I crouched and scuttled, keeping my eye out for soldiers, but whatever battle had happened here had moved on. I didn’t hear any gunshots or artillery or explosions, or running feet or angry voices, so I gradually relaxed. I was wearing my round-rimmed spectacles with the special lenses, and, through them, I could see the silvery streak of the dead cultist’s worm-trail just below my eye-level, stretching off into the distance. I had some walking to do. I might as well do some looting along the way.

  A black and silver flag full of bullet holes hung limply from a rod over the smashed-in window of a general store. The front door was four meters high, and as I looked around, I realized everything here seemed about double my own human scale. I climbed into the window, being careful of the glass, and rooted around, putting a few oversized cans of food and pouches of dried meat (you learn not to wonder what kind, after a while) into my canvas pack. The clothing definitely suggested humanoid creatures, albeit of immense size – maybe they’d evolved from Gigantopithecus or something. I’d seen stranger things. I looked wistfully at a rack of shoes, since my boots were coming apart, but even the smallest options were far too large.

  I climbed back out the window and followed the worm-trail. The Sleepers estimate that every branch of the multiverse is directly adjacent to at least three or four other branches, and sometimes more. It’s like standing in a room, surrounded by a lot of doors, and each door leads to a room with a new set of doors, and so on. Why you end up in one particular world over another, if you aren’t following an existing fissure, is less clear. Is the destination entirely random? Does it depend on where, geographically, we go to sleep in the prior world? For that matter, why do we wake up in a specific place on any given world – in a public square, say, instead of an empty lot on the other side of town, or an empty desert on the other side of the planet?

  Some sleepers think we can guide our destinations subconsciously – by wishing desperately to reach a city, we increase our chance of traveling to a developed world, if such a world is one of the available options. The theory seems impossible to prove, but it does makes me feel better sometimes.

  There may be many more than three or four adjacent worlds, of course – there could be tens, dozens, hundreds, thousands. Those other worlds just aren’t capable of sustaining the life of a conscious entity, so they’re closed off to us. Toros thinks many, maybe most, of the worlds in the multiverse are bereft of life, or built on fundamental laws of physics inimical to biology. I get dizzy imagining the vastness, so I try to focus on the immediate.

  I tracked the worm-trail out of town, along a paved road with fields on each side. I was always looking for evidence of my quarry’s passage, hoping they’d left some evidence about their motives or their people. So far all I’d found was the occasional food wrapper from a different reality or the remains of a campfire. No grimoires bound in human skin or scrawled manifestos about annihilating reality or audio recordings of maniacal laugher.

  There were no birds, no vehicles, and no people along the road, but off in the distance I saw columns of smoke, and once a fire tornado, fortunately moving away from me. Eventually the trail veered off toward a residential subdivision, and the devastation there was vast – houses (all twice-human-scale) broken into pieces, burned, with great jagged holes in their roofs. Massive vehicles were overturned and smoldering in the street. More flags full of bullet-holes dangled limply. There were no people at all, though some might have been hiding in the shells of their homes, I supposed. No corpses, either, which was strange – had the people escaped? Evacuated? Been taken prisoner? Was that ash raining from the sky the remnants of the local population, disintegrated by some kind of energy weapon? I was curious, but I had to accept the fact that I would likely never know. Mysteries are just part of my condition.

  I followed the worm-trail into a two-story house, one side caved in, the other mostly intact. The track went through the front door, looped into the kitchen (someone had been foraging), and then disappeared upstairs. I climbed the stairs and followed that silvery thread to its endpoint in a child’s room, though the child was probably my size or larger, based on the dimensions of the furniture. I also found this journal, which is a good size for me. The pen is a bit unwieldy, like the fat pencils I used in crèche school as a child, but I can manage until I find something more suited to my stature. The worm-trail ended in mid-air over the bed, and there was a smudge of red clay on the blanket – the traveler had appeared right there.

