“Best thing about that girl is how much she takes after her daddy. Worst thing is how much she takes after me.”
—Frances Brown
A dimension that may or may not have a name, making bad choices, which is pretty much par for the course
Now, whatever that means
THE THING, WHATEVER IT was, had erupted from the ground in front of us in a writhing mass of tentacles, sort of like the world’s largest sea anemone. They could have all been part of the same massive, subterranean beast, or they could have been unique individuals working in concert to ruin my day. With most of the thing still buried, I had no way of knowing, and at the moment, I had better things to worry about, like the fact that it was trying to kill us.
The part of me raised to respect nature and appreciate the need of all living things to participate in the great and glorious web of life wanted to know more. Wanted to get right up to the edge of the hole and look down, figure out the body plan and likely behaviors of the thing, determine whether we were dealing with one or many—begin the scientific process at its most basic. The part of me that has been surviving in hostile dimensions for half a century said that part was being bog-stupid, and we should shoot the thing until it stopped moving.
If there was something important here for us to learn, we could learn it from the corpse. Lots of naturalists have worked exclusively from dead things. It’s a time-honored tradition, and you know what it gets us? A lot less dead naturalists, that’s what.
Most of our ragged band of refugees had been smart enough to scatter when the ground started heaving like a cat trying to hork up a particularly difficult hairball. A few of the former Murray guards and some of Thomas’s trained soldiers had formed a rough perimeter around the noncombatants, assorted polearms and other weapons lowered in a bristling wall of pointy pointy ouch ouch. I didn’t begrudge them the attempt at creating a defensible position. Just showed they had marginally more common sense than the rest of us.
“The rest of us,” in this case, was me, my husband, and my husband’s semi-adopted daughter who he’d acquired during the fifty years we spent living in different dimensions. And it says something about the tentacle geyser in front of me that that sentence was not the weirdest thing about my day.
Or maybe it says something about my life. It can be difficult to tell sometimes.
The tentacles varied in diameter from about the size of a hose to bigger around than my torso. They waved threateningly, seeming to follow the vibration of our footsteps as they slapped at the ground. This wasn’t as novel as it sounds. Lots of things that live underground use vibrations to hunt. They were dark pink, with an odd, leathery texture like an elephant’s trunk, and probably meant whatever we were dealing with was the local equivalent of a mammal.
“Always nice to know what’s about to eat you,” I muttered, unholstering my mother’s revolvers. One major downside of where the thing had emerged: if I chucked a grenade at it, a lot of people would get hurt, and I wasn’t willing to dismiss them as collateral damage. Not after spending six months shepherding them across dimensions in a vain attempt to get them to someplace they could call home.
Well, this dimension was out of the running, if it was going to go sprouting tentacle fountains all over the damn place.
One of the tentacles snapped like a whip, almost brushing the front rank of guards. They gasped but held their ground, refusing to be intimidated. Okay, that was it. I stomped my foot as hard as I could, hoping the vibrations would make me seem like a better target. “Hey, ugly!”
That wasn’t very nice of me. Maybe this thing was the most attractive bundle of tentacles in the whole dimension, and all the other bundles of tentacles wanted to come over to its horrifying underground lair for the local equivalent of coffee. But the thing was trying to hit my people, and I didn’t like that.
Fortunately, I’d been right about the vibrations. The tentacles stopped lashing out at the guards and reoriented to lash out at me, leaving me to jump and dodge in to avoid being smacked upside the head. I didn’t shoot. I wasn’t entirely sure bullets would do me any good against this thing; I wanted to get more of it aboveground before I started trying to hurt it.
Thomas—the husband I mentioned before—shouted something. I glanced toward him, distracted. Only for a second. Maybe only half a second. It was long enough.
The next thrashing tentacle caught me square across the stomach and sent me flying backward, stopping only when my back found a convenient rock wall. I slammed into it hard enough to send my diaphragm into a spasm. Unable to catch my breath, I slid limply to the ground, where I blacked out.
So yeah. Just another normal day in paradise.
