“Oh, same to you, sneaky one.”

  Minna’s fundamental gift is adaptation – she can study life, examine its attributes, and alter herself as necessary. I knew Sorlyn had some natural psychic camouflage, and now, Minna had it, too. I rushed to her, picked her up, and spun her around, hugging her close, while she giggled in my ear. “I was afraid I’d never see you again. I should have known you’d find a way. You always do.” I set her down and frowned. “Why are you sneaking around?”

  “Toros wants to murder all the wormy people and blow up their home,” Minna said. “Ana and Sorlyn and me and Vicki thought there must be a better way, so we all sort of… ran off on our own… and we don’t think Toros would be happy to see us again.”

  “To clarify,” Vicki said, “I was fine with exterminating the malevolent cultists bent on destroying reality. I did, however, agree there might be tactically sound approaches that involved… less murder… and offered to help explore them.”

  “We saw you on the First World, Zax,” Minna said. “I was going to rescue you, but then you rescued yourself, and Toros rescued you the rest of the way, so I just followed you back here. It took me a little while to sneak all the way in – people don’t usually see me, except robot people, but cameras can, and Vicki has been tricking the mechanical eyes as we go.”

  I frowned. “How did you even get here? Toros has that whole weird coliseum airlock thing to trap travelers.”

  “Oh, just a simple tweak of the safety control parameters,” Vicki said. “You know how the sleepercars have failsafes to stop them from appearing in places that are too small for them to fit, even if that’s the natural entry point to a new world for travelers?”

  “I do now,” I said.

  “Ah. Well, yes, if the entry area is too small, the chariot appears in the nearest possible location that has sufficient space. I simply extended our sleepercar’s safe distance allowance to a kilometer in every direction. As a result, we couldn’t appear in this facility at all, and so we entered this world high in the air above the camp. We used the same technique to avoid the autocannons and sentries in the First World and the surrounding cultist outposts–”

  Minna said, “Maybe all that later. Leaving now?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Zax – we’ve been working with Ana. Will you come with us, and join her?”

  That sounded good to me. I looked at Zaveta. “Are you ready to travel?”

  “I have never felt more rested.” She swung her legs out of bed, and picked up her pack and her cudgel from the corner. “There. Do I need to hit anything on the way out?”

  “We’ll keep the option open,” I said.

  Vicki could interface remotely with just about any kind of technology, and guided us out along a circuitous route to avoid people. The ranks of the Sleepers had thinned out in the attack, and were spread even more thin now, so it wasn’t difficult to pass unnoticed. Most of the defenses were automated, and Vicki sorted those out. The Sleepers had access to high-tech gear, but Vicki was on a whole other level.

  We made it to a corridor that led to a side gate, where one of Toros’s cousins stood, looking out a barred window, his back to us. Zaveta gripped her cudgel, but I touched her arm.

  The guard put a finger to his ear, then turned and loped off down another passageway. “I spoofed an emergency call into his earpiece,” Vicki said. “But we should leave quickly, because once he realizes there’s no emergency, this place will go on alert.”

  We opened the door – thank goodness for electronic locks; a big padlock would have caused us more trouble – and escaped the facility. The terrain was rolling hills spotted with reddish grass, so the whole moon looked blood-spattered. There was no cover or concealment anywhere in sight, so creeping along was pointless – we sprinted instead, in the direction Minna indicated.

  An alarm started wailing, and I looked back to see small hovering objects rise up from the walls and fly toward us.

  “Drones,” Zaveta said. “I hate drones.”

  “Vicki, can you handle those?”

  “I can,” Vicki said. “But their weapons systems aren’t even online, so they pose no danger.”

  One of the drones buzzed toward us, and an amplified voice emerged: Toros. “Zax, Minna, what are you doing?”

  “The best we can!” I shouted, and then Minna’s sleepercar shimmered into view, uncloaked. We scrambled inside, Minna quickly donning the diadem, and the dome closed. The drone hovered just outside, and though I know it’s just some sort of psychological projection, I swear the machine looked confused, dispirited… even betrayed.