  Normally when I find the termination of a trail, I close my eyes and follow it, moving on to the next world. I’ve been doing that ever since I picked up this thread, two weeks after the fall of Sleeperhold, making good time, and not even thinking about keeping a journal. So why did I pick up that dead (or missing, or who knows what) child’s pen and start writing again? Why was it suddenly so important to pause my hunt to stop and reflect?

  Because there was another trail in the room, originating just a couple of meters from the first one. That trail didn’t go down the stairs, but out of the window. I peered out and found a trellis there, easily suitable for climbing, and based on the trajectory of the track, the other traveler had done just that, and then proceeded into the woods, where I lost sight of their trail among the trees.

  Two sleepers had come through here – and not with one sleeping in the other’s arms, because passive companions don’t leave worm-trails. Were they two cultists, traveling together? If so, why had they split up? Were they going in different directions to increase the likelihood of transitioning to different worlds, off on different missions, or what?

  I started writing this to organize my thoughts. Because now I have a choice. I can keep backtracking that dead cultist… or I can switch tactics, and follow the other worm-trail into the woods, and try to chase down a cultist who might still be alive. That corpse I found and started following backward in the first place was fresh, and may have been in this world as recently as a week ago. If he arrived at the same time as this other traveler, I could catch up to them, if I move fast. But then what? Try to get answers out of them, sure, but the lack of a common language isn’t the only barrier to gathering intelligence. The cultists captured by the Sleepers fight and bite and spit and try to knock themselves unconscious so they can escape – being able to talk to them doesn’t mean they’ll be willing to talk back.

  I am good at talking to people, though. Maybe I could pretend I want to join the cult, and get their sales pitch in return. It would be nice to know why they do such awful things – infecting innocent people, flinging them into the multiverse, trying to damage reality. The cultists can’t go back home, either, as far as we can tell, so they leave their world and people behind when they set out on their missions. There must be a good reason. Or at least a terrible reason they find compelling.

  But if I stop tracing this cultist back, I lose my best chance to find their homeworld. Even if I catch this other traveler, and they tell me their entire philosophy, what can I do with that information? I wouldn’t be able to follow his trail back to this point, because there’s no returning to a world I’ve visited before. The doors of sleep only open one way, unless you have access to a sleepercar. What are my odds of finding one of those?

  Basically zero. I’d have to hunt around and hope I found some other cultist who’d come a different way, and follow their trail backward, if I want even the tiniest sliver of a chance of reuniting with Ana and the others. Finding another trail is probably possible – the local array of worlds clearly sees a lot of cult activity – but the search would set me back. Still. I’m supposed to be gathering information. Isn’t tracking a living cultist worth the risk, if it lets me figure out the true nature of the threat against the multiverse?

  Ugh. Sometimes doing the right thing is the worst.

  Ana

  Zax let me read his journal during our long trip to the Sleeperhold, and it filled me in on everything that happened after we got separated (the first time), so I thought I’d start keeping an account of my own. I’ll write down my own story first, I think. I never got to tell Zax everything about my long journey from the silent city to the weird mead hall where we finally reunited, over a thousand worlds later. I was too busy telling him about the cult… and kissing him… and other things. If I put it down here, maybe Zax can read it someday. I’m choosing to be hopeful about that possibility right now. Writing will help fill all the blank time between worlds, and those long hours spent hidden away in stealth, waiting for the woman with the lotus pod face, the low priest, the Trypophile, to pass my way again.

  Plus, there are things it’s easier to say in writing than it is to say in person, especially when those things might cause a person you care about to look at you in a different way.

  I’ll start with a happy memory, though: the day I met Zax.

