“Yes,” I said, looking up at the worm-trail that ended right above our heads. I put my arm around her. “Do you think you can fall–”

  She began to snore lightly, and I chuckled. Zaveta hadn’t proven a perfect companion, true, but she had definite advantages, and most importantly, I liked her. Everything is easier when I’m not alone.

  I closed my eyes and took us away.

  * * *

  The next world (1308, let’s say; close enough) was a cave, somewhere deep under ground. We appeared on a shelf of rock, next to a body of water of indefinite size – it could have been an entire underground sea, for all I know. There was light, coming from things in the water – the creatures teeming there were head-sized balls of teeth, bristling with antennae, each stalk topped by a glowing light the size of an eyeball. Zaveta tossed a pebble into the water, and the things swarmed it, making the water froth and boil. “I was thinking it would be nice to have a bath soon,” she said. “But perhaps being dirty isn’t so bad, eh?”

  The trail ended less than a meter from where it began, but we waited a while – Zaveta couldn’t fall back asleep immediately – and explored the cave, such as it was. I showed her how to use one of my flashlights, and we puzzled over pictographs scratched onto one wall, depicting fish-like creatures building some kind of ziggurat. We found soot marks on another wall, and smears of ash on the rock, but we couldn’t see how anyone had gotten combustible material down here, as there didn’t seem to be any crevasse or crack or tunnel leading out, just smooth rock walls. “Are you always confronted with such mysteries?” Zaveta said.

  “Pretty often.” We were sitting, side-by-side, as far from the water as we could get. I was keeping half an eye on the bobbing lights, in case they turned out to be amphibious creatures merely biding their time for some reason. “You learn to just accept things.”

  “The world is what the world is, I have always said. Now I think I must say, the worlds are what the worlds are.” She tossed another rock into the water, setting off another frenzy, and chuckled. Then she looked at me, turning serious. “How far must we travel to reach these cultists?”

  “I can’t be sure,” I said. “The people I know who hunted them before never made it more than about forty worlds from their base of operations. They would send operatives to follow the cultist’s trails, but if they went farther than that, they would never come back. We think the cultists have outposts in the worlds close to their own, and they kill anyone who gets too close.”

  “How many more worlds must we traverse before we find one of these outposts?”

  I considered. I’d been knocked out in Sleeperhold, seen cultists in the adjacent world flickering out as they transitioned, fled when they saw me, fled farther to shake off pursuers, and then decided to become a hunter myself, and searched around until I picked up a trail… “Fifteen more worlds, or maybe twenty? That’s just a guess, though. The way the worlds are arranged, it’s not a simple progression. It’s more like following a path through a forest, and our path splits, and those new paths each split again, and so on. Now that we’re following a worm-trail, we know we’re going in the right direction, but I don’t know how far afield I wandered before I found that trail.”

  “Still, we are unlikely to reach one of their outposts or their citadel in the next few days,” Zaveta says. “That gives us ample time to prepare for conflict, and fare better than those scouts did.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  I sat down to catch up writing this account after that. Zaveta thinks written language is an affectation that drains all nuance and sense of drama from a given subject, and that writing is profoundly inferior to songs, chants, and storytelling, which depend on improvisation and a feeling of give-and-take with the audience. She once knew a… story-smith I guess is the best way to describe it… who recited the same tale twice in exactly the same way and was pelted with rotten fruit for their laziness.

  I pointed out that at least my prospective readers were unlikely to throw wormy apples at me, no matter how much I annoyed them, since we probably wouldn’t be in the same room when they read this, and Zaveta said I made a good, if cowardly, point.