  The dome went black, and we left that world for the space between.

  “Vicki,” I said. “Ana’s really OK?”

  “She was the last time we saw her, which was just this morning, so I assume so, though I cannot say for sure.”

  “What have you all been doing?”

  “Toros wants to detonate a special sort of bomb in the First World,” Vicki said.

  “Oh, yes. He told me.”

  “It was a tactically sound idea when Toros conceived it, and remains so, even now that we have a greater understanding of the nature of the cult. We can’t possibly fight the Prisoner. We can’t even reach the place where the Prisoner actually lives in order to fight it, because being conscious in that void is detrimental to sanity. We can only repair the cracks in the monster’s prison. In theory, this bomb would seal the breaches, isolating the First World, and cutting off the Prisoner from the worlds beyond. The drawback, of course, is the death of some unknown number of cultists in the process.”

  “That’s a big drawback, Vicki.”

  “They knew what they were getting into,” Zaveta said from the back seat. “When you declare war on everything, you have to be prepared for everything to fight back.”

  “I tend to concur,” Vicki said.

  “I like you, magic ring,” Zaveta said.

  “The cultists were tricked,” I said. “Raised by parents who were tricked. Those cultists were indoctrinated from childhood with the idea that no one else in the universe, in all the universes, is even real. I’m not saying none of this is their fault – individuals still made choices – but there are mitigating circumstances, and those have to be taken into account before we just execute them all!”

  “Ana felt the same way,” Vicki said. “Or, to be more accurate… she said she knew you would feel that way. When she isn’t sure whether some choice is right or not, she asks herself – would Zax do it?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Vicki, I screw things up all the time, in all sorts of ways.”

  “Arguable, but even if true, you always mean well, and think through the reasons for your actions,” Vicki said. “Ana knew you wouldn’t consent to killing the cultists, so she decided she shouldn’t, either. So she convinced Sorlyn to try something else.”

  “What?”

  “Resettlement,” Vicki said. “Speaking of, Ana asked us to pick a straggler up on our way…”

  We appeared above an array of immense, rusting radio telescopes. Houses had been built inside the immense dishes, but they all looked abandoned. The ground far below was moving, a series of irregular dark ripples. “Is that an ocean down there?”

  “Bugs,” Vicki said. “Some sort of flesh-eating beetle, we think. That layer of scuttling life down there is approximately a meter deep. The infestation drove the people of this world to climb high – the beetles have some aversion to metal, so they don’t follow them that far. It’s unclear to me how such huge swarms survive at this point, since surely they’ve run out of food by now.”

  “They eat each other,” Minna said, waking up in the back.

  “Yes, but you can’t do that forever.”

  “I think there used to be many more of them,” Minna said. “Perhaps someday the people can have this world again.”

  “The only people we’ve seen here are cultists,” Vicki said. “There were seven of them in this outpost, but one was apparently out foraging when we came before – there are ropeways that lead from dish to dish, and the cultists forage in the houses for supplies.”

  “His mother was so upset,” Minna said. “We had to promise we’d come back for him.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You’ll see.”

  Still stealthed, we landed on the edge of one of the dishes, where a lonely campfire burned. Minna slipped out, doing her fade-from-view thing. Zaveta and I sat, looking out the dome, as she disappeared into a small hut.

  A moment later, she came out, carrying a young man over one shoulder. Minna has always been a lot stronger than she looks – she was bioengineered to be farm labor before she was trained to be a master grafter. “No trouble at all,” she said cheerfully when she got close. “It was much harder to get six of them at once! We had to help Ana catch them and put them in the shuttle. Before I joined her, she had to be very sneaky and take one or two at a time.”

  “You are collecting the cultists from their outposts?” Zaveta said. “And doing what with them? Imprisoning them?”

  “It is not a prison!” Minna said. “It is really very nice. We call it the Wormwood. Help me, Zax?”

  We got the unconscious cultist settled in the front seat beside me, and then Minna reattached her diadem and slumped back in the seat.

