After a moment’s thought, I tore off a scrap of the dead cultist’s shirt and used it to both pick up the vial and wrap it. The Sleepers don’t think people can get doubly infected, but I was still repulsed by the thing – the vial was, in a real sense, an artifact of a profane religion. It contained an unknown number of parasitic worms, waiting to be dumped into a well or slipped into a bowl of soup, transforming new hosts without their knowledge and against their will, ruining their lives, as mine had been ruined.

  Well, maybe not ruined. “Irreversibly and forever changed,” maybe. I can’t say I wish I’d never been infected. Because of this power, I met Ana, after all. I met Minna, and Vicki, and the Pilgrim, and others I was glad to know. I helped some people along the way, too, who wouldn’t have been helped otherwise. But it sure felt like ruination at the time. The Sleepers said I was a rarity – I’d traveled longer and farther than anyone they’d ever met before. Their order actively recruits people who’ve been infected by the cultists, and the most venerable veteran of the multiverse they’d met before me had traveled to four hundred worlds before his recruitment, as opposed to my thousand-plus – and he was considered a prodigy. Why hadn’t the Sleepers met more experienced travelers?

  Because the travelers usually died, often within the first few worlds, almost always within the first hundred. Sure, there’s some unknown mechanism to ensure you don’t transition into a pool of acid or a cloud of poison gas, but you can transition into a forest of hungry predators or hostile locals. Why didn’t that fate befall me?

  I was lucky, at first, and then I was extraordinarily lucky. About eighty worlds in, I met a scientist named the Lector in an absurdly technologically advanced world. He gave me my linguistic virus and other physical augmentations that made it vastly easier to survive. (Being able to talk to people makes a big difference.) Of course, he later tried to vivisect me so he could figure out the source of my power, and stole my blood to make a serum that let him travel through worlds, and wrought vast destruction in his attempt to found a multiversal empire, until I managed to stop him… but at least I got some good out of that horrible relationship.

  A while after parting ways with the Lector, I met Minna, the most adaptable person I know (also the nicest). Minna is capable of changing her own body – and the bodies of others – to survive and thrive in various environments. She changed me profoundly, allowing me to stay awake indefinitely and sleep at will. The Sleepers were very excited to find us. They knew Minna and I could give them two things to shift the balance of power against the cult: control and communication.

  The cult must have known that, too, since they attacked the Sleeperhold and killed or scattered our forces, not long after Minna and I arrived. I don’t know how the cult organized such a strike, but they must have had inside help. Someone among the Sleepers betrayed us. On some worlds, the term for a traitor in an organization is a “burrower”, for a creature that digs tunnels, undermining the very ground beneath your feet.

  In other worlds, though, such a traitor is called a worm: hidden in the fruit, devouring from within.

  I tucked the vial, wrapped well, into my bag. The cultist didn’t have anything of use on her so I left her body in the woods, unburied and unmourned, and returned to the broken house. I went through the front door again, up the stairs, and stretched out on the giant child’s bed. I gazed up at the rounded end of the worm-trail above me for a little while, thinking of absent friends.

  I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

  I opened my eyes to brightness: rows of white bulbs set in a low ceiling. I sat up and took in my surroundings, doing my habitual threat assessment. I was in a warehouse or lab of some kind, in a narrow aisle between rows of silver cylinders that reached nearly to the ceiling. Each cylinder was big enough to hold a body, my mind helpfully noted. The air smelled yeasty and pungent. Maybe this was some kind of brewery?

  I stood up and reached toward one of the cylinders, careful in case it was hot, but the surface was cool and smooth. There were small panes of glass set into each cylinder, like windows, but they were mirrors instead. I took the opportunity to finger-comb my hair (it was getting long again) and clean some smudges of soot off my face.

  Then something banged inside the cylinder, like someone was punching the inner wall, and I jumped back, hitting the cylinder behind me, and that one jolted, too. Maybe those panels weren’t mirrors. Maybe they were some kind of one-way glass, and there were things inside the cylinders, looking out.

  The banging continued, and then some of the other cylinders began to make noise too, like fists on metal. The cylinder in front of me started to rock, and then another, and another, like things inside them were hurling themselves back and forth.

