We flew the cultists fifty kilometers from our entry point. We didn’t want them carving spears and lying in ambush for our next visit. We stretched their sleeping forms out on the ground next to a pile of supplies we’d brought from their outpost, and headed back out again.

  It took about a full Sleeper-standard day, round trip, to go from an outpost world to the paradise we’d started calling Wormwood and back again. It was slow work, since capturing them wasn’t easy and, at some point, word got around that something was happening – they were more cautious, and on alert, and there were automated defenses at the better-appointed outposts. Sorlyn tweaked the chariot, something about adjusting the failsafes, so it could appear a kilometer or two away from the natural entry point, and that kept us from getting shredded by autocannons. At the time we were baffled about how they knew to be on the lookout for us. Who’d told them? Still, we were sneaky, the most experienced agents the Sleeperhold had, and good at what we did. The work slowed, but we didn’t stop. Sorlyn was tireless and never lost his temper, no matter how cranky and tired I got.

  Oh, Sorlyn. We were such a good team.

  It took ages, but we cleared out a lot of cult outposts, and even managed to get some answers to our questions. The missionaries we’d encountered before were zealots who’d never talk willingly, but the ones left behind could be more pliable. They told us about other outposts, though none of them were experienced multiversal travelers, so we still couldn’t definitively pinpoint the First World – being told it was “four sleeps” from one place or “six sleeps” from another helped, but none of it was definitive, since every world could lead to three or four others. We were narrowing it down, even without access to the intelligence Toros had gathered.

  I lost Sorlyn on a cult outpost situated in the midst of a reeking swamp, all bugs and predatory reptiles. Their base was built on one of the only solid patches of ground in the area. The site was very hard to sneak up to, but we did our best.

  For once, our best wasn’t enough. The cult had better tech than usual, maybe thermal imaging, and they saw Sorlyn coming. A bunch of cultists boiled up out of the swampy water, wearing breathing apparatuses, and grabbed him, dragging him to their solid island. There were so many cultists, more than I could take out, even with my staff loaded with tranquilizer darts. They seemed intent on capture, not killing, so I decided to hang back and wait for my moment.

  That was the second time I saw the Trypophile. She strolled out of the hut, carrying a gnarled wooden walking stick, wearing that horrible wasp’s nest mask of hers, and prodded Sorlyn with her boot. “The Prisoner told me about you. That you’d been creeping from world to world, taking my people away. He told me where you took them, too. There’s nowhere you can go that he can’t watch, figment. I’m going to steal that shuttle of yours and bring them all home again. You’ve done nothing but waste your time. You should have killed them instead.” She raised her voice. “Come out! I know there’s another one of you out there, to pilot the shuttle! I’ll kill this one if you don’t–”

  Sorlyn vanished. He’d taken Minna’s neurological upgrade, and could travel at will. The Trypophile cursed and pointed to one of the cultists. “You! Go after him!”

  “I’ll get a sedative–”

  “Now!” She struck him on the head with her walking stick.

  He fell, but he didn’t disappear – she’d hit him too hard, and instead of knocking him out, she’d killed him.

  Even she seemed aghast, and there was a lot of commotion among the cultists, but finally she singled out another and said, “Take a sedative, go after the Sleeper, I’ll be along to pick you up later!”

  He ran inside the fort. “Should I go with him?” another cultist said. “This Sorlyn is formidable–”

  “Then who would power the shuttle, fool? You and my driver are the only travelers left here! No, you and Skrayling go out, find the shuttle, kill the driver, and then pursue Sorlyn.”

  “If the shuttle is in stealth mode, Trypophile, how can we–”

  She shook the staff at him. “There are only about a dozen places in this filthy swamp where you can even stand up without sinking! The shuttle is huge, it has to be parked somewhere! Hurry, before the pilot can move it!”

  He scuttled off, grabbed a cultist I assume was Skrayling, and they ventured into the swamp… unfortunately heading in exactly the right direction.

