Then he patted me on the arm, and the dome above us opaqued into blackness. The dashboard lights dimmed. It reminded me of being on parabolic flights to the holiday zones, when the crew would dim the lights so people could rest on the journey… or, that’s what I’m reminded of now, thinking about the experience in retrospect. You know what I mean.

  If I’d realized we were going to travel between worlds, I might have started screaming at the idea of being in that endless place full of holes and worms again, but I didn’t know much of anything. I was comfortable, on a plush seat; my belly was full for the first time in weeks; I was warm; and I felt safe. That was plenty for me at the time.

  I don’t know how the sleepercars work, even now. Toros doesn’t, either, though he can pilot them just fine. The engineer who built them, Gibberne, came from a technologically advanced world, one where scientists had a mastery of “spatiotemporal interactions”, including the ability to slow down and increase their own perception of passing time – which is to say, they could make everything around them seem to slow to a crawl, so they had all the time in the world to think things through, or they could make everything around them seem to speed by in a blur, to avoid tedious waits. Gibberne applied his knowledge to the problem of the endless subjective time experienced by conscious people while traveling between worlds, and whatever solution he came up with worked: as long as you’re sealed inside the opaque sphere of a chariot, you can stay awake, and the transition seems to take just twenty-one minutes and twenty-one seconds, rather than endless eternities.

  More importantly, the sleepercars can steer. Their instruments are able to detect adjacent worlds, just like we think the parasitic worms do, and choose which ones to enter. Unfortunately, you can’t actually peer into those universes next door to see if you’ve got a paradise or a hell waiting, but the sleepercars can detect certain physical attributes of an adjacent universe. Toros says they can read “unique vibration signatures”, but I don’t know what that means, exactly. The upshot is, there’s a database of visited and logged worlds in each sleepercar, so if it detects a familiar vibration, you actually can know what to expect when you transition, just by looking up the right code in the database. Unlike the parasite, which drives its host relentlessly forward to random worlds, the sleepercar allows you to backtrack, too – so you can retrace your steps and go home again.

  All this, of course, assumes you have a traveler to power the chariot – to act as a living interdimensional engine. Without those, the chariots are just stylish flying cars. Toros had Sorlyn, the person snoring in the backseat, as his traveler, connected to the chariot’s navigation system by neural lace. The lace, combined with the controls in the sleepercar, stimulated him, soothed him, and guided him, based on Toros’s piloting. The parasite within Sorlyn still wanted to press ever onward, and going to new worlds was apparently easier than going back, but the tech in the chariot could overcome that relentless forward drive.

  That’s what we did. We transitioned through worlds Toros had seen before, back to the Sleeperhold, following our own worm-trail. It took most of a day in clock-time – we only spent moments in each transitional world (except in one relatively safe post-apocalyptic world, where we stopped for a pee break), but the twenty-one minutes in between worlds adds up. I dozed, in and out, and Toros spoke to me almost constantly – I couldn’t understand him, of course, but the point was just to soothe me, I think, and it probably worked. Toros can be very soothing.

  The dome opened, and I heard birdsong. I lifted my face up to sunlight filtering through tree branches, and the air was warm and lightly scented with flowers. Toros helped me out of the chariot, and Sorlyn got out with us, first disconnecting his diadem and then stretching and giving me a friendly wave before wandering off.

  A few people rushed up to us, including the Sleeperhold’s doctor, Colubra. She wore the iridescent, sideways teardrop of a helmet that held her diagnostic equipment, and also disguised her faceted eyes and complex mandibles. She wore a long white coat that hid her lower arms, and had her legs folded at the extra joints so she wouldn’t tower over me, but I was so out of it, I doubt even seeing the extent of her physiology would have made me do more than blink. (Colubra doesn’t call herself a doctor; she calls herself a “practical xenobiologist”, but in practice, she patches up the Sleepers and their allies when they get hurt.)

