“Are you here to buy, or sell?” the figure behind the counter said, voice sepulchral.

  “Sell. I have some gold, and some jewelry.”

  “May I see?”

  I reached into my bag and drew out a small pouch. I always made a point of carrying small precious things with me, for situations like this. Granted, there are worlds where gold and diamonds aren’t scarce or valuable, but there are broad trends of geology and psychology that seem to hold up on a reasonable array of worlds. Judging by the jewels in the case, this was one of them. I plucked out a diamond, a sapphire, a black opal, a red beryl, and several fine pearls. I also had a small quantity of nearly pure gold in finger-sized bars (gold is heavy, so I can’t carry much), and some gems set in bracelets and rings, but I decided to start with the loose items.

  The shopkeeper bent low and examined them, light shining from his helmet. He pushed away the red beryl and sapphire – “I do not need these” – but considered the others carefully. “I can offer you… three thousand lumens for the lot.”

  That would buy a lot of herbed loaves, plus traveling food, clothing, maybe some small technological wonders… but it seldom hurts to negotiate. I started to sweep the jewels back together, shaking my head regretfully, and the shopkeeper chuckled. “Fine, fine, I see you know your own worth. I’ll make it… three thousand five hundred.”

  “That’s more like it.” Maybe we could even afford… “Tell me, are there rooms for rent nearby?”

  “Of course. The galleria is anchored by the Barycenter Suites. Their accommodations have fine views of the local collapse. I think they run about four hundred lumens a night, since we’re off-cycle.”

  Zaveta wouldn’t know what to make of a real bed. Maybe we could order room service. And I could get a shower – unless this was one of those worlds with sonic wave cleaners or nanites. I hoped not. I loved hot water showers. I hadn’t had one since the Sleeperhold. In fact, I’d last taken one with Ana…

  I forced my attention back to the matter at hand. “I accept your–”

  One of the windows behind me exploded, and I spun to see the guard land in a crumpled heap on the floor. He groaned loudly, so at least he was still alive. Zaveta climbed in through the window, cudgel in hand, roaring in her language: “No one dishonors Zaveta of the Broken Wheel!” I rushed toward her, hoping to drag her away before she did any more damage.

  Which is why I also got caught in the paralyzing field projected by the swarm of security drones that arrived to apprehend her.

  Ana

  I wanted to rush off and find Zax right away, but Toros insisted I wasn’t ready for field work yet. I needed training before he’d risk sending me out into the unknown, even with a Sleeper as experienced as Sorlyn accompanying me.

  Learning to operate the sleepercar with Toros sitting alongside reminded me of my day-father teaching me to operate a hovership back home: an exercise in impatience and frustration, with someone I liked and respected too much to yell at. I got the basics right away, and understood the mechanisms instinctively because I’ve always been good with machines, but Toros insisted on doing everything so slowly and incrementally, making sure I’d absolutely mastered every step before I could learn the next. For the first three lessons we didn’t even leave the Sleeperhold, just sat in the cockpit, going over the controls and the meanings of the indicators. “Can’t you just flash lights in my eyes and make my mind extra absorbent so I’ll learn this faster?” I demanded.

  He chuckled. “Learning to drive a vehicle does not require the level of neuroplasticity that learning an alien language does, Ana. Piloting this vehicle is well within your baseline capabilities.”

  I growled in frustration. “Zax could be hurt, Toros, or he could be dead, don’t you understand?”

  “I do understand,” he said placidly. “I need you to set your expectations appropriately, Ana. The odds of us finding Zax alive and well… they are not good. I have followed many travelers over the years. Few of them survive more than a few worlds, for the multiverse is a dangerous place. If I send you out to search for him, unprepared… then you will be hurt, or perhaps killed, as well, and I fail to see how having both of you dead is an improvement.”

  I slumped in the seat and stared at the console lights. “Do you really think it’s hopeless?”