  I hurried back to the shuttle, considering my options. I didn’t have a lot. I had to move cautiously, since even invisible I still left a wake in the water when I waded or swam. I barely kept ahead of the cultists, and only managed to do so at all because they blundered into one of those predatory reptiles, and had to spend some time screaming and shooting the animal.

  I was ready by the time they reached the shuttle, though. I shot them both with tranquilizers. I left Skrayling there – out of the water, so he wouldn’t definitely get eaten – and lugged the cultist traveler into the cockpit of the shuttle. I bound him, and wired him up, intravenous feeding tubes and all. Then I messed with the settings and overrides so I could keep him in a more-or-less constant state of sleep, reduced from a person to a propulsion device. It wasn’t very nice, but what choice did I have? I went after Sorlyn, but he’d fled ahead of the cultists, flickering through worlds, and we were so close to the First World that every place I went was riddled with worm-trails, and I had no way to tell which one was his. I wasted a couple of days looking, and then resigned myself to the fact that he’d have to take care of himself. I would continue the work, on my own, and just hope we’d meet again.

  The first thing I did was return to the swamp. I was angry and lonely, but I took all the cultists to paradise. I’m not sure I would have been so merciful if the Trypophile had been there, too.

  I kept up my resettlement efforts, though it was slower going without Sorlyn. I would lie in wait on the now-deserted swamp world, sometimes, hoping the Trypophile would return to check on things, but she never did. Maybe the Prisoner warned her away. I knew if I wanted to catch her, I was going to have to hunt her.

  That’s about the time I started keeping this journal. So there you go: have yourself a full circle.

  Of course, stuff has happened since I started writing this account. Occasionally I’d see a smooth trail, and know it must be Minna. I even tried to follow her a few times, but without knowing which direction to travel or how far away she was, I didn’t have any luck. In the end, she found me, quite by accident. I was doing reconnaissance on the world with the radio telescopes and the beetles when she popped out of a hole in my attention and said, “Hello Ana, have you seen Sorlyn or Zax, I like you also but I am worried about them.”

  I told her and Vicki what had happened to Sorlyn, and they told me about their fruitless search for Zax – the reason they never returned to the Sleeperhold was because they were looking for him, and, unlike me, they didn’t ever give up. Minna doesn’t know the meaning of the word “quit”. She also told me the Trypophile had tried to recruit her, offering to make her a queen of all creation, which tells me she didn’t understand Minna at all. If she did, she’d know the way to get to Minna is to threaten her friends, not offer her rewards. (I wish that wasn’t so clear to me. My mind just notices these things.) When the recruitment attempt failed, the cult tried to kidnap her, but Minna escaped doing her fade-from-view trick, learned from Sorlyn.

  Minna told me she’d “had a good strange idea” to protect herself from being captured again, but when I asked what it was, she said, “Not where the big worm in the void can hear us,” and pointed to my sleeping cultist. OK then.

  Minna and Vicki agreed to help me – my task wasn’t incompatible with looking for Zax – and things went faster then. We cleared out every outpost but one – a Sleeper base the cult had taken over – and also narrowed down the location of the First World. Since we’d been attacking the outposts, we reasoned the cult would probably focus their defenses on the last one standing. Instead… why not sneak in behind their last line of defense, and clear out their homeworld instead?

  We tried to transition to the First World in our carriages, but wow, there were a lot of guns. We talked about adjusting our entry parameters so we’d pop into the air a kilometer above the transition point, but worried they’d be on the lookout for us, since we’d already tripped an alarm. We were in the only adjacent world, debating the best approach, when the console on my chariot beeped. Its breach-detection systems were still active, and there was a big one here. We followed the signal, and there it was: a hole in the world, invisible in the air, but marked by a pair of standing stones.

  We stealthed our ships, and then me and Minna and Vicki just… walked in. The cultists had a guard on the other side of the breach, but just one, and I crept up and took him out. We hiked through that horrid red landscape for about an hour before we found their central camp. What a squalid junk-heap of a place. The things people will put up with in order to be closer to god… Vicki messed with their automated defenses, and put the shuttle and all other sleepercars on some sort of “whitelist” so the guns wouldn’t shoot us when we appeared. Apparently making the change was easy, since there was already an exception in place to stop the guns from blowing away the chariot the Trypophile had stolen.