  The campus of the Sleeperhold is a mishmash of different architectures, from stone towers to subterranean labs to wooden lodges, but the medical facility is the strangest, a multifaceted dome made of something that looks like plastic but is, in fact, extruded chitin, produced by Colubra’s drone-brood; without a mate she can’t have sapient children, but she can birth the hand-sized, mindless, pheromone-guided workers that form the unskilled labor force of her world moreor-less at will.

  Inside the medical dome, under bioluminescent lights, Colubra sliced off my clothes (her lower arms are tipped by cutting appendages) and examined me. I learned later there was nothing wrong with me physically apart from dehydration, malnutrition, and a mild case of exposure. She hooked me up to machines that provided intravenous nourishment and left me in a dim room.

  I would have stayed there, not quite catatonic but certainly unresponsive, forever, probably, if not for Toros. He spent weeks working with me, first just visiting to sit by my bedside, and then, once I was physically recovered, moving me to a rehabilitation suite in the big lodge. Understand, I was not a particularly valuable asset. I was obviously just a passenger, not a traveler myself. Since I’d been found with my mind broken, it was clear I wasn’t an experienced passenger, either, who knew to sleep through the transition. Toros had no reason to think I was a great warrior (I’m not) or a towering intellect with useful knowledge. (I’m smart, and a pretty good engineer, even if I did use that skill mostly to build moving sculptures, but I could have been a simple hunter-gatherer for all he knew.) He tried to help me anyway, devoting time he absolutely could have spent on more vital things, because he believes people matter.

  The first memory I have that feels completely real, full of color and sound, is from the rehabilitation suite. I was reclined in a comfortable chair, gazing at a wall full of lights that flickered in hypnotic patterns. They shut off, and the room flooded with light. I felt… really good, like I’d just had a peaceful night’s sleep and awakened refreshed and restored. I was dressed in a loose, sleeveless silver gown that fell just past my knees, and there were sandals on my feet.

  I sat up in the chair, and there he was, sitting on a stool in the corner, holding a luminous slab of glass – some kind of tablet or hand terminal. He smiled at me, pointed to himself, and said, “Toros”. He patted his chest a couple of times for emphasis. Then he pointed at me, and said, “Eh?”

  That was clear enough. “I’m Ana.”

  “Eyemanna,” he said, and I laughed and shook my head.

  “Ana.” I patted my chest. “Ana.”

  He grinned, sort of sheepish, and said, “Ana.” Then he pantomimed eating, scooping his fingers toward his mouth, and looked at me with raised bushy eyebrows.

  “Ravenous,” I said, and I suddenly was.

  He led me out of the rehabilitation pavilion. It was a bright afternoon, and I looked around, breathing in that sweet air. The grounds of the Sleeperhold reminded me of a rustic summer camp I attended as a young teenager, adjacent to a wilderness preserve segment of one of the inner arcs – lots of trees, dirt trails connecting scattered buildings (though the buildings here were more diverse and strange), the glimmer of a lake off in the distance. I’d had a wonderful time at that camp (my first kiss, my first breakup, my second kiss), and I’d learned to swim and sail small craft and make fire and shoot bows and arrows. Our art teacher had been a moderately renowned sculptor, and I credit them with inspiring my career. I was instantly at peace and ease in this place.

  Various people – most humanoid, but a few of more unusual configurations – went past us, bustling around on their own business, some smiling and waving. A few wore gowns like me, but really, the dress varied wildly, from rugged tactical-looking gear to simple shirts and trousers to complicated things bursting with colors and sequins and feathers. I later learned those people were support staff. A few were the companions of travelers we’d recruited, but most were friends and cousins Toros had brought from his own home world (which, I gathered, was a place most people wanted to leave). Even after I could speak the language, the terminology confused me, and honestly it’s still a bit muddled. Collectively, their group was known as the Sleepers, though sometimes the word “sleeper” was used informally to describe interdimensional travelers, and the leader of the Sleepers wasn’t a sleeper himself: Toros could only travel through worlds in a sleepercar.