  I was working in my backyard one sunny summer morning, the domelight shimmering in that crystalline way it had at my latitude of the innermost sphere. I’m an artist, and back then my medium was large-scale kinetic sculptures, which usually ended up installed in public spaces in far-flung corners of the Realm: beautifying the hinterlands. I can admit that I was third-tier, as an artist – not one of the superstars, with a name familiar even to people who don’t follow the art world, or one of the geniuses admired by aficionados, but even the next level is pretty good. I had a solid reputation, worked steadily, enjoyed the devotion of a few influential admirers, and picked up the occasional award from my peers. I was young, too, in my early twenties, and though I wasn’t a Realm-shaking prodigy, I was “an artist to watch”, and felt confident my best work was ahead of me.

  The day I met Zax I was out in my yard-slash-studio, assembling a floating sculpture of polished metal and glass. The pieces were bound together by force-fields, and could contract into a seamless-looking mirror-bright sphere, and then expand into a glittering, rotating array of shards, catching and reflecting the light in a precise way to create a dazzling, otherworldly effect. There were also hidden cameras, and some of the shards were mirrors and screens, so I could choose to make them “reflect” images from the other side of the sphere, or even display entirely different images, which would lead to a subtle, disorienting effect for the viewer. That was the idea, anyway. I never got to actually deploy the sculpture for an audience, so I don’t know how well it would have worked.

  I wore a visor that projected a wire-frame overlay of my sketched-out design onto the air, and had fingertip controls that let me guide the hummingbird-sized drones who were assembling the various elements. I was deep into flow, lost in the intricacies of assembly, and then–

  A man appeared on my lawn, just a meter away from me. He was just – there, suddenly, on a previously empty patch of smartgrass. I’d never seen anything like that happen in real life, that kind of materialization, though it was almost familiar from special effects in sims about magic or hypothetical tech. It couldn’t really be happening, though – there was no actual device in the Realm that could… what? Teleport someone?

  I was frightened, at first, and then realized I was controlling a swarm of drones with force-field manipulators and an array of shards of rather sharp metal and glass. Then I was less frightened. Anyway, the newcomer didn’t look like much of a threat. For one thing, he was asleep. He wore ragged clothes and had a scraggly beard, and his hair was long and unkempt… but he was beautiful, too, with dew shining in his eyelashes, and he looked so peaceful and beatific. Then his eyes blinked open, and widened, and he rolled away, putting distance between us. “I am sorry, I will not hurt you, I am just…” He slumped, making himself small, and muttered, “What is the point, they never comprehend, and she is so comely, she must think me a ragamuffin and a fool–”

  “I understand you,” I interrupted. “I just don’t understand how you got here.”

  He stared at me for a long moment – his eyes were lovely, the sort of gaze you can disappear into – and then he laughed, a joyful sound, and leapt to his feet. “You speak the tongue of the Realm!”

  “I know Realmspeech, yes. Doesn’t everyone?” Though his words sounded quite formal to me, like someone in an historical sim.

  “Not at all. Not at all!” He whooped, and spun, startling my drones into autonomous flinch reactions. “I have returned, I am here, I am home once more in the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies?”

  “The Realm of what and what?” I said, bewildered.

  He cocked his head. “Oh. It is… no? That is not where I am?”

  “Never heard of it,” I said.

  He bowed his head, his shoulders slumped, and then looked up at me, a bright and charming smile slowly spreading across his face. “It is no matter. This is closer than I have been to something like home since my tribulations began. My name is Zax. What is yours?”

  “My name is ‘how did you magically appear on my lawn, you weirdo?’”

  “That is a tale to tell.” Then he sat down cross-legged on the smartgrass, gazing past me at the gleaming spires of the innermost sphere, and told me everything.

  By the end, I was sitting across from him, our knees touching. I was totally rapt, and he wasn’t looking past me, but into me. I heard about the thirty-nine alien worlds he’d visited before mine, and I didn’t doubt him. Partly because I’d seen him appear, sleeping, in my yard, and as evidence, that was hard to dismiss… but mostly because he just radiated trustworthiness and a lack of guile, and because he was so obviously transported with joy at having someone he could talk to. This was clearly a man who’d wandered in the wilderness – in various wildernesses – and there was no mistaking his delight at connecting with someone again. Understand, this was before Zax received the linguistic virus, so I was the first person he was able to hold a conversation with since he’d started traveling. I have no doubt that’s a big part of why he fell in love with me: he was desperate for connection, and connection was possible with me.

