“I’ll be here with you until the very end.” I kissed him on his lips, and his forehead, and on his eyelids when they closed. Our love was brief and tragic and doomed: we were star-crossed and tempest-tossed. It was all very romantic, and I was already starting to think about how I could turn my feelings into art. That’s one problematic aspect of being a creative type; a part of you is always standing back, observing. I had an idea for a sculpture based on our story: a sort of orrery, with two orbs that would cycle through complex rotations and pendulum swings, coming together almost close enough to touch for a brief moment, at which point they would burst into bright illumination – and then fall dark again when the mechanisms of the sculpture carried them farther apart.

  Then Zax fell asleep, and everything changed. I’d expected to see him vanish from existence, leaving a warm depression in my piled blankets, the reverse of his appearance in my yard. What he didn’t know, because he’d never transitioned so close to someone else before, was that I would go with him when he traveled.

  Zax had told me what it was like for him, in between worlds: an interval of dreamless nothing, brief and dark.

  That was not my experience. I traveled when I was awake, you see. I was conscious when I passed from one world and into another. I was aware. I saw what comes in between.

  Trying to remember what I saw and heard and felt now, my mind skitters away, flinches, resists. I can only write about the experience lucidly at all because the Sleepers have therapies that can (painstakingly, slowly) repair the minds of those who’ve glimpsed… whatever that place is. The crawlspace of the worlds. The empty spaces between the bubbles in the quantum foam. The borderlands. Call it what you want. I’m not the same as I was before I saw that place between places – I am, absolutely, changed – but thanks to the efforts of Toros and the other Sleepers, I’m a whole and functional person again, albeit with some fault lines and cracks.

  So. What did I see. According to Zax’s journal, when we woke up, I scratched his face, and jumped to my feet, and screamed about holes in the sky, and things pushing through, and said, “Worms, worms, worms in the world.” Then I ran away, disappearing into the alleys of a silent gray city of impenetrable blank towers. He looked for me, and called out for me, but couldn’t find me, and eventually he passed out, exhausted, and went to a new world. That was that.

  I don’t really remember that part – scratching him, running away. There’s a shattered pile of broken glass where my memories of that time should be, just fragments, some larger than others. The largest are actually the pieces from before he woke up and we reached that silent gray world. My clearest memories of that period are of the void between.

  Which makes sense, because I was there for, subjectively… I don’t know. “Centuries” sounds impossible, doesn’t it? How can you live for hundreds of years, with every moment spent in terror? But that seems right, and it’s what the few others who’ve seen that place report, too. The stress of such an experience should kill you, but in that place, you can’t die. Time and space aren’t the same there as they are in other worlds. My pitiful human perception did the best it could to parse my surroundings and organize it into something coherent, but I certainly wasn’t seeing whatever is really there.

  Basically, the space between worlds, as it appeared to me, was nothingness – a nothingness full of holes. Some people have trypophobia: a fear of clusters of small holes or bumps or dark spots. They look at seed pods, or honeycombs, or wasp nests, or the suckers on tentacles, or coral, or the eyes of insects, or worm-eaten fruit, and they feel an intense, full-body aversion. I never had that problem, personally. I’d eat strawberries all day, and I thought wasp nests were rather pretty, in their way; I even did a sculpture based on them, once. (Instead of wasps swarming out, it was tiny art critics.)

  But when I was in that space, surrounded by those holes, some of them seemingly tiny, some vast and cavernous, all I could think about was what must be inside those holes. Were they burrows? Were they tunnels? Were they full of… wriggling, crawling things?

  After a long, long time, I saw movement in one of the smaller holes, directly above me. Something luminous but slimy, segmented and long, thrust its featureless end out of the hole, and I thought worms, worms, worms. The thing crawled out, and then crawled into another hole, its form an undulating compression wave of something stranger than flesh. That thing moved, just centimeters from my face, for – well, for a sizable percentage of forever. Everything took most of forever in that place.