  He took me to the cafeteria, a long low building, and led me to a series of food-laden tables. He pointed to one table and shook his head, but I didn’t need telling to avoid that section – there was a pot of murky water full of wriggling things, a plate of sliced discs that shimmered like oil, a bowl of small spiky pods. Food, I assumed, for some of the more unusual residents. Unusual by my standards, anyway. I was going to have to alter those.

  I went instead to a table heaped with fruit and meat and vegetables and salad, much of it at least adjacent to foods I recognized, and made myself a heaping plate. I sat with Toros, who kept up a steady low murmur as I stuffed myself. He pointed to things and people, presumably identifying them, as if I could possibly keep up with the vocabulary. After I declared myself full, he took me back to the rehabilitation suite and settled me down into the chair.

  I was docile, complacent, content to be led and to do as I was told. My senses were working properly again, and I could string thoughts together, but I was still curiously lacking in volition. Something about seeing those worms between the worlds made everything seem pointless, I think, but it wasn’t even despair so much as neutrality. Nothing mattered, so I might as well follow the easiest path.

  This time, Toros settled a circlet onto my brow, sort of like the one Sorlyn had worn in the chariot, and triggered the light array.

  The earlier course of treatment had been devoted to reintegrating my senses and my psyche, restoring my sense of linear time, and dulling the memories of trauma – they were still there, but they’d been smoothed, like jagged pieces of glass made harmless after years of tumbling around in the sea. This treatment, it turned out, was about teaching me the common language of the Sleeperhold. The lights sent me into a hypnagogic state, and the circlet stimulated my mind, and gradually all the endless murmuring from Toros started to coalesce into a rudimentary understanding of the language. I was like an infant again, my brain made more plastic, taking in the deep structure of the Sleeper tongue along with vocabulary.

  When I came out of my fugue, Toros was still there. He ran everything, but he took the time to oversee my care personally. “Hello, Ana,” he said. “Can you understand me a little?”

  “I can,” I said. “You saved me.” I burst out crying, and he rushed over and patted my hand.

  “That is what we do here, when we can. When you are feeling better, you can join us, or we can take you home.”

  “Home,” I said immediately, and he nodded, untroubled by my decision.

  The following weeks were devoted to learning the language, mostly. (That linguistic virus of yours, Zax! If only we’d had that sooner, the Sleepers could have achieved so much more.) I also focused on getting myself into better physical shape, first taking walks, later swimming in the lake (where some aquatic people lived; they were fun to race against, even though I didn’t have a hope of keeping up). I was given a small room of my own in the big lodge where Toros lived, and started to feel settled. Sorlyn, the violet-eyed Sleeper who’d traveled with Toros, popped in once to ask me some questions about “your traveler”. Sorlyn took it all in, especially interested in the fact that Zax had found me on his fortieth world, expressing wonder that he’d reached a world with a common language. After I’d told all I knew – really not much – Sorlyn said he hoped my recovery continued well. I was still too loose in my brain, or just overstimulated, to wonder why he wanted to know about Zax.

  After about a week, I asked Toros when I could go home, and he said “Any time. It isn’t a terribly long journey – just twenty minutes longer than your trip from the world of silent towers to this one. Just say when, but you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

  I did miss home… but only in flashes. I’d be seized with a desire for the tea I liked, or my favorite skywine, or I’d get the itch to play with my drones and matter compilers, but I didn’t really miss any of the people. I’d lived for my work, and even my closest friends and lovers were really just acquaintances, now that I thought about it.

  So I kept putting off going back home, week after week. I told myself to treat this as an extended retreat, a vacation, a much-needed rest after my ordeal with the worms. I became friendly with some of the Sleepers, and, as my vocabulary improved, I started to get a sense of the nature of the work they did here. They rescued people, like me and like Zax, who’d been lost in the multiverse, and they studied the whole phenomenon of interdimensional travelers. I heard occasional mentions of a cult, and enemies, but I told myself all that was none of my business. I was just recuperating, after all.