  “The intent is certainly the same as taking them to prison,” Vicki said. “But we like to think we’re taking them to paradise. Or, at least, the closest approximation within half a day’s interdimensional travel.”

  “It’s just like what we do on the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies,” I said “When we have people who can’t or won’t be rehabilitated, we put them in a pleasant place to live out their days. This was Ana’s idea?”

  “And Sorlyn’s, yes. He knew just the right world. The cultists infected with the worm are already off in the multiverse, so we can’t do anything about them at the moment. These cultists on outposts can’t travel, though – they were transported as companions, and left in place. That sort of cultist stays where you put them. Since Toros was kind enough to disable the Trypophile’s chariot, there’s no danger of these being brought back to cause trouble.”

  “But the whole cult,” I said. “Can you really resettle them all?”

  “We’ve questioned them, and though some certainly lied, as best we can tell, their numbers simply aren’t that great – perhaps a hundred and fifty in all remain uninfected by the worm, including those on the outpost worlds. We’ve repatriated almost that many already.”

  “Once they’re all gone, and the First World is unpopulated… the bomb.” I whistled. “That works. Surely Toros can see the sense of doing it this way. If we talked to him about your plan–”

  “Toros is… not entirely rational on this subject,” Vicki said. “He is intolerant of delay, and though he would not admit it, I think he is also motivated by a desire for revenge against the cult.”

  “I see his point,” Zaveta said. “I also dislike delay and enjoy the revenge. Why are we wasting time clearing the outposts, if the bomb will only destroy the First World?”

  “Three reasons,” Vicki said. “First, because getting past the outposts is difficult, when they’re fully staffed – they have equipment that can detect the sleepercars, provided by their spies in the Sleeperhold. Ana had to land far away, creep in wearing her shimmersuit, and take them one at a time, to weaken their defenses. Second, because when the resettlement effort began, Ana and Sorlyn didn’t know which place was the cult’s homeworld. It took a while to narrow down the options definitively, and before that, every outpost was potentially the cult’s lair. And third–”

  “Because it’s nicer to keep them together,” I said. “They’re a family, of sorts, and a community, and it would be cruel to separate them. They have a better chance of healing if they’re not alone.”

  “That was Ana’s reasoning, yes,” Vicki said. “I myself think they’ll simply self-reinforce their delusional worldview, but, on their new garden homeworld, they won’t be able to do anything about it. We made sure none of them have worms on hand. No sacrament means no missionaries, no proselytization, and no bad works. Let them believe whatever they want, if they don’t hurt anyone else in the process.”

  We landed on the next world, and Minna jolted upright. “Oh no, oh no, I had a dream, but not a dream, I saw a person, he looked like the overseer from the Farm but he sounded like… he sounded like you, Zax.”

  “That was the Prisoner,” Zaveta said.

  “The god of the cult?” Vicki said. “We’ve heard that it speaks sometimes to those in the void… What did it say, Minna?”

  Minna looked at me, wide-eyed. “It said if we don’t come to the volcano, and pledge ourselves to the Prisoner’s service… it will kill Sorlyn.”

  “That’s where Sorlyn ended up?” Vicki said.

  “I think I missed something,” I said.

  Ana

  I’ve almost caught up to the point where I started this account. There’s just a little more sad stuff between there and here, and I might as well get that down, too.

  Sorlyn and I brought the shuttle back to the Sleeperhold the day after the attack, stealthed, and watched for a while to make sure the cult wasn’t still lurking. They’d all either fallen in battle or slept their way onward to the next world. I went to the cottage first, on the off-chance that I’d find some sign of Zax, but he was gone.

  I did pick up his journal, though, and took it with me. His most prized possession. I knew he’d want it back, when I found him, and I was going to find him. I can see why he loves this journal so much. I’ve been writing in it myself, all this time, and it’s been a great comfort to me, in the empty space between worlds, with only an unconscious cultist and my memories for company.

