“So what do we do in the meantime?”

  Sorlyn shrugged. “We use the sleepercars for rescue and recruitment, so we have numbers to deal with the cult once we do track them to their lair. We think there can’t be that many cultists, and each of their missionaries can turn multiple people into travelers, so in theory, victims outnumber victimizers… except lots of those victims die before we find them. Once we have a bigger team of trained agents, though, Toros plans to send a heavily armed expedition in sleepercars to track the cult to its source once and for all.”

  “That sounds… terrifying.”

  Sorlyn looked at me carefully. “Do you want to go home? It’s not too late.”

  I thought about it. I shook my head. “No. This is important. I… want to do something important.” I also wanted to find Zax, and going along with their plan was part of the deal.

  Sorlyn grunted. “Good. That was the real point of this little outing, you know. Toros wanted me to convey to you how much is at stake, and how heavily the odds are stacked against us, and see if you still wanted in.”

  “Oh, I’m still in.”

  “In that case, we’ll move on to the next part of your training – how to survive, and how to stop other people from killing you.”

  “You’re going to teach me to punch and kick people?” I said.

  “A little bit,” Sorlyn said. “Also how to hit them with sticks. You’ll get training in weapons and armor. The cultists we run into don’t usually have weaponry more advanced than knives, unless they scavenge something on another world.”

  “They invented multidimensional travel but they haven’t figured out how to make guns?”

  Sorlyn shrugged. “Just one of the many mysteries about them. Maybe they’re content to steal what they need. Regardless, we have better equipment than the cult. We do a lot of foraging too, and since the sleepercars let us go to the same worlds over and over, we can return to especially fruitful places, in a way the cultists can’t.” He shuddered. “Sorry. I was just thinking about what would happen if the cultists had sleepercars again. We’re relatively safe from the cult, because the cultists we capture can’t go backward to report us to their bosses. I much prefer being the hunter to being the hunted. We need every advantage we can get.”

  We flew back to the force bubble and landed on the edge of the compound, where there was… a lot of commotion going on. Several of the support staff were dragging a thrashing humanoid wrapped in filthy gray robes toward the rehabilitation lodge. A Sleeper I knew vaguely – Trina, I think her name was – sat on a rock, sobbing into her hands, while someone else murmured and comforted her. “What’s going on?” I said.

  Sorlyn put a hand to his ear – he had some kind of comms device there – and held up a finger, frowning. Then he let out a low whistle. “They caught a cultist. He appeared right here in camp.” He pointed at the thrashing figure as he disappeared into the lodge. “He attacked Trina and knocked her over, and she hit her head. The impact knocked her out, so she traveled to an adjacent world, and he went with her.”

  I shivered. “He transitioned with her while he was awake?”

  Sorlyn nodded. “You remember what that’s like, a little, don’t you?”

  “More than I’d like to.”

  “Yes. He started howling. Trina managed to contain him, and tie him up, until a sleepercar went to pick them up.”

  “What will happen to him now?”

  “That’s up to Toros,” Sorlyn said. “But I’m curious too, so let’s go ask.”

  We found Toros in the rehabilitation lodge, standing against a wall, looking thoughtful. The cultist was in a nearby hospital bed, Colubra fussing over him. “Is he sedated?” I asked. “How can he be sedated without poofing to another world?”

  “We’ve put him into a decreased metabolic state,” Toros said. “Enough to keep him calm, not enough to trigger travel. He will fall asleep eventually, and transition, but we have sleepercars waiting in the immediately adjacent worlds to bring him back so we can continue his therapy.”

  “Are you going to try to repair his psyche?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Toros said. “I have questions for him.”

  “I guess you can teach him our language, too,” I said.

  Toros shook his head. I’d never seen him look so grim. “That’s what we don’t understand, Ana. Trina says after he traveled awake, he was screaming – and he was screaming in our language. Shouting about worms, and tearing down walls, and breaking chains, and setting a prisoner free.”