It was at least a brief loss of consciousness, since the scene was basically the same and my ears were still ringing when I woke up. My back ached, but not enough to indicate that I’d broken anything; at most, I might’ve cracked a rib and just not been able to feel it yet. That was fine. I don’t think I have any ribs left that I haven’t cracked at least once, and most of them are in the frequent-flier club.
The impact had also knocked my revolvers out of my hands, which was a much bigger problem than knocking the air out of my lungs: air is replaceable. My revolvers, which used to belong to my mother, are not. I shoved myself to a standing position, scanning the ground until I found them, and bolted forward. The tentacles were still flailing wildly, but I should be able to get to the guns before I got smacked again. If not, well. I bounce.
Thomas was shouting again, although I couldn’t make out quite what he was saying. This time, I kept my eyes on my goal, refusing to let myself be distracted. If this thing wasn’t going to back down, I was going to make it back down.
I don’t know what it was about the run of dimensions we’d been in for the last few weeks, but they all seemed to think megafauna was an absolutely fabulous idea, yes, good, let’s make more of it. When we got back to Ithaca, I was going to have a serious sit-down with Phoebe and Helen about what, exactly, they had been thinking when they said this was a good direction to find uninhabited worlds that might be suitable for our bottle universe refugees.
And this is all getting a bit confusing, so hey, let’s pause in the middle of a pitched battle against a giant tentacle monster—or monsters, as the case might be—and agree on the basics. My name is Alice Enid Price-Healy. I spent fifty-five years as the unwitting hunting dog of a serpentine asshole who thought sending me in the wrong direction was morally acceptable, and my reward was finding the husband everyone had been trying to tell me was long since dead and buried. Turned out he was just fine, for values of “fine” that include “trapped in an inescapable bottle dimension, magically exhausting himself trying to keep the place from collapsing while he’s still inside it.” Since I’d been fine for a value of “fine” that meant “allowing myself to be regularly skinned alive in order to stay healthy enough to keep looking for my husband,” I couldn’t exactly get mad about the situation. Although I could certainly grumble about it whenever the opportunity arose.
See, fifty-five years ago, the bargain Thomas made with a horrifying supernatural entity we called “the crossroads” came due, and he was ripped away from the life we’d been building together and thrown across a few dozen dimensional barriers to wind up in that bottle dimension, which was actually the rotting, cast-off corpse of the world the crossroads originally came from, or something close to the world they originally came from—it’s hard to be sure when you’re talking about centuries of time and multiple dimensions of distance. He’d been too far away to get a message to me, and too trapped to make it home, and so I’d done the sensible thing, for certain definitions of “sensible,” and gone charging after him.
We’d had two small children when that happened, and I’d passed them off to my best friend, Laura Campbell, with the promise that I’d be back as soon as I could. Well, I’d kept my word on that, it just turned out that “as soon as I could” was more than fifty years, thanks to the serpentine asshole I mentioned before.
Naga was a Professor of Extra-Dimensional Studies at the University of K’larth. We met when I was just a little kid. He’d been summoned by a group of snake cultists who’d believed he was their god and could grant them infinite power, and I’d been kidnapped as a sacrifice by the same group. Big mistake. Both parts, really. Naga wasn’t a god, just a frustrated academic who didn’t like cultists, and while I had a pissed-off mother with a big gun and a ghost babysitter, neither of whom was going to sit idly by while I got fed to a giant snake.
Naga and I survived that night. The snake cultists didn’t. We’d stayed in touch while I was growing up, communicating through a mail system I didn’t entirely understand but appreciated all the same. There had been times, in the gap between coming home from college and my father’s death, where Naga’s letters had been all that kept me sane. So I’d trusted him. Of course I’d trusted him. He was my friend.
My friend who, as soon as he had the opportunity, started lying to me, intentionally steering me away from the path most likely to reunite me with my husband, keeping me from my children until they became adults with their own lives and their own children and no need or desire to have me around.
My friend, who let me spend fifty years thinking maybe everyone I loved was right when they told me I was chasing a ghost, that I was never going to find him because he wasn’t out there anymore. My friend who—and this is the best part—convinced me to let him have me skinned alive over and over again so he could collect the magical membrane that adhered to my skin every time I pushed my way through the wall between dimensions.