  And connect we did. I’ve always had an adventurous spirit, you might say – artists should be open to new experiences – but this was more than just the novelty of hooking up with an interdimensional traveler. Something in him called to something in me, and vice-versa. That’s the way it is, sometimes. If you’ve felt it, you know. An hour after his arrival, we were in the shower, and not long after that we were in bed, and not long after that, we were lamenting our tragic and inevitable parting and I was configuring my chem-printer to produce the most powerful legal stimulants to prolong our time together. I don’t mind admitting… I got a little caught up.

  It’s easy to see why Zax was drawn to me. We could talk, of course. Plus, I grew up in a world a lot like his, strikingly similar, in fact – he hailed from the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies, and I lived in the Realm of the Known and the Found. Both were human civilizations, both technologically advanced, with inhabitants spread throughout our home systems; our planets even had the same names in most cases. We both came from societies that are (I realize in retrospect) a bit culturally imperialistic. How was it our worlds were so similar? We don’t know. We don’t know how the multiverse works at all – whether there was some prime universe that all the other branches sprang from, or if universes grow wild, and our similarities were just the sort of coincidences that happen occasionally when you have infinite options. Our languages had a common root, obviously, and we could understand each other right away, though like I said, he sounded a bit archaic, and he thought I used a lot of unintelligible slang. When you’ve been in hostile alien worlds alone for a month, of course you’re going to become attached to the first person who seems remotely familiar.

  But how to explain why I fell in love with Zax? I had multiple simultaneous relationships, as was common in the Realm, mostly with other artists, all with varying levels of intensity, though nothing serious enough to lead to cohabitation. Those entanglements were mixes of lust, admiration, respect, mutual interest, and compatible philosophies. What I felt for Zax was different. He just… lit something up inside me. He gave me love-story feelings, when I’d thought those were just things that happened in stories. At the time, I just embraced the thrill – I was a big believer in seizing opportunities – but I can look back and understand my own reactions a bit better now.

  Think about it: I watched Zax appear from nothing in my own backyard. He was a sojourner through alternate worlds. He was a miracle… and I was a romantic. Two people, finding each other, out of all the worlds in the multiverse? How impossibly unlikely, how astonishingly lucky, how dramatic was that? I was just swept up in it all.

  Ugh. This is coming out wrong. I want to acknowledge the superficial factors that made us reach for each other, but at the same time, I don’t want to minimize what we had. There was undeniably chemistry between us: we had our first kiss less than an hour after we met, and we barely stopped kissing (among other things) for the next two days. And Zax is a good person, one of the best people I’ve ever met, and I could sense that from the very beginning. (I’m not as good, and not as nice, but we’ll get to that.) That infatuation might have developed into a mature sense of love, a real partnership… if we’d had time. But we didn’t. We had until he next fell asleep, and we loved each other with everything we had, with the knowledge of that ticking clock. It’s easy to love without thought of consequences when you’re pretty sure there won’t be any consequences.

  I tried to tell myself, in the years after we met, that he didn’t really love me. That I didn’t really love him. And that if we ever found each other again, neither of us should expect too much.

  “I have to go,” Zax finally said, his face cracking into a yawn. “I want to stay, but… I’m slipping.” He’d picked up some of my speech patterns, so he sounded less like an old-timey professor. I’d made him cup after cup of tea laced with stimulants, but he didn’t have any augmentations then, or even much in the way of mental training, to stay awake for more than a couple of days. His eyelids fluttered, and I pulled him close to me. We were in my bed, just me, and him, and his supplies: I’d gifted him a canvas bag and filled it with food and water and other odds and ends to help him wherever he ended up.