  * * *

  Once she was tired enough to move on, we traveled again. I went to sleep with the usual trepidation, but also, I admit, with real excitement. While the nature of my journey through the multiverse has remained essentially the same – constantly waking up to the unknown – my relationship to that journey has shifted a lot since I began. At first I focused fully on just trying to survive, and those first weeks are still a blur of panic and despair. Meeting Ana taught me I could still make connections with people, however fleeting, and losing her so soon after taught me that I had to be careful with those connections. That’s when I started trying to help people when I could. I thought, if I could do something good, now and then, it might lend my life a bit of meaning. The Lector betraying me corroded my trust, and my sense of my own judgment, pretty severely – I’d thought he was a brilliant old man interested in learning about the world, not a megalomaniac who wanted to found a multiverse-spanning empire. After that, I was a wounded creature, limping along, forming tentative and short-lived connections. Until I found Minna, and Vicki, who felt like family. But by then the Lector was pursuing us, and I was constantly running away, trying to stay a step ahead, desperate to escape–

  All that changed when the Lector died, and Ana found me again. She took me to the Sleeperhold, and gave me the one thing I hadn’t even realized I needed: a mission. A chance to be active, and not reactive. When I learned about the Cult of the Worm, and the threat they pose to the fabric of reality, I finally had something important to work toward, and a goal bigger than myself. Now, when I move forward, it’s with purpose – not running away from danger, but moving toward a problem that needs to be solved. The multiverse is in disarray. I can help restore harmony.

  It turns out that’s all I ever wanted, and Ana’s the one who gave it to me. I’ve lost a lot in the process – the attack on Sleeperhold tore me away from my friends – but I’m more patient and hopeful now, too. I lost Minna once before, and she found her way back to me. Same with Ana. I know we’re all heading to the same place, and working toward the same goal. I choose to believe we will meet again, and that together we’ll make a difference.

  Despite all the terrible things that have happened, when I open my eyes now, I open them with hope.

  The world after the cave seemed to be a museum, dim and unoccupied. The worm-trail here was also relatively short – barely a hundred meters in length – but we had some time to kill again before Zaveta got sleepy, so we wandered through dim galleries, lit by faint lights, looking at paintings and sculptures (mostly abstract, so they didn’t tell us much about the world’s inhabitants). I thought it was odd that there were no guards or apparent security systems, until we finally found a door that seemed to lead to the outside. It was metal, and had an electronic lock with a keypad. I’m sure Vicki could have opened it in an instant, but neither Zaveta nor I had such skills, and I didn’t think my plasma key had enough charge left to cut a hole for us to get out. There was no pressing reason to leave, anyway. It was warm enough here, and secure, and though there was nothing fresh here to eat, there was also nothing trying to eat us. I thumped the door. “I think we’re in some rich person’s private art vault.”

  Zaveta sniffed. “Where I am from, the vaults of warlords have more interesting things than paint on cloth or piles of welded metal.”

  “I wouldn’t mind some precious gems,” I admitted. “Art seldom holds it value across realities.”

  I wrote a little, and she did her exercises – push-ups, lunges, all sorts of vigorous things that made me tired just watching. After that, we had a little picnic from our packs in a room with some attractive landscapes on the walls. If I squinted, I could almost believe they were windows looking outside. Zaveta wanted to make a fire to cook some of our small supply of meat, but I explained about sophisticated fire suppression systems, and she didn’t like the idea of being doused in foam or having all the oxygen sucked out of the gallery. We made do with cold and dried things until she nestled up against me and began to snore again.

  The next world was loud, because we arrived in the middle of what I thought was a battle but turned out to be either a brawl or some sort of strange sporting event. We were in a large brick plaza under a blazing sun where people in black lacquered armor, armed with long wooden poles, were bashing at other people who wore gray padded armor, and only had weapons of their own if they managed to wrench a pole away. Perhaps because Zaveta and I didn’t fit either dress code, we were ignored and jostled around, though I couldn’t stop Zaveta from getting a few licks in when someone’s staff caught her on the backswing. We worked our way to the edge of the crowd, only to find that we were hemmed in by a wall about seven feet high. Zaveta boosted me up to the top, then jumped up, grabbed the edge, and effortlessly mounted. We dropped down on the other side, and found ourselves on a beautifully manicured green lawn, with hedges and flowerbeds and gravel paths on all sides. The din of the battle was slightly muffled here, and I exhaled. Being in that crush of bodies was so panic-inducing that I hadn’t even looked for the worm-trail.