  Maybe this was all perfectly natural, part of the fermentation process… but I didn’t want to find out. I snatched up my bag and rushed along, following the worm-trail down the aisle. The banging followed me, each cylinder seeming to set off the one next to it. There was no end of the cylinders in sight. Fortunately, the worm-trail didn’t go too far – the cultist hadn’t liked this place any more than I did, apparently.

  I sat down in the aisle beneath the trail’s end and did my meditative breathing. It was difficult to get into a properly relaxed state with all that hammering happening around me, but I’ve had a lot of practice (and alterations to the literal structure of my brain, courtesy of Minna), so soon enough I slumped, and transitioned.

  I opened my eyes, instantly coughing on dust, and looked around frantically for the source of the roaring and clashing I heard. I was in some kind of tumbledown ruin of a stone coliseum, and about ten meters away, two people were trying to kill each other.

  In my travels, I’ve learned not to judge people by appearances, but I admit I was instinctively rooting for the one who looked human – female, dressed head-to-toe in dark brown leather, her long braids decorated with beads, feathers, and bits of metal – over her opponent, a shambling shirtless humanoid with gray skin and a head like a warty pumpkin, covered in pustules and red-rimmed eyes of various sizes. Pumpkinhead wielded a gnarled wooden club, while the barbarian had a cudgel with a thick head wrapped in metal.

  I wasn’t that close to them, but I backed up anyway, climbed on some fallen rubble, and made my way up into the remains of the stands. There were no spectators. The worm-trail I’d followed extended past the fighters, out of the stadium, along a dusty track, and vanished from sight beyond a rocky hillside. I didn’t see an easy way to leave the arena without getting closer to the fighters than I wanted, so I’d just have to wait for them to finish… whatever this was. Not an exhibition, with no audience present, but maybe they were athletes, entertainers, just engaged in bit of sparring practice–

  Then the barbarian leapt into the air and spun, braids flying, and brought her cudgel down squarely on the crown of her opponent’s lumpy head. I looked away, wincing, as the skull (or whatever) broke and splashed, very much like a gourd smashed with a hammer. Pumpkinhead dropped. The barbarian wiped the head of her club on the dead person’s clothes, neatly and efficiently, then hung the weapon from a hook at her belt, using a leather loop at the end of the haft. I couldn’t tell how terrified I should be. Pumpkinhead looked monstrous, sure, but she’d just casually killed him, and maybe that made her the monster in this scenario.

  She shaded her eyes and looked up at me, then called out a few words. It took a moment, as always, for the linguistic virus to turn the foreign language into something I could comprehend: “–another traveler?”

  I stood, trying to look harmless, as she strode in my direction. “I am a traveler, yes.” Her language was guttural and harsh, but I was sure I’d get used to it, if I stayed here long enough.

  She grunted, then beckoned. “At least you say words, instead of just quack, quack, quack, making noises with no sense, like the last one.”

  The last one? Did she mean the cultist whose track I was following? I opened my mouth to ask but she spoke first, in a commanding tone. “Come down. Pustule check.”

  “Pustule… check?” The virus is very good at what it does, but it doesn’t exactly provide much in the way of cultural context.

  She scowled. Her face was sun-darkened (and there were two suns here, close together in the sky, one bigger and redder than the other). Her face was weathered, all planes and sharpness. She was extremely good at looking annoyed and angry. “Have to check you. Make sure you aren’t sick. Won’t turn into one of those.” She gestured at Pumpkinhead.

  “Right.” I stood up. “That’s… he has some kind of infection, then?”

  “You don’t know about the pustule?” She shook her head. “You must come from far away, if you don’t have the pustule there. Across the barrier sea? They start out small, one spot, like a bite, your skin a little raised. Then they spread, three or four more appear. You can stop them then, press a hot coal or iron to the flesh, deep, burn them out, but only if you notice them. They don’t even itch at first. After another day, or two days, the pustule spreads too far, and then, you can’t burn it out without killing them, so.” She shrugged. “You kill them. They beg you to kill them, mostly, before they lose themselves. This one must have been in the wastes for weeks to be so far gone. No person left now, just the pustule walking around.”