  After that… well, it wasn’t easy, but it was doable. We slipped in, all stealthy, and gradually cleared out the cult’s home camp. Minna was unnoticeable, and I had the shimmersuit, and Vicki cakewalked through all their security measures. We crammed the shuttle full of cultists, though after a couple of loads the ones left became really paranoid. The last twenty of them huddled in a room together, with guns pointed in all directions. I wasn’t sure how we were going to deal with that. But Minna spent a while staring at one of the unconscious cultists, and then these weird white flowers bloomed from her fingertips. The blossoms started to produce this pollen or dust or something, and Minna wafted them through an air vent into the room. The cultists all passed out, and Minna said, “They are having the nicest dreams, oh so sweet and fine.”

  We dragged the cultists out, bound them up, and took them to paradise. The Trypophile was off being a zealous dictator elsewhere with the Pilgrim, unfortunately, but every other denizen of the First World was gone.

  Minna stayed there to watch for the Trypophile while I took the shuttle to the last outpost world, to clear that out. There were about a dozen of them there, but they were all together, and I had a glass bottle full of Minna’s sleepy-time-pollen, so once that went smash in the middle of their gathering, it was all over but the carrying and transport. My back still hurts. They’re all a big happy family on Wormwood now, though. OK, maybe not so happy, but they’ll get used to it.

  Now I’m back to the First World… and there’s no sign of Minna and Vicki. I hope they’re OK. I did see the Trypophile and the Pilgrim set off in their sleepercar, not across worlds, but just through the air, toward the volcano. They dragged someone with them, dressed in rags, tied up, with a hood over their head – I’m not sure who it is, but anyone those two assholes want to hold captive is someone I want to set free.

  I’ve heard a lot about this Prisoner of theirs from the cultists who’ve opted to talk to me, and I gather that volcano is where you can hear the voice of their god, except the Trypophile doesn’t like to let anyone else go up there. It’s smart to control access to the divine, I guess, if you want to maintain power. She probably had to agree to let the Pilgrim talk to God to secure his assistance. At least, I hope he asked for that much proof. Who knows.

  I’m going after them. I’m going to catch them, and take them away from this place. The Trypophile and the Pilgrim aren’t going to Wormwood, though. I’ll stick them on some other world – nothing unpleasant, just a world the Trypophile can’t bully and boss and accidentally murder her followers anymore, and where the Pilgrim can reflect on the consequences of betrayal.

  They’ll have plenty of time to realize that, instead of worrying so much about God, they should have been worrying about me.

  A Total Lack of Clever Plans • Parley • A Sacrifice • Zaveta Meets the Pilgrim • Final Dispensations • A Tricky Thing • The First Breach • A Happy Ending

  We transitioned to the First World, and flew across the lake, toward the volcano. I thought of its counterpart on the other side, spewing ice into the sky. That would have been less scary to approach. “Are we just supposed to… land on lava?” I asked.

  “The chariots are not that durable,” Vicki said. “According to the cultists who’ve spoken to us, there is a cave near the base of the volcano on the far side, away from the lava streams, where the Prisoner speaks to his chosen conduit, and offers them the sacrament.”

  “So, a squalid worm-hole. Got it.” I looked at Minna. “Did the Prisoner say anything else?”

  I’d never seen Minna look so miserable, even during our darkest times. I knew she’d spent a lot of time with Sorlyn, but I hadn’t understood how close they’d gotten. In my defense, I was too wrapped up in being close to Ana to notice much of anything else. She said, “Just that we have to help them or Sorlyn dies, but I do not understand, why doesn’t Sorlyn just close his eyes and leap away?”

  “You can’t sleep your way out of this place if you slept your way into it,” I said. “There are no new adjacent worlds. It’s the end of the line for people travelers.”

  “There must be a way to fix that,” Minna muttered. “To make it so we can travel back as well as forward, even without these chariots.”