  Toros shook his head. “I don’t believe in hopelessness, as a rule, and in this case, there are reasons for optimism. Zax made it much farther than most Sleepers do – forty worlds, you said, before he reached you? He might be one of the rare exceptions, either very lucky, or a natural survivor, or both. Those tend to make the best agents for our order, too. The way Zax left food behind, tried to take care of you when he couldn’t save you – that speaks well of him. That’s why I’m willing to send a sleepercar on an extended mission to find him. If nothing else, you will follow his trail to its end, and then, his end will not be a mystery.”

  “If he’s dead, I can’t do anything about that,” I said. “So I have to proceed on the assumption that he’s alive. How far do you think we’ll have to go? I mean, how many worlds has Zax likely passed through since he lost me?”

  Toros stroked his beard. “Mmm, assuming he sleeps on a cycle not unlike yours, barring surprise head injuries or liberal use of sedatives, perhaps… ninety or a hundred?”

  I hadn’t expected such a large number. “But… that would mean I’ve been here for months.” I cocked my head. The days here were roughly the same length as the ones I was used to back home, but the calendars didn’t have any connection to time as it was kept in the Realm, so I realized I didn’t know how long I’d been at Sleeperhold. “Wait. I’ve been here for months?”

  Toros nodded. “Your first weeks were… fairly shattered, I’m afraid.”

  I asked follow-up questions, and it turned out my psyche hadn’t knit itself together as quickly as I’d assumed. There’d been a period of catatonia before the light therapy began, during which I was fed intravenously and eventually spoon fed, my linens changed by staff and my body sponge-bathed, while Colubra’s neurological rehabilitation drugs did their work. “A hundred worlds,” I murmured. “How could Zax possibly survive so many?”

  “I found Sorlyn on something like his four-hundredth world,” Toros said. “Of course, he was a soldier on his homeworld, with extensive survival training, and his people have natural camouflage, a sort of psychic ability that lets them mask their presence from others. I don’t suppose Zax exhibited training or talents like that?”

  “He was a social worker,” I said miserably.

  “Mmm,” Toros said. “Well, you never know.” He patted my hand. “There’s always hope. Now, let me show you what to do if the decision manifold sticks…”

  I mastered the sleepercar, first piloting it on local expeditions with Sorlyn as a very annoying backseat driver. We had to get used to working together, since he’d be my partner once I set out. On one of our first trips together, I learned the true nature of the Sleeperhold, which I’d just assumed was located on some unpopulated planet.

  Sorlyn had me close the dome of the sleepercar but make it transparent, so we could see where we were going. We set out flying on a straight line over the lake, toward the far shore, where I’d never gone, even on my long hikes – the trails never quite seemed to lead all the way around the body of water, doubling back on themselves instead.

  We skimmed low over the trees beyond the lake, and I saw a shimmer on the horizon, like solar radiation interacting with a magnetic field to create aurora, all flickering ribbons of golden light. “That’s the containment field,” Sorlyn said. “Don’t worry, the sleepercar is calibrated to pass through it in both directions.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Behold, the edge of our world,” Sorlyn pointed.

  The sleepercar passed through the zone of light. The barrier wasn’t very thick – we were on the other side in seconds – but beyond that field, everything was different.

  The Sleeperhold wasn’t on a planet at all: it was located on a very small moon, in orbit around a turbulent gas giant that now filled the sky, all blue and purple clouds. I boggled at that, and the dozens of derelict spaceships that floated in our vicinity. The ships, once sleek and lethal-looking, were now destroyed, like stinging insects crushed under a boot heel.

  I was so startled by the sudden shift from forest camp to futuristic hellscape that I lost control of the sleepercar, and it flipped upside down, making Sorlyn cluck his tongue as we dangled from our restraints. I looked up through the dome, and the moon where I’d been unwittingly living all these months seemed now to be suspended above me. From here, I could see that the Sleeperhold was contained in a shimmering golden dome, ringed by silver metal towers. That bubble of light and air contained my whole world. I got the sleepercar turned upright and resumed skimming over the pitted gray surface of the moon.