  I began to worry about the bigger holes. Size was strange there – I couldn’t tell if things were very small and close to me, or very large and far away, and they constantly dilated and contracted – but they certainly seemed like holes of various sizes, and if some were as big as they looked, what kind of creatures would lurk inside those?

  Then I saw the eyes, peering through some of the holes: red-rimmed eyes, black-irised eyes, eyes with pupils shaped like barbells, eyes of luminous blue – like dozens of alien entities were looking at me, squinting through knotholes in a wooden wall. I had no doubt those creatures were vast. The eyes would appear for a moment, look at me – at us, because I was still clinging to Zax, unconscious and unmoving Zax, like a woman holding onto a piece of flotsam after a shipwreck – and then the eyes would move away. Over the subjective, timeless centuries I spent there, I saw perhaps a dozen eyes, but eventually, I saw thousands of worms, some hair-thin, some the size of train cars, and everything in between – or perhaps not. Perhaps scale had less meaning there. I doubt any of it was literal – that the eyes were actual biological things. I think they were my brain’s way of making sense of the fact that something (or things) was watching me. But I really don’t know.

  I do know that, by the time our journey was over, I was a gibbering wreck. My mind was destroyed. I was unable to hold onto a thought for more than a second, unable to string multiple thoughts together at all… but somehow I knew it was Zax’s fault. He’d dragged me to that awful place. He’d taken me from my cozy bed in my wonderful house in my beautiful sphere in my glorious Realm and delivered me to a world of worms that ate their way through reality like it was a piece of rotten fruit.

  No wonder I screamed at him and scratched his face and ran away. I don’t actually remember doing that, even after Toros’s careful reconstruction of my psyche. My first coherent memory of that gray city is being alone, and cold, and shivering on my belly in the mist, lapping at a puddle of condensation. As best Toros can determine, that was a few days after my arrival in that place, a day or two after Zax gave up on finding me. I was beginning to come back to myself, probably driven by the needs of survival – my body preferred not to die of dehydration, so it brought me around enough to make me follow the smell of water and lap it up, dirty and gritty though it was.

  I wandered that silent place, laughing and screaming and singing nonsense songs, the empty spaces absorbing my voice instead of echoing as I might have expected. Everything there felt muted and drained. I spent most of every day looking for water and food – the former was usually available, and the latter never was. I tried to climb the towers, but they were featureless and smooth.

  It turns out the reason Zax had such a hard time finding me was, those silent towers moved. Never when you were watching, but often behind your back, like pieces sliding around in a puzzle… or like the walls of a treacherous maze. I’d emerge from alleys, only to turn and find plazas in their place, or impassable walls of smooth black stone. Add that mutability to the homogenous quality of the towers, and it’s understandable that Zax couldn’t track me down.

  I did, eventually, find food: a little pyramid of canned goods and wrapped protein bars, familiar from my own pantry, in the middle of a plaza. Zax had left them for me – every single bit of food I gave to him, I realized later, when I could realize things. I fell upon the hoard, yanking pull tabs and scooping up sweet fruit and cold stew and spiced vegetables indiscriminately, just cramming calories into myself. I huddled, and shivered, and looked at the sky, which was blank and starless and caught in eternal twilight.

  With some food in my belly I could put as many as two thoughts together, though they’d fly apart pretty quickly. I remember thinking I was on the surface of a dead world in a dead galaxy, succumbing to heat death. When I looked back, my mind repaired, I knew that couldn’t be the case: there was air to breathe, and while the city was bleak and chilly, it wasn’t killing cold, and the temperature was steady. I think now perhaps I was underneath some structure, surrounded by moving support columns, in the hidden machinery of an advanced world.

  Zax took me to that place, but he didn’t mean to… and he’s also the one who saved me from dying there. The food he left sustained me, so instead of being dead a month after my arrival, I was alive – albeit hollow-cheeked, traumatized, delirious, and down to my last few crumbs – for Toros to find me, and save my life.