  The Lector had believed there was, but he hadn’t been able to figure it out. I’d come to realize Minna was smarter than the Lector ever was, though, so if anyone could crack the problem, it was her.

  “I wish we could come up with a clever plan,” I said. “But the Prisoner is watching us, so even if we did, it would know.”

  “A shame,” Vicki said. “I do love a clever plan.”

  We approached the volcano. It was a stark black cinder cone, with trails of sluggish lava oozing down the near side and into the lake, so the base was shrouded by steam. The mountain was not erupting so much as endlessly seeping. I wondered how big the lake had been before years of lava had turned its far edge to rippled stone.

  The far side of the volcano, for whatever reason, was free of flowing magma. There was a visible path, presumably trod by generations of worm-priests, leading to a shadowed concavity in the mountainside. The mouth of the cavern glowed. There was lava in there.

  “Look, the shuttle!” Vicki said. “Ana’s here. I’m hailing, but… no response. She must not be on board.”

  I willed us to land faster, which didn’t help, but soon we settled down next to the shuttle. I scrambled out of the chariot and looked into the shuttle’s cockpit, but it was empty, except for a cultist snoring and drooling in the back seat, attached with more wires and tubes than Minna had been. I hadn’t thought to ask how Ana kept traveling after she and Sorlyn were separated – but now I knew. Abducting a cultist was probably not a choice I would have made, but then, it wasn’t a choice I’d been forced to make, and these were desperate times. Maybe Ana was in the back for some reason–

  Someone crashed into me, and I gasped, but they were hugging me, not attacking me, and then Ana shimmered into view, dressed in her crinkly silver shimmersuit. She kissed me on the mouth for a long time (but not long enough) and then said, “Zax, Minna did it, she found you!”

  “She did.” Her face was smudged with ash, and I stroked it away. “What are you doing here? Did the Prisoner send you a message too?”

  She frowned. “What?”

  I told her about Minna’s vision, and that we thought Sorlyn was inside, being held hostage. Ana swore. “What do we do?”

  Zaveta stepped forward, smiling. “We get him out. You are the famous Ana? You are tiny, but comely enough.”

  Ana looked from Zaveta to me and back again and frowned. “Who are you?”

  She bowed. “I am Zaveta of the Broken Wheel. I joined Zax of the Thousand Worlds to exact vengeance on those who stole my friends away.”

  ““Zax of the Thousand Worlds?” Ana murmured. “I’ve been to a thousand worlds too, you know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But you have to admit… you did it in a flying chariot. I walked.”

  “The leader of the wormlings is in this cave?” Zaveta took the cudgel from her belt. “Then let us venture forth, and settle this matter.”

  “If we attack them, they’ll kill Sorlyn,” I said.

  “If they do, they lose all leverage, but I take your point. I suggest going in alone, as an obvious threat, to draw attention. Minna and Ana can be more sneaky, and stab this Trypophile and the Pilgrim in their backs.”

  “What will I be doing during all this?” I asked.

  “Averting your eyes from the violence, and preparing medical supplies in case we need them,” Zaveta said.

  “A good enough plan,” Vicki said. “Except that, in theory, the Pilgrim and the Trypophile are in direct communication with the Prisoner, who is watching us even now, and certainly reporting on our activities.”

  “Hmm,” Zaveta said. “Then… I suggest we parley, and see what terms they offer. We need not accept the terms, but perhaps there is a way to secure Sorlyn’s safety.”

  “If we’re trying talking,” I said, “that’s my area.”

  I went into the mountain, unarmed and alone. The cavern was surprisingly small, almost cozy, and not as horrifically hot as I’d expected, given that there was a literal pool of lava bubbling just a few meters away.

  The Trypophile sat on a throne of natural rock, and the Pilgrim stood at her side, pointing his long rifle at Sorlyn’s head, where he lay bound on his side on the stone. Even without the gun, the Pilgrim could have picked Sorlyn up and hurled him into the pool of lava from where he stood. The glow from the bubbling magma flickered redly across them; they looked like demons in a stage play. And so did I, probably.