Yeah. Great guy, Naga. I almost wish I hadn’t let Thomas kill him. Only almost, and only because the more time I have to think about what he did to me—to us—the more I wish I’d been able to kill him myself.
But that’s water under the temporal bridge. I went the direction Naga didn’t want me going, and I found Thomas, just like I always said I was going to. Thanks to the wonders of magic, he was almost the same physical age he’d been when he vanished. I would have been happy married to a man in his nineties, but being able to skip that in favor of us both being young enough to survive getting out of the bottle dimension had been a bonus. So we were finally together, and we were going to get our happy ending, right? Right?
Wrong. So, so wrong. Because while he’d been locked in that bottle dimension, Thomas had essentially become a dynastic warlord, with a whole community of people who depended on him. All of them were either victims of their own crossroads bargains or descended from victims, and none of them deserved to be left behind to die there. Meaning that when we’d managed to get out, we’d done it with just over three hundred refugees in tow, and none of them had been equipped to strike out on their own.
Some friends of mine from Ithaca, Helen and Phoebe, had offered to give us a helping hand, in the form of supplies, various charms that would boost Thomas’s natural ability to open doors between worlds, and a map that would help us get the ones who could go home back to their original dimensions, and find places where the ones who didn’t have anywhere to go back to could settle down and figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. And that’s what we’d been doing. Hence the megafauna parade and tentacle party.
We’d managed to shed nearly two hundred people during the trip, returning them to their homes or finding places where they wouldn’t encroach on other intelligent life, and I was exhausted. With more than a hundred people left to resettle, it was starting to feel like this was another quest that was never going to end, and Thomas and I were never going to have a moment to ourselves.
“I got it!” shouted a female voice, heavy with a Maine accent, right before a human woman in her early twenties ran past me, a spear clutched in both hands. I snapped upright, gripping my guns, and watched her run. The tentacles between us weren’t thrashing anymore; something seemed to be pinning them to the ground, where they strained against the unseen force.
I glanced to the side. There was Thomas, hands raised and face set in a grimace as he focused his sorcery on keeping the thing from hitting Sally. A small, unpleasant part of me pointed out that if he could do that, he could have been doing it before, but hadn’t bothered when I’d been the one in danger. I shoved that part down as hard as I could. The fact that I’d been chasing a fairy tale ending for fifty years didn’t mean anybody owed me one. It certainly didn’t mean Thomas could be blamed for saving the girl who had become his daughter in all but literal blood rather than his still semi-unfamiliar wife.
It didn’t. It couldn’t. It was unfair of me to think that it did, and so I wasn’t going to think that, no matter how hard circumstances tried to make me.
Sally leapt, spear held overhead in a classic javelineer’s pose, and stabbed viciously downward. There was an offended bellow from the pit—the first sound we’d heard since the tentacles erupted from the ground—and they began to retreat, leaving Sally stumbling back from the edge of the hole, spear still clutched in both hands.
Panting, she turned to face me, a small, cocky smile on her face. “Thanks for the assist,” she said, and strolled back toward where Thomas was standing. His hands weren’t raised anymore. They were resting on his knees as he bent forward, panting slightly. Every dimension we went to had a different pneuma, and the pneuma was what fueled his magic.
Thomas is a sorcerer, a form of naturally occurring human witch who can tap into the pneuma of a world and use it to make the laws of physics sit, stay, roll over, and play dead. When we were together the first time, he mostly used it to move things from one place to another, start small fires, and occasionally keep me from falling out of bed when we got too enthusiastic. What’s the point of being able to move things with your mind if you can’t use it to keep your wife from bruising her ass on the floor, right?
Well, his time in the bottle dimension, where there was no native pneuma to draw on, had forced him to become a lot more innovative, and a lot more efficient about how he used power. Moving to a new dimension might throw him off-balance for a little bit, hence the panting, but once he recovered, he could do more with less than he had ever been able to accomplish before. Hence simple telekinesis becoming “I can restrain a whole-ass tentacle monster before it eats anybody.” It was a pretty nice upgrade, all things considered.