  Sorlyn said, “How in the dying stars did a cultist learn the language of Sleeperhold? Toros, you constructed that language. It’s not like they could have picked it up somewhere else.”

  “That’s what concerns me.” Toros walked to the cultist’s bedside, watching the dirty, bearded man mutter and twitch. “We’ve always hoped we were safe from organized retaliation by the cult because the leadership on their homeworld doesn’t know about us – the working theory was, they can’t know, because they’re totally compartmentalized. They send out missionaries who can never report back to their king or high priest or ruling tribunal, because the parasite only lets them travel forward. But if they learned our language, that means they know about us. That suggests they can backtrack, to deliver information.”

  “Piggybacking,” Sorlyn said. “It must be.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A theory of Sorlyn’s,” Toros said. “The idea is, a missionary could travel with an uninfected companion. Then, at some point, the missionary could feed that companion a parasite. The worm doesn’t know where you’ve been without it.”

  “So the newly infected partner could travel back through worlds they’d seen before as a companion, and report to their leaders.” I groaned. “But… isn’t there a chance they’d go to other adjacent worlds instead, and get lost?”

  “We’ve found worm sign scratched onto trees, stones, and pillars near cultist camp sites,” Sorlyn said. “Those marks are often accompanied by unknown glyphs. I think those places mark transition points – they are guideposts. If the newly infected companion goes to sleep in the same place their escort did, they’ll follow the trail back to the prior world, following the existing fissure. With piggybacking, they could even make a sort of map of the worlds immediately adjacent to their own – the same way we do with our sleepercars.”

  “I had my doubts,” Toros said. “We’ve never seen evidence to suggest they’re that organized. The cultists seem to set out in small groups, but they quickly scatter into pairs and then individuals. They seem more interested in fanning out than reporting back – they essentially take part in a series of oneway suicide missions. The only hint of organization we’ve found is the fact that our people can’t follow them all the way to their source without being killed. My assumption has always been that they have a bulwark of outposts in the few worlds immediately adjacent to their own.” He nodded toward the cultist. “Now… I have to revise my assumptions. Perhaps they are piggybacking, though even then, I don’t know how they’d learn our language. Maybe if they caught one of our Sleepers and interrogated them… but Sleepers are hard to hold onto, by definition.”

  “Maybe they can surveil us,” I said. “The parasites can sense a few things about adjacent worlds. Maybe the cultists are able to get a… closer view than we can.”

  “There is a simpler explanation.” Toros met my eyes, and I saw tears in his. “They might simply have spies embedded among us. Our goal has been to infiltrate them… but what if they’ve already infiltrated us?”

  “We’ll find out,” Sorlyn said. “We’ll put this poor creature’s mind back together, and we’ll get answers, since we know he can speak our language now.”

  “Yes,” Toros said. “That’s our best hope.”

  Except it didn’t work out that way. Sometime that night, one of those spies Toros speculated about disabled the surveillance system in the rehabilitation lodge, and cut the resting cultist’s throat.

  Jailbreak • Zaveta Learns About Zippers • Teeming with Teeth • Fifteen or Twenty Worlds Away • A Melee • Two Trails in the Garden

  “I am sorry, Zax.” Zaveta sat slumped on the gray bench against the gray wall. We were in some kind of holding cell in the basement of the Starfall Galleria, having been dragged there by floating many-armed drones. Our paralysis had just worn off enough for us to talk and move around.

  “What happened back there?” I asked.

  “That guard approached me and told me he did not like how I was looking at the shop. I was only trying to keep an eye on you, in case of trouble. He said I should move along. I said I was waiting for a friend. He said I looked like a thief, and if I did not leave, he would call security.” She scowled. “He called me a thief, Zax! I have never taken something that is not mine through stealth or treachery – only what I earned through work or by right of conquest.” She spat on the cell floor, which did not improve the ambiance. “A thief. That is a killing insult where I am from. But I remained calm, and told him I was doing no harm, and he should leave me be. That is when he laid his hands upon me.”

  I sighed. “So you threw him through a window.”