  Into the Woods • A Vile Vial • Silver Cylinders • Single Combat • Pustule • Enter Zaveta of the Broken Wheel

  Faced with a choice about which cultist’s trail to pursue, I decided… not to decide yet. I’d just go and check things out – track the traveler who’d gone out the window to their point of departure, see if they’d left any signs or portents, and make my choice about what to do next then.

  I clambered out the window, climbing down the rickety trellis. The remains of the flowers clinging to the wood were normal-sized, reminding me that I hadn’t been hit with some kind of half-scale shrink ray, but was just inhabiting a world populated by primates much larger than myself. (Unless they’d all made themselves extinct. It was weird that I couldn’t hear any shooting or explosions when there was still smoke in the air.)

  I followed the worm-trail through a remarkably intact backyard, complete with an immense trampoline. I imagined three-meter-tall teenage apes doing somersaults and laughing. The back fence was smashed down and the trail passed right through the gap. From there, I went into the woods, a dense stand of trees that seemed to stretch for acres and, amazingly, wasn’t on fire. The trunks soon closed in around me, the backyards hidden from view, and I could easily imagine getting lost here, if I didn’t have that silver thread in the air to follow.

  The woods went on and on, and I wondered if the local kids ever played in here, or the adults hunted, or if this was just the next bit of vestigial wilderness waiting to be demolished to make room for more houses and streets and culs-de-sac.

  The woods were pretty enough, and peaceful without the signs of recent battles in evidence, but my ears were cold and my feet hurt. I stopped to sit on a fallen log and ate some jerky of unknown provenance. Back home in the Realm, I’d been famously picky about my food – my family teased me about it – but you can’t be too precious when you’re adrift in the multiverse. I draw the line at eating sapient creatures, but otherwise calories are calories.

  Thus fortified, I set off again, and about five minutes later I found my second dead cultist of the week. That solved my problem about which one to follow. I do sometimes spend a lot of time fretting over things that turn out to be moot. I guess most people do.

  This cultist was just like all the ones the Sleepers had met: humanoid, pale-skinned and dark-haired and wiry with muscle, like they came from a place where calories were barely adequate and the work was hard. She was dressed in a mismatched array of clothes, which also fit the hodgepodge habits of the cultists. This one wore pants of some electric blue wicking smartcloth; chunky black boots clearly cobbled by hand, with visible hobnails in the soles; a diaphanous white shirt, under a leather vest, under a heavy coat of stitched-together furs; and a pink beret. The wardrobe of an interdimensional traveler who grabs whatever she can whenever she can moreor-less indiscriminately. I make some effort to fit in on the worlds where I find myself, if I can. The cultists don’t. They just tear through, spreading chaos.

  There was a bullet hole under her left eye, a neat black circle big enough to put a fingertip into (not that I did so).

  She’d run afoul of something. I had no idea how long she’d been dead – she wasn’t too ripe, but it was cold here. Either she’d been caught up in the battle that wrecked this place, or she’d been shot by a local for other reasons. I tried to imagine being a gigantopithecus and seeing a comparatively diminutive creature like this running through the woods. I doubted deadly force would have been my first instinct, but you never know what cultural systems people are operating within – maybe in the local mythology, pale tiny humanoids are the equivalent of demons, or something.

  I didn’t want to touch a murdered body, for all the obvious reasons, but I needed to confirm that she was a cultist, and not a victim like me, who happened to share superficial traits with our mysterious tormenters. I pulled at the dead woman’s coat, intending to remove enough of her clothing to look for a worm-sign, but something tumbled out of a crudely sewn pocket in the lining.

  It was a small vial of clear glass, tightly stoppered, half full of a greenish, translucent fluid. I stared at the thing where it lay on the crushed leaves and moaned. I’d seen vials like that before, at the Sleeperhold, where they were kept in containment fields.