  Assuming her explanation was truthful, she wasn’t a monster, but was instead doling out a brutal mercy. I made my way down the steps, careful of the cracked and broken sections, reasonably confident she wasn’t going to bash my head in when I reached the arena floor.

  I stood before her. She sighed. “Clothes off!”

  Ah. Right. At least it was warm under those double suns. I unbuttoned my shirt (it still had most of its buttons), pulled down my pants, and stood in my underwear, keenly aware that it had been a dozen worlds since I’d showered… but then again, she was rather musky herself.

  She walked around me in a circle, sometimes peering closely at my skin, but never touching me, grunting to herself occasionally. “All clothes,” she said. “I don’t want to look at your scrawny nethers either, but must be safe. The pustule gets in everywhere.”

  The Realm of Spheres and Harmonies isn’t as prudish as some civilizations I’ve visited, and I’m not inherently uncomfortable with being naked, but being naked in front of a killer with a cudgel is different from being in a locker room with presumably harmless strangers. I didn’t think refusing would go well for me, though. I dropped my undergarments.

  She looked me over, entirely clinical, and had me… move things aside or pull them apart so she could look everywhere. Still no touching, at least. At last, she grunted again. “No pustule.” She could have sounded happier about it. I wondered if she was disappointed that she didn’t have an excuse to smash my head in. “Where are you going, traveler?”

  I pointed along the worm-trail, then hurriedly dressed. “That way.”

  Another grunt. “Same. My settlement is that way. Come. Get food and water. Plenty there.”

  “That’s very kind of you. My name is Zax.”

  “Strange name, strange person.” She thumped her chest. “Zaveta of the Broken Wheel.”

  “Is Broken Wheel the name of your settlement?”

  She cocked her head. “That is my renown,” she said, speaking slowly. “I broke the wheel, and freed the ‘pressed.’” She made a walking-in-circles gesture with her hand, wiggling two fingers like legs. “The pustule ruled here. They built a machine. They ‘pressed the people, chained them to the wheel, made them push, push, push the wheel until they fell, and when the one beside you fell, you could not stop, but had to push harder, dragging the body in its chains along the ground until a pustule came and cut them loose and chained another in their place.” She shrugged. “I came. I broke the wheel. I freed the ‘pressed. I gained renown. Come.” She set off walking, and since she went in the direction the worm-trail went, I followed.

  “That sounds… very heroic.”

  “Bah.” She waved her hand. “Hate the pustule, is all. Hated the machine, too. It ate a hole in the ground, and the hole smoked. The smoke blackened the sky.”

  “What was the machine for? What did it do?”

  Zaveta shrugged. “Don’t know. Never asked. Pustule were very excited, so, something bad. The machine does nothing now. Broken. Some things are better broken.”

  Fair enough. I wondered if she knew anything about the cultist I was backtracking. “You saw another traveler, you said? Like me?”

  “Dressed strange, like you – not the same clothes, but both of you, in clothes you don’t see here.”

  “When was this?”

  “Ten sunsets ago. He came, quack quacked, no sense, but made gestures – hungry, tired, lost. Settlement took him in. Guest-right. Then he left, went to the arena, from there, I don’t know. His trail stopped.”

  She didn’t have my spectacles, so she’d been limited to following his footprints or whatever. I could see his path far more clearly. The worm-trail went up the slope of a low hill, following the faint suggestion of a trail, and Zaveta went that way, too. “Do you know this other traveler?” she asked.

  How to answer that? “I… might,” I said. “I think we’ve crossed paths, yes. I’m sort of… following his trail. Looking for, ah, his people.”

  We got to the top of the hill, and I looked down into the clearing below. The settlement was there: a cluster of half a dozen buildings of wood and stone, a well, and a few scraggly garden beds and empty animal pens, the structures all clustered around a big, jagged hole in the ground. The ruins of a wooden tower jutted from the hole, and at the base of the tower rested the broken halves of a great spoked wheel, dangling all over with chains. I gasped, but not because the famous Broken Wheel was so impressive, though it was.