  Sorlyn and I made our way to the center of the camp, and found Toros, Winsome, and Colubra sifting through the wreckage of the lodge. We joined them, embraces all around (except Colubra, who isn’t the hugging type). “I’m so glad you two made it out,” Toros said. He looked ten years older, face haggard, hair dirty and even messier than usual. “The cult caught us completely unprepared. Scores were killed, many more grievously injured. So many of my cousins…” He bowed his head. “I suppose we must have posed a real threat to the cult, if they went to this much trouble to hurt us.” His laugh was a scattered, broken thing. “I don’t know how they broke through our defenses.”

  “The Pilgrim,” I said. “He betrayed us.”

  Toros nodded, like that didn’t surprise him; like nothing could.

  “Our Zax does have uneven taste in companions,” Winsome said.

  “It’s because he sees the best in everyone,” I said.

  “The Pilgrim did ask me an awful lot of questions about gods I’d heard of, and about the cult,” Toros said. “I assumed that, as a religious person, he would consider the Cult of the Worm heretics. I didn’t realize he was thinking of joining them. He knew everything about our defenses.” Toros sat down in the rubble and put his face in his hands. “I only wanted to save the rest of the worlds from the fate of my own.”

  Sorlyn had told me Toros’s history, and why he’d formed the Sleepers – the devastation of his world by breaches in space-time, and the ruination caused by the bombs used to seal those breaches. Now, after listening in on the cult for so long and interrogating our captives, I know the Prisoner caused those cracks in the world, with all his endless pounding on the walls universe. “It’s not too late,” I said. “We can rebuild–”

  “I don’t think so,” Toros said. “In fact… I think now is the time to strike back hardest, when the cult believes we’re at our weakest.”

  I frowned. “Strike back how?”

  “Many of the outposts still stand,” Toros said. “All those missions I set in motion before I joined you in the search for Zax and the Lector have begun to bear fruit. We’ve narrowed down the homeworld of the cult – there are only a few possibilities, now. I say we gather our survivors, arm them heavily, and storm each choice in turn. Now that you’ve brought back the shuttle, we can descend in numbers, with heavy armament. Once we definitively identify their homeworld… we set off our breach-bomb.”

  “The what bomb?” I asked. It was the first I’d heard of the weapon, and when Toros and Sorlyn explained what it could do – what much smaller versions had done, on Toros’s homeworld – I was both intrigued and horrified. “Ignite the atmosphere? With all those people there?”

  “Not people,” Toros snapped. “Cultists. Murderers. They slaughtered our family, here, last night! We have to hit back, when they think we’re still reeling. Sorlyn, load the shuttle with our best weapons. I’m going to gather the survivors. We’ll head for the outposts soon. We will raise an army.” He stomped off, Winsome and Colubra following at his heels.

  I looked at Sorlyn. He looked at me. “Well,” I said. “Are you going to do that? A last-ditch, desperate assault, where the best outcome makes us into mass murderers?”

  “I am open to alternative suggestions,” he said.

  “I think I know what Zax would do,” I said.

  So we stole the shuttle. Without that, Toros couldn’t deploy his bomb – it was too big for a traveler to carry. First we hit a known cult outpost on a world where trees grew upsidedown from a cavern ceiling and the floor is covered in thick fog. We crept in, me in a shimmersuit and Sorlyn with his natural camouflage, and waited for a cultist to emerge from their crude wooden fort. We tranquilized him and stuck him in the back of the shuttle.

  It took hours, but we got all five of the cultists there. The last one was pretty freaked out, wandering around, calling for her siblings; they were a family unit. A lot of the outposts were like that, it turns out. Once we had the cultists all bundled away, we traveled to a garden world twenty-four jumps away. Sorlyn had noted that world on an earlier survey. There were no other worm-trails there, and it had seemingly never been visited by the cult.

  Their new home had lush trees with edible fruit; ample water; lots of fish; fat, slow-moving birds; and, in that region at least, an absurdly temperate climate. The only predators we identified were rat-sized egg thieves. The day-night cycle was comfortable, and the skies were beautiful and full of stars. “Sorlyn,” I said, “why are we giving the cult this world? I want to live here.”