  That vial – or, more specifically, the things teeming invisibly within it – were the source of my power, my gift, my curse. It was a vial of worms.

  Ana had explained things to me on our way to the Sleeperhold, ending years of my speculations in the course of one conversation. How had I gained this ability to travel to new worlds when I slept? Why me?

  The Cult of the Worm is why. The ability to travel the multiverse originated with them, and their vials of tiny parasitic worms.

  At some point in the near past – certainly many years, possibly even decades ago – the cultists began to spread through the multiverse, and to infect people with parasites as they went. They slip the worms into food and water, mostly. The parasites exist mostly in the higher dimensions, making them undetectable on our physical plane without special equipment. The bit of the worm that extends into physical reality, and attaches to a living host, is almost microscopic, so it’s not something you’ll taste while you’re quaffing your ale. I’d seen a photo of one on the Sleeperhold, magnified and enlarged; the visible portion was a maggotlike white grub, but with a leechlike series of toothy rings at the mouth end. The thought of one of those swimming in my body somewhere, the invisible length of it tethering me to unknown dimensions, made me want to gag. I tried to look back at my own worm-trail as seldom as possible.

  Once they’re attached to a host, those parasitic worms impart the ability to travel – indeed, they compel travel – through the multiverse. The worm’s only desire (though that’s the wrong word – instinct? Goal? Purpose?) is to visit new worlds. The parasites secrete a substance that enters the bloodstream of the host, and makes them travel when they sleep.

  We’re pretty sure the cultists didn’t infect me directly. Instead, at some point, the cult infected a woman and sent her spinning through the multiverse. Eventually, she ended up in my home, the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies. I worked as a harmonizer – a kind of caregiver – and she was in clear need of care, disoriented and incomprehensible.

  She died in my arms. Her blood got on my body. Some portion of that blood must have touched a mucous membrane. That was all it took to let the parasite inside her flee its dying host for a new, more hospitable body: mine. (Unlike other parasites, which gleefully reproduce inside their hosts, these worms are singular creatures, and only move to a new body if their current victim dies. I didn’t inquire too closely about the experiments the Sleepers did to prove that. Multidimensional parasitology is not my field, and anyway, it’s gross.)

  The woman was only dead for a couple of minutes, because medical science at home is advanced, but the worm had already moved into my body when she was revived. She still flickered out of my world when she went to sleep, because the parasite secretes a substance into our blood that makes us travel, and she still had residue in hers… but in a few days, without the toxin being replenished, she would have stopped waking up in new worlds. I always hoped she found herself in a peaceful place. Toros said sometimes travelers were killed by local wildlife, and then those animals got infected, and transitioned to a new world the next time they fell asleep. They were usually killed themselves, or starved, soon after they were infected. More intelligent beings were better at navigating the ever-changing complexities of life flung into the multiverse.

  Ana told me the worms do damage beyond merely ripping people out of their lives, though. With every new world an infected person visits, the integrity of the multiverse gets weaker. That means every time I fall asleep, I poke holes in the fabric of space-time, damaging the superstructure of the universe. Every penetration between worlds is a pinprick… but enough pinpricks can make you bleed to death. The Sleepers have detected breaches, holes between worlds, caused by cult activity. The cultists must know about the damage they’re doing. They must want to cause it. Why else would they spread the infection? But why do they want to unravel reality? It doesn’t make any sense.

  I shifted my gaze from the vial to the dead cultist. I wondered if the worm had infected the local who killed her – it takes hours for enough of the worm’s chemicals to build up in the blood, and who knows how long for the victim to fall asleep, so they could have transitioned far from here, their worm-trail beyond my view. I tried to imagine how much more challenging my travels would be if I were twice my current size. I thought the worm probably hadn’t been passed on, though. This was murder from a distance, and I doubt the killer got any of the cultist’s fluids on them.