  Now that we were out, I did look. And found two of them.

  Ana

  Fortunately, no one was infected by the murdered cultist’s parasite. The worms won’t jump to someone who already has a parasite, but there were plenty of staff and companions around. Apparently you have to touch blood or some other bodily fluid to pick up the worm, and since Colubra found the corpse first, all the proper protocols were followed. That dead cultist is probably still in an airtight refrigerated box in a storage unit back in the ruins of Sleeperhold, the interdimensional parasite writhing in frustration at its lack of forward motion.

  The lack of new infection was the only good news, though. There was uproar in the camp when word got out about the murder, chaos and suspicion all around. Toros did his best to present his usual calm front, but I could tell he was deeply rattled. It was a fundamental tenet of the Sleeperhold that we were all in this together, bound by the shared trauma of what the cult had done to us or people we cared about, and now… there was a killer among us.

  The best-case scenario was that we had someone who hated cultists so much that they’d felt compelled to murder one… but we all knew that was unlikely. Other cultists had been captured without being murdered, after all, while the first time we got our hands on one who might actually talk to us, they didn’t last the night.

  The worst-case scenario was that we had an undercover member of the cult keeping tabs on us. My training stalled, and our plans to look for Zax were put on hold, while we tried to figure out what happened, and who did it.

  Everyone at Sleeperhold the night of the murder was questioned separately by Toros – fifty-four people in all, nearly the entirety of the group, since only two pairs were off on missions in sleepercars that night, and only a handful were stationed on our outposts in adjacent worlds. Ten were sleepers (including Sorlyn), fourteen were onetime companions of sleepers (including Colubra and myself), six were the amphibious people who lived in the lake (refugees rescued from a boiling world who’d agreed to join the Sleepers and help our cause), and the rest were support staff from Toros’s world. To our leader’s credit, he didn’t show any favoritism, even though most of the latter were literally his family members (he had innumerable cousins, apparently).

  Toros made everyone pair off while the investigation was ongoing, so no one was ever alone, and that was pretty tense; I was paired with one of his cousins, a guy named Dromelio, who had a perpetual squint even when he wasn’t looking at me with open suspicion. I was the newest arrival, after all, and a lot of people muttered about me until Toros confirmed that I’d been playing dice with three other people when the murder happened.

  Most everyone could be alibied easily, since only the surveillance feeds in the central camp had been meddled with – and the fact that only certain people had access to the security systems in the first place helped narrow things down further. In the end, once all the data was reviewed, there were only five possibilities: a traveler named Celectra, a cyborg companion named Garish, and three of Toros’s cousins.

  Toros called them all to the rehabilitation lodge. It was generally suspected that the psyche-repairing therapies at his disposal could also be used to tell if someone was lying – or even to induce them to tell the truth in a hypnagogic state.

  Garish didn’t come when she was called. We immediately scoured the latest surveillance data, and found a fifteenminute-old recording that captured her in the forest on the far side of the lake, near the force wall. An unknown figure appeared in the frame, dressed in a dirty brown robe, and handed Garish something. She plugged it into one of the ports on the metal side of her head, then slumped into the stranger’s arms. A moment later, they both vanished.

  One of Toros’s cousins was supposed to be Garish’s buddy. We found him on the ground behind one of the outbuildings, bleeding from a head wound – not dead, but severely concussed. Some of the travelers wanted to pop sedatives and follow Garish’s trail, but Toros forbade it. “Garish knows where the cameras are,” he said. “She wanted us to see her leave. The cult is probably trying to lead us into a trap.” He organized an armed response team in a sleepercar and sent them to check the outposts on adjacent worlds instead; on one of them, their arrival triggered a crude explosion on entry, but the chariot only sustained superficial damage. The Sleeper agents at that outpost were dead with knife wounds. The chariot returned home, and Toros told them not to pursue the worm-trails any farther, lest they stumble into more traps. We needed to collect ourselves, regroup, change and tighten up our security protocols, and consider our next move.