  “A very measured response, I thought. I know you said no violence, except in self-defense, but when he touched me… it felt like an attack, Zax, or the precursor to one.”

  “Next time, if there is a next time, just… walk away.”

  “Zaveta of the Broken Wheel does not retreat from a challenge, Zax.”

  I rubbed my face. I’d been so close to getting supplies, outfitting us properly, and the temptation to be angry with Zaveta for ruining things was so strong… but I thought back to my first forays into the multiverse, and I hadn’t exactly handled myself with aplomb, either. A world like this one was totally alien and doubtless overwhelming for Zaveta. “I understand that. But… did you ever do, I don’t know, reconnaissance missions? Undercover work?”

  “Covert operations, you mean.” Zaveta sighed. “My superiors deemed me… temperamentally unsuited to such work, I confess. But that is the sort of approach we should take here, isn’t it? You are right. We are trying to gather intelligence, and forage to continue our mission, and I spoiled both efforts. Zax, I pledge to do better. I cannot claim I will make no more mistakes. To live is to err. I can say only that I always learn from my errors. This sort of journey, it is just… very new to me. I thought I was prepared, but in the moment, it proved difficult. The strategies I used in my old life may not be applicable here.”

  She seemed so sincere that I softened entirely. “There could come a time when you really need to throw someone through a window,” I said. “This just… wasn’t it. I appreciate the way you didn’t kill him, though.”

  “That did show admirable restraint on my part. I am pleased you noticed.” She went to the bars, which were plain old metal, fortunately, and not some kind of force field. “How do we escape this place?” She rattled the bars, or tried to; they didn’t really rattle. “We could simply sleep our way to the next world, but then we might lose the trail, yes? Find ourselves in a different world than our quarry came from?”

  I nodded. “It’s better to transition as close as possible to the end of the worm-trail. That pretty much guarantees we’ll stay on the right track.”

  “They took your bag and my weapons and picks. I can see them, in that locked cabinet behind the – ‘watch captain’, we would say in my world. Behind his desk.”

  The “watch captain” was another hulking figure in an exoskeletal harness, and he’d dumped us here and told us to “cool off until the external authorities arrive”. I didn’t know how long we had before that, but I’d have to hope it was enough.

  “I can get us out of the cell.” I held out my left arm, and began to pluck at the flesh on the inside of my forearm with the fingers of my right hand. I peeled away a flap of skin, revealing what looked like dark wood underneath.

  Many worlds ago I’d lost a good portion of my left arm in an accident. My friend Minna, who is a wonder-worker of all things biological, fashioned a remarkable prosthetic for me out of a sort of living wood. The new arm and hand integrated with my own nervous system beautifully, though the sensation in those fingertips was slightly dulled, even after all this time. Minna had also cultured a kind of moss or mold – I hadn’t inquired too deeply – to cover the prosthetic, and mimic the texture and color of my own skin.

  A while back I’d asked her if we could put a hidden compartment in the arm, to hide some emergency supplies, and she’d helped me hollow it out. I popped open the compartment now, while Zaveta stared. “I knew a man with a hollowed-out wooden leg, once, where he kept a small flask,” she said. “But that limb looked like it was made of wood.”

  “A friend of mine made this for me, when I lost my original arm.” I reached into the compartment, and pulled out a plasma key. They were one of my favorite technological devices, and I’d found variations of them in various advanced realities, so I collected them whenever I could. This one was even shaped like an old key, its shaft as long as my forefinger and apparently made of black iron. “You might want to avert your gaze.”

  I went to the bars and activated the key. A blazing light appeared from the end, the color of lightning, and my spectacles automatically darkened to protect my vision. I deftly cut through the metal bars above, below, and on either side of the lock mechanism until it fell to the floor with a clang. The cut edges of metal glowed briefly and then began to cool. I deactivated the nearly depleted key, put it away, smoothed the flesh back down over the hatch in my arm, and pushed the door open. “See?”

  “You are a resourceful fellow, Zax.”