  “Why is our headquarters here?” I said.

  “It’s practical,” Sorlyn said. “There’s a lot of floating tech to salvage, but that’s just a bonus, really. When Toros was searching for a home base, he had me look for the most desolate universe I could find near the worlds where we’d seen cult activity. As far as we can tell, this whole section of space is devoid of habitable areas – the few planets in this system that were ever capable of supporting life have been rendered uninhabitable by whatever war-wrecked those ships. There were a few space stations nearby capable of sustaining life, so we blew those up. That force-field bubble down there is the only place within several hundred million kilometers where you won’t die instantly without protection.”

  “But why?” I said again. “Surely there are nicer places to live – and places where a system failure won’t leave us exposed to vacuum!”

  “That dome survived an apocalyptic war,” Sorlyn said. “We think it was the pleasure palace and safe room of some oligarch, and its systems are multiply redundant and buried throughout the moon – we couldn’t even turn the field off on purpose, let alone by accident or enemy action. As for why Toros picked this little bubble of air in a lifeless place… he did it to protect us. We only travel to worlds that can sustain our lives. We don’t always end up in nice places, but there is always breathable air and a lack of deadly radiation, and do you know how vanishingly rare those conditions must be in an infinite – or functionally infinite – multiverse?”

  “Pretty rare,” I said. “So any traveler who comes through to this universe, or at least this sector of this universe, can only arrive in the dome?”

  “Exactly. That makes it very hard to ambush us, or set up a nearby outpost in secret. We have extensive surveillance and security systems in place at the Sleeperhold – we notice anyone who comes through. We can’t guarantee there’s nowhere else habitable in this entire cosmos, but if they show up on some planet in another solar system, so what? Even if the cult found a spaceship and figured out how to pilot it, they wouldn’t know how to find us, or even realize we were in some other solar system in the same universe waiting to be found.”

  “I guess that makes sense. You think cultists are likely to find us, though?” I’d been given a primer in the basics of the multiverse, as the Sleepers understood them: each world was adjacent to a few other worlds, and each of those adjacent to a few others, so the options got exponential really fast. “We’re one grain of sand on a beach, right?”

  “Early on, we followed trails back until we found worlds where lots of those trails overlapped,” Sorlyn explained. “Their missionaries set out in groups, and then split up, as best we can tell, sometimes leaving companions behind to create permanent outposts. The Sleeperhold is right in the midst of an array of worlds that show a lot of cult activity. We suspect we’re close to their world of origin… though whether close means fifty hops away or five hundred, we aren’t sure. Doing exploration and surveys is tricky, with all the branching worlds, some of them full of things that want to kill us.”

  “We’re so close their homeworld?” I whistled. “I had no idea.”

  “We’re on the front lines,” Sorlyn agreed. “The cultists must have a home base where those foul worms are grown or hatched or cultivated, and they radiate out from that point, infecting people along the way, and sending them on their own journeys. We’re all fanning out from that unknown point of origin, but not throughout the entire multiverse, at least, not yet – we’re in a particular segment, or arc, of that whole. We don’t think the cult knows where we are – we have no reason to believe their leadership even knows the Sleepers exist – but they could stumble upon us.”

  “I liked it better when I thought we were living on one speck in an infinite expanse. Safer that way.”

  “The cultists or their victims have spread throughout a few thousand worlds, Toros thinks, though it’s hard to be sure. The cultists fare a little better than their victims as travelers, since they know what they’re getting into when they set out, instead of just waking up in a strange hostile world one day, but even so, we often follow trails and find dead cultists at the end. They get killed by local fauna or environmental hazards or hostile natives, too. We think they try to get as far away as possible from their homeworld before infecting someone, so they can extend their reach further into the multiverse, but of course it’s a balancing act – if they wait too long, they risk dying without finding anyone to infect.”

  “Why are they trying to infect people anyway?” I said. “What’s the point?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” Sorlyn said. “We’ve tried asking the ones we captured, but since we don’t have a common language, it doesn’t work very well.”