  I sat with Toros and Sorlyn that night, sipping small cups of strong clear liquor. Toros was stricken, and Sorlyn was thoughtful. “Why kill the cultist?” I said. “Why didn’t Garish just set him free and escape with him?”

  “Maybe the cult doesn’t like people who get captured,” Toros said. “Or maybe murder was just more practical. It’s hard to carry someone who is alternately sedated or raving about worms – your choice – through the camp without being noticed.”

  That made sense. “Why do you think Garish turned on us?”

  “Her traveler, Malvant, went on a scout mission last year and never came back, and her body was never recovered,” Sorlyn said. “Perhaps Garish just blamed us for the loss of her friend. Or maybe she was hacked. Malvant saved Garish from a world where cyborgs were used as soldiers, compelled by neural implants. The cult has never seemed technologically savvy, but maybe they found a way to reactivate the implant. Who knows?”

  “We need more help, and more intelligence,” Toros said. “But at the same time, we have to be more aggressive. We’ve talked about pushing forward, establishing more outposts, getting as close to the cult home world as possible – in theory we can create a bottleneck, station people on worlds the cultists must pass through in order to reach the wider multiverse. We can create a filter, a screen, a wall they can’t get past. We just don’t have the staff or the resources…” He sighed. “Can we establish distant outposts with just one or two of our people running things, supported extensively by drones and automated defenses? I’ve been reluctant to spread our forces that thin, but the cult struck here, in our camp. Something has to change. I’m going to one of the advanced worlds nearby to source more weaponry and surveillance tech. Biometric scanners, friendor-foe detection systems – there are some horribly paranoid worlds out there, and I fear we have to join their ranks. We are no longer protected by obscurity, if we ever truly were.” He sat up and pushed the liquor away. “In the meantime, I’m sending Sleeper teams out to follow every trail we’ve identified so they can recruit travelers and their companions, and capture any cultists they encounter.”

  “Does this mean I can go look for Zax?” I said.

  Toros nodded. “Yes. Sorlyn, you’ll have to continue Ana’s training along the way.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “There is one fact that makes me cheerful, Toros.”

  He frowned. “What’s that?”

  “The cult clearly thinks we’re a threat. That must mean we’re a danger to them. I think someone in their ranks is worried about us setting up that wall of outposts, too. If the cult is sufficiently afraid to give up a spy in our camp to stop us from getting information, that means we’re doing something right.”

  “That’s true,” Toros said. “I just came to a realization myself, but a rather darker one. Would you like to hear it? Be warned: it will make a bad night even worse.”

  “I’m sure we can take it,” I said.

  Toros picked up his cup again. “How can we be sure Garish was the only traitor in our midst?” He tossed the liquor back.

  Sorlyn and I loaded our sleepercar’s underbelly cargo compartment with supplies and prepared for a voyage of no fixed duration. “We’ll forage when we can,” he said. “There are some hospitable destinations along the way. But we’re likely to leave the array of surveyed worlds soon after we pick up Zax’s trail. Breaking new ground can be dangerous. Fortunately, we’re good at being stealthy.”

  “You are,” I said. “I don’t have the psychic ability to make people stop noticing me.”

  He chuckled. “Yes, but the carriage has adaptive visual camouflage, allowing it to blend in with most surroundings. And for you… I have a shimmersuit.”

  I groaned. I’d done a few training sessions with the suit, one of the late engineer Gibberne’s inventions. It looked like a jumpsuit made of metal foil, with a hood and a translucent mesh facemask, and you’d think it would crinkle alarmingly with every step, but it was weirdly silent, distorting sound the same way it could distort vision. ‘The suit was powered by bioelectromagnetics, and it bent light around you as well as masking body heat. If you sat still you were almost invisible, to eyes and sensors both. If you moved, you… shimmered, just a bit, but if you were careful that was a minor problem.