  I gasped because there were at least ten worm-trails winding throughout the settlement, looped around one another in the air, overlapping and crisscrossing, all disappearing into the huts. I’d never seen so many worm-trails in one place other than the Sleeperhold.

  Suddenly Zaveta was behind me, my hair in her fist, my head pulled back, and a knife at my throat. “Traveler,” she said softly into my ear. “Where did your friend take my people?”

  Ana

  I remember Toros arriving, but I don’t know if it’s a real memory – it’s curiously drained of color (not that the world of silent towers was very colorful anyway) and emotion, so maybe it’s a confabulation, an invented memory I created after he told me about it. Either way:

  I was sitting with my back against a tower, dipping my fingertips into a puddle beside me and licking off the drops, staring up at the sky, when, for the first time, something moved clearly in my line of sight. A gleaming golden orb, incised with glowing ivory lines in swirling patterns, swooped through the air from behind a tower, skimming along a dozen meters off the ground. I didn’t feel curiosity, or fear, or hope, or anything else at the sight of this intrusion; I wasn’t capable of any of those things.

  The orb – officially called a “dimensional transition vehicle”, but usually just called a “sleepercar”, I later learned – dropped to the ground across the square from me, landing on delicate-looking wheels with a small bounce. The sleepercar rolled toward me, and, as it approached, the top half slid back, turning the vessel into an open-topped hemisphere. There were two bench seats inside, one behind the other, each occupied. The person in the front was dark skinned and had long wild gray hair and a beard to match, both woven with purple ribbons and blue glass beads. He wore oversized goggles with bulging convex lenses. The person in the rear was asleep, head tilted back, wearing a silver circlet on his shaved head, wires running from the crown down into the body of the chariot. The one in front stood up and leapt out before the chariot even stopped rolling, and landed before me. He was wearing boots made of overlapping metal plates, so he clanked when he landed, but he wasn’t otherwise armored – he had on a sort of black leotard and a short cape the same purple as his hair ribbons. He looked back at the chariot, barked a nonsense word, and the person sleeping in the back yawned hugely and waved a hand in annoyance.

  The man peered at me for a moment, then lifted his goggles to his forehead. His eyes were blue with hints of ice. (I remember that part vividly, but then, I spent a lot of time looking into Toros’s eyes later, during the hypnotic cognitive-repair and language-acquisition process.) He held out his hand to me, and I just gazed at him blankly. He sighed, went back to the chariot, rummaged around inside, and returned with a cylindrical squeeze bottle. He squirted some fluid into his mouth, looking at me all the while, then offered the bottle to me.

  Oh. He was showing me it was safe to drink. My mind was still in pieces, but my body knew it wanted something other than puddle water, so it reached out, and took the bottle.

  I do remember that taste, but, again, I tasted it often later, so who knows how real that memory is. If I was expecting water, that’s not what I got: instead it was a rich broth, salty and savory, and every cell in my body lit up in desperation. I’d been starved of vitamins, nutrients, minerals, and it seemed every single element I’d craved was in that bottle. I drained it dry, then leaned back, sated, and belched hugely.

  The stranger laughed heartily, and that, at least, was a common language. I smiled at him. Toros says I did, anyway. He says that’s when he knew my mind was not broken beyond repair. He offered me his hand, and this time I took it. He helped me to my feet and guided me over to the chariot. It was spacious enough to fit four people, two per bench, though the person in the back – who was snoring again – was sprawled in the middle of his, arms outstretched along the top of his seat. My savior got me settled in the front, strapped me in, and then took his seat beside me. I remember the lights on the dashboard twinkling, and thinking: pretty.

  He pressed a button, and the top of the sleepercar slid up and over, sealing us in. The dome was transparent, at first, and I gazed out as the chariot rose into the air. It flew slowly, weaving among the towers. I know now that Toros was looking for worm-trails, the sign of sleepers who’d traveled here from other worlds, because I was clearly not from this world, but I also didn’t leave a trail wherever I walked, which meant I wasn’t a traveler myself, but a passenger. Eventually he must have found the place where Zax and I came through or Zax left, because he hovered for a long time, pressing buttons, taking measurements and logging coordinates.