  “You taught me the language of the Sleepers pretty quickly,” I said.

  Sorlyn chuckled. “You were cooperative. You also don’t travel to another universe every time you lose consciousness. Neither is true of the cultists, which makes them harder to work with. Mostly, the cultists we encounter try to murder us and escape, or try to kill themselves, in that order. A couple of companions, like you, working as support staff, have been turned into travelers that way – a cultist manages to commit suicide, and their parasite jumps to the nearest uninfected person.”

  “That’s horrible.” I shuddered.

  “Better it happens on the Sleeperhold. At least then the new victims don’t spin out into the endless multiverse alone – they fall asleep, end up in one of the immediately adjacent worlds where we maintain satellite outposts, and someone picks them up and brings them home in a sleepercar.”

  I set our chariot down on a level spot with a good view of the gas giant. “What I’m hearing from you is that the Cult of the Worm is horrible and they suck.”

  “That they do,” Sorlyn said. “We have to stop them, both for reasons of basic decency – tearing people out of their lives and casting them into the multiverse isn’t very nice – but also because our more scientifically adroit personnel believe the cultists are damaging the fabric of space-time. In heavily traveled worlds, we’ve detected breaches, tears in reality, that allow people who aren’t infected by the parasite to transition between worlds.”

  Wow. “And those people don’t lose their minds during the transition?”

  Sorlyn shook his head. “No. By all accounts, it’s like walking through a doorway from one room to another. There is no terrifying void between. Our theory is, worlds joined by a breach are sort of… melting into each other. Instead of being properly separate, they begin to overlap, and occupy the same space.”

  “That sounds… bad.”

  “We think it might be the way the multiverse ends,” Sorlyn said. “Everything crashing together, a billion trillion universes attempting to occupy the same space. But it’s not just the long-term effects we’re worried about, because people aren’t the only things that pass through breaches. Objects do, too. And radiation. Pathogens. It’s like a crack in a wall, allowing the environments on either side to mingle. The consequences can be disastrous. So. We’re motivated.”

  “Why can’t you just gear up and follow the cultists back to their point of origin and blow up their worm farm?”

  Sorlyn chuckled. “That’s the kind of work we’re training you to do, Ana. We’ve sent scouts, Sleepers armed with tracking tech, to trace the cultists we’ve found. They make it about forty worlds away, but not much farther – I think the record is forty-two jumps. When we send someone in a sleepercar to rendezvous with the scouts and bring them back, we find them dead – or just gone, their trail ending in mid-air, with no sign of them anywhere.”

  “What? How is that possible?”

  “Their bodies could have been destroyed by acid. Fire. Disintegration rays. Who knows? We believe the cultists have created a ring of defenses in the worlds around their home. When they send out one of their infected missionaries to spread the parasites, that missionary probably also carries an uninfected cultist or two with them, and leaves them in adjacent worlds to establish a little cult base. When our Sleepers get too close, the cultists kill them. After we lost half a dozen agents, Toros put a pause on those expeditions. Our sleepercars have stealth capabilities, so they would make better scouts, but we’re terrified of the cult getting their hands on one. If they had a sleepercar, the cultists could come and go from their homeworld at will, access our database of known worlds, go back to resupply with more worms when their missionaries ran out, travel safely to far distant worlds and spread their infection much more deeply into the multiverse…” He shook his head. “Nightmare scenario.”

  “Maybe if we could infiltrate the cult,” I mused. “Send someone undercover…”

  “We’d love to. We know they recruit members from beyond their homeworld, occasionally – why anyone would join the cult, we don’t know, but it happens – so it should theoretically be possible to embed an agent in their organization… but we don’t know their language. We can’t talk to the cultists, so it’s hard to convince them we’re part of the team. So far, waiting around for one of them to approach us and ask us to join hasn’t worked. Toros has been trying to learn their tongue, but, like I said, they don’t cooperate.”