  I went to the desk and looked in the top drawer, where I’d seen the watch captain put away the remote he’d used to seal the locker and our cell both. I fumbled with the buttons until I got the locker doors to swing open, and handed Zaveta her cudgel and her pack, then gathered my own possessions. On impulse, I opened the other lockers, and found a few odds and ends of clothing, including a flat brown cap, a button-down shirt, and a dark blue hooded jacket with the logo of a ringed planet on the back. I pulled on the hat and shirt, and handed Zaveta the jacket. “Put that on, so we won’t look quite as distinctive. The most important thing now is to get to the atrium and pick up the worm-trail. If we can do that quietly, so much the better.”

  Zaveta pulled on the hoodie, and then began to pull the zipper up and down its metal track, marveling. I showed her how it worked, and she zipped up and laughed in delight. “This fastening is ingenious!” I grinned back at her. At least she wasn’t a brooding club-wielding warrior.

  I pulled my cap low, and she put her hood up. We went to the door and pushed it open, revealing the long gray corridor we’d been dragged down while paralyzed. A sleek white drone hovered at head height, and emitted a shrill buzz when we appeared.

  Zaveta smashed the thing out of the air with her cudgel, reducing it to sparking fragments, then glanced at me. “I hope that was all right?”

  “You can hit the drones,” I said. “They don’t seem to be people, just machines.”

  “Things like that are people in other places?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “There are all sorts of people.”

  “Everything is so strange since I met you.”

  “Just you wait.”

  We crept along the corridor, but didn’t encounter any other drones, guards, or visible surveillance. Once we pushed through a door into the galleria proper, I relaxed a bit. With luck, that smashed drone wouldn’t be noticed right away, and no one would look for us soon. I looked at the shops with yearning, but I hadn’t finished my transaction at Beauty Renewed, so I couldn’t pop in and buy anything, and I wasn’t about to risk getting arrested for shoplifting. We stood on a sliding walkway – that delighted Zaveta, too – and then took an escalator down to the ground level of the atrium, where the worm-trail twisted along.

  The food court was on that floor, order counters and seating areas ringing the forest and fountain and floating sculptures, and the scents were competing and delicious. Zaveta’s stomach audibly grumbled, and I sighed, wishing there was a way–

  A crowd of teenagers dressed in matching neon-yellow workout clothes went jostling pass merrily, shouting, “Samples! Samples! Samples!” That’s when I noticed there were little stations dotted around, with tall tables staffed by smiling people doling out free tastes from the various dining options.

  I tugged Zaveta toward some kind of meatball station, and we each received one on a toothpick. Zaveta ate hers in one bite, eyes widening, and started to reach for the tray, but I smoothly guided her away. “Only the first one is free,” I murmured. “But there are other things to try.”

  We had a miniature feast: deep-fried root vegetables, a tiny cup of some cooked grain mixed with an inky black sauce, small strips of grilled meat, crunchy chips to dip in a tiny paper cup that held a dollop of spicy yellow sauce, flaky nutty sweets, some kind of flash-fried insect, delicate curled tentacles, weird dumplings filled with unidentifiable goo, baked goods cut into tiny bite-sized cubes – I ate them all, having long since expanded my palate to include basically anything edible. When you’ve grubbed in alien soil for a root to gnaw on in order to stave off starvation, you stop being a picky eater. Zaveta devoured every offering with gusto, licking her fingers and making loud proclamations of how much she enjoyed it all, and once we’d done the full circuit, she suggested switching our outerwear and seeing if we could get away with going around again.

  I was tempted, but then I saw a couple of the exoskeletal guards circling around the perimeter, clearly looking for someone. I nodded toward them and said, “We’d better go.” Zaveta saw them too, and didn’t argue, though I could tell she was eager for a rematch.

  Fortunately, the worm-trail led into the trees, along the winding paths into the heart of the atrium. The trails all led to the central fountain, but there were little nooks with benches and arched bowers here and there along the way, most unoccupied. I took a bench near the end of the worm-trail, and Zaveta sat beside me, nestled in, her bag in her lap. “Close enough?” she murmured.