  Then, one day, my perspective changed. I remember vividly sitting on a stump while Sorlyn tinkered with the wiring of one of the chariots. Their inventor, Gibberne, had constructed all our chariots by hand, since he didn’t have access to his world’s tech anymore, and supplies of the necessary special components were limited. After he died – lab explosion – there were no more sleepercars forthcoming, and they were delicate devices, in constant need of small adjustments. We only had eight of them, so if even one fell out of commission, it drastically limited the Sleepers’ operations. (I know where one of those eight chariots is now, because I’m sitting in it, and Minna took another. Most of the rest are gone; I wish all the rest were.)

  I was just kind of zoning out, listening to birdsong, when Sorlyn said, “Toros says after we take you home, we’ll try to pick up the trail of that traveler who took you. Zax, you said his name was?”

  I snapped back into the moment. Zax. I’d barely let myself think about him, and he was so tied up with my trauma that my memories of him were a little smoothed-over, too – but hearing his name sent a sharp ache right through my chest, a mix of anger and affection and worry and guilt. “What?”

  “Zax,” Sorlyn said, head stuck in the chariot’s workings. “We have to return to the world of silent towers anyway, to take you back home, so we might as well follow his trail upstream too, see if we can reach him. It’s been a while, so we aren’t hopeful, but…”

  I stopped hearing him. It had never occurred to him that the Sleepers could find Zax. I’d assumed he was lost in the multiverse, spun off into unknown worlds. I knew about worm-trails, but I hadn’t thought they would actually follow him – surely he was too far gone? “I could see Zax again?”

  Sorlyn turned his bare head and looked at me. “Oh,” he said. “I hadn’t thought… Toros wouldn’t want to take you into unknown worlds. It’s very dangerous, and the chariot gets crowded with three people inside – let alone four, if we actually manage to find Zax alive and recruit him.” He looked thoughtful. “If you became a Sleeper agent, though…”

  That’s how it happened. I joined the Sleepers because I wanted to see Zax again. Sorlyn always struck me as guileless, but I wonder sometimes if he planned that nonchalant mention of Zax to tempt me. I was surprised by the intensity of my feelings when I allowed myself to think of Zax. That’s when I started telling myself my feelings weren’t real, and even if they were, that Zax wouldn’t reciprocate them anymore, not after so much time. We all try to protect ourselves the best way we know how. I told Sorlyn over and over that I didn’t want to find Zax because I had feelings for him, I just wanted to know he was OK, and to thank him for leaving me food, and to let him know I was still alive, and to explain to him why he’d developed this condition, and to kick him in the shin for getting me mixed up in all this, and – Sorlyn always just nodded and smiled and never argued with me a bit, but he knew.

  I miss Sorlyn. He was a wonderful companion. Much better than the angry cultist I have bound and gagged and wired up in the back seat of the chariot now. The sleepercars aren’t meant to work with an unwilling person as the engine, of course. Toros is far too ethical to allow anything that looks like coercion in his organization, and there are safeguards in place to prevent exactly what I’m doing.

  But I’m a little more practical than Toros. And like I said before: I’m a pretty good engineer.

  A Knife to the Throat • A New Companion • Starfall Galleria • Comets • Beauty Renewed • An Altercation • Zaveta Learns About Drones

  I said, “He isn’t my friend.” I’d never previously noticed how many muscles move in the jaw and neck when you speak even a simple sentence, but then, I’d never spoken with a blade that close to those muscles before. Clearly, that wasn’t enough of an explanation for her, so I risked my life further to elaborate. “I’m following that other traveler’s trail backward – trying to hunt down the people he worked for.”

  “Why?” Zaveta whispered in my ear.

  “Because they’re stealing people, and I want to stop them.”

  “Where did he send my people? Can you get them back?”