbed out of the sleepercar, took the poster down, and admired it. He looked at me and grinned – I’d almost never seen him actually smile. “It’s a wanted poster,” he said. “Minna is disrupting the Lector’s operations. She’s his enemy!” He folded up the poster and tucked it into his pocket. “I like her. I really like her. Do you think… I couldn’t tell from the footage on the space station, they weren’t ever together for long, but… do you think Minna and Zax are, ah, involved?”

  That hadn’t even occurred to me. Zax and I were together! Except, of course, we’d only spent a couple of days that way, and anyway, he thought I was dead. “How should I know?” I snapped. “Let’s go.”

  Swamps, battlefields, villages. Hundreds of trails, so many it was hard to find Zax’s, the one that was a different shape than the rest. “We must be catching up,” I said. “The Lector has to spend some time on each world, subjugating it, so the end must be near, right?”

  “I hope so,” Sorlyn said. “There’s a breach here that’s big enough for a person to crawl through.”

  I looked around. “Where?”

  Sorlyn pointed at nothing, a space between two redwood trees. “You can’t see it. That’s the problem. You walk along, you step wrong, and… you’re in another world. Sometimes the breach is stable, and you can walk right back. Sometimes they oscillate, open and close, or they only open one way, and…” He shrugged. “This area seems fairly remote, at least. But as the Lector’s army gets bigger, the breaches will only get worse. Once there are enough of them, the worlds will begin to collapse in on themselves. Or so the theory goes.”

  “Let’s try to avoid seeing it in practice.” We set off again.

  After all that pursuit, I wanted there to be a big, violent climax. I wanted to find Zax, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder beside him, and fight against the Lector’s army. I wanted to set the Lector on fire the way I had Polly. (I know; I am a fundamentally more vengeful and bloodthirsty person than Zax, but sometimes that’s the kind of person you need. Though it’s good to have Zax’s tempering influence. He was always there in my mind, seeing the best in everyone, and wanting the best for them, too.)

  Instead of taking part in the last battle, we arrived after the battle was done. The world of Zax’s last stand was a rocky, mountainous place, all broken rocks and stunted trees under a steel gray sky. Our chariots appeared near a small crater, and everywhere around us were the signs of battle, including a much larger crater in a valley, ringed by bits of metal debris. There was a campsite, too, and the Lector’s army was here, or at least, most of them were – blue-furred humanoid creatures, giants, bird-headed people, robots, and more… but no sign of New Polly, or of the Lector.

  “I’ll go listen in on the troops,” Sorlyn said, but I stopped him.

  “Your little invisibility trick doesn’t work on machines, and there are a lot of robots down there. I’ll go in the shimmersuit.”

  Sorlyn still hated sending me into danger alone, but he nodded.

  I stealthed myself, and crept into the Lector’s camp. It was impressive, not canvas tents or prefab forts like the Sleeper outposts I’d heard about, but sturdy stone buildings – some were assembling themselves as I watched, invisible compilers turning the local matter into more useful forms. I moved slowly toward the biggest structure, hung with the Lector’s banner, and peered through the door.

  “–telling you, he’s gone, Delatree took him!” A woman with the head of a crow was arguing with a blue-furred man. “The Lector traveled while he was awake. His brain will be a cinder by now.”

  “If anyone can withstand the truths of the void–” the blue person said.

  She cawed derisively. “Yes, fine, let’s say he can survive it – I saw what happened to the people the Lector experimented on, the ones he sent through while they were conscious, and I don’t think anyone could stand it, but maybe you’re right. Let’s say the Lector is fine, of sound mind, and defeated Delatree wherever they ended up. So what? We can’t get to him. The Lector’s personal guard is in pursuit, but the rest of us are stuck here, without serum! Our glorious leader’s portable laboratory is keyed to his biometrics, and if we tamper with it, the case will release poison gas and then incinerate the contents. Damn his paranoia. We’re trapped here, don’t you see?”

  “The – the Lector will come back for us,” the blue person said. “He’s working on the problem, he always says, he’ll find a way to backtrack and return to the worlds he’s already won, it’s just a matter of–”

  “Shut. Up.” The crow-headed woman stared down at the ground for a long moment, then looked back at the blue person. “Organize a foraging party. We need to find out if there’s anything to eat in this accursed place, because it’s where we’re going to spend the rest of our days.”

  I’d heard enough. I returned to the sleepercar and reported. “They say Zax traveled, and took the Lector… while the Lector was awake.”

  “Perhaps we can save him,” Toros said over the radio. “Repair his mind. But… well. I thought we should try to recruit him. Having seen the damage he’s done, though…”

  “Maybe it’s better if we don’t?” I said.

  “There is such a thing as too much mercy,” Sorlyn said.

  “What about the serum?” Toros said. “Is there a supply here?”

  “The army says no, or anyway, not any they can access. The Lector was paranoid, and controlled the supply – I guess he didn’t want anyone else setting themselves up as a rival multiverse emperor. His people are stranded here.”

  “In this desolate place?” Toros said. “At least they can’t do harm to anyone but each other.”

  Sorlyn put his hand on my shoulder from the back seat. “Let’s go pick up Zax, shall we?”

  Reaching Zax took a few worlds. We saw some of the Lector’s people stumbling around in confusion here and there, but just a handful – that personal guard I’d heard about. “The Lector isn’t here,” Sorlyn said. “Zax must have held on to him, and traveled again.”

  I tried to imagine experiencing that eternity in the void between worlds, not just once, but twice, three times, more… I wasn’t sure even the Lector deserved that.

  When we got to the world with the waterfall, we paused, and got out of the sleepercars, and stood on the cliff. The cataract was too thunderously loud for us to hear one another speak, but that was fine. What we saw spoke for itself.