The guards lowered their spears, turning to make reassuring noises to the other refugees as I holstered my pistols and cautiously approached the edge of the hole. Thomas watched me warily but didn’t say anything. He knew better than to tell a Healy not to investigate a natural phenomenon.
I climbed the jagged mound in the earth, careful of my footing, and peered into the opening. A wide tunnel seemed to lead to the surface, and judging by the sides, it had been dug out by the creature we’d seen before. “Sally? Did you see what was down here?”
“Ayuh. Big round pink thing with a bunch of tentacles coming out around the edges.”
“Uh-huh.” That matched what I was seeing, and I didn’t like it. I backed away from the hole, hands on my revolvers. “Thomas? We should be somewhere else now, if that’s cool by you. Don’t care whether it’s on top of a big rock or in the next dimension on the list, but I’m going to say this is not a good place for people to settle. Also going to say I have a decent idea why there isn’t any intelligent life around here.”
“And why is that, dear?” There was a hard edge on the last word. He was annoyed. Well, that was nothing new. Not after the last six months.
“Because that was a giant star-nosed mole, or the local equivalent, and I don’t think we want to be standing here when it burrows its way back,” I said. “Poking it in the snout surprised it enough to make it leave, but that doesn’t mean it’s staying gone. Moles are carnivores. The ones back home eat grubs and worms, and are about the size of my hand. The ones here—”
“Would happily eat us, I’m sure,” he concluded. He took a deep breath and pressed two fingers to the inside of his left wrist, as if he were taking his own pulse. Which maybe he was. I’m no sorcerer. Even after fifty years of playing hide-and-seek across dimensions, half of how it works is a mystery to me.
Not entirely because I didn’t try to learn. Naga wasn’t just taking my skin every time I came back to him for help: he was taking my memories, editing what I knew to make sure I’d keep being a good little dog and going where he wanted me. Eventually, I was sure, his pet Johrlac would have figured out a way to take Thomas and leave me running through the dimensions with no idea why. Johrlac are clever that way. There’s a reason nobody likes them.
“I can’t get us out of here just yet,” he said finally, dropping his hand. “I’ll need about another hour. Sally? Can you find us a route to the top of that rock?”
He gestured toward the low bluff I’d slammed into before. It was a semi-sheer rock face roughly eleven feet high—tall enough to keep us from attracting more moles, and also tall enough that half our party wouldn’t possibly be able to climb it, even if we’d had a way of securely anchoring our ropes to the top. Some of them were old, and about a third were children. Isn’t leading a group of interdimensional refugees to safety fun?
“I can do it,” I said, as Sally said, “On it, boss,” and took off running along the line of the rock, clearly scouting for a place where the climb would be easier. Her gait was uneven, unusually so, and after a beat, I realized she wasn’t hurt, she was doing that on purpose.
“She’s walking without rhythm so she won’t attract the worm,” I said, amused despite myself.
Thomas was approaching me, no longer winded, still clearly annoyed. I straightened, ignoring the twinge in my back.
“I could have found a way up,” I said. “I have a lot more experience with scouting runs in parallel dimensions than Sally does.” Sally was incredibly skilled at wilderness survival, even for a girl from small-town Maine, but then, she’d been stranded in a hostile bottle dimension full of people who wanted to kill her for the better part of a decade. I, on the other hand, was a bounty hunter feared across multiple dimensions and recognized in dozens more, who’d been skipping world to world for fifty years. There was no question which of us was better equipped to navigate unfamiliar terrain.
“Maybe so, but as she’s not the one who got slammed into the side of a cliff five minutes ago, I thought it was better if I sent her off while I took care of you.” He frowned, and I fought the urge to squirm. I always felt about two feet tall when he looked at me that way. “When are you going to learn that you’re not indestructible anymore?”
“I was never indestructible,” I protested. “I don’t act like I am.”
He didn’t say a word. Just looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and waited.
The silence stretched between us until it became unbearable, and I blurted, “Okay, so maybe I got a little careless when it came to my personal safety, but if I couldn’t patch myself up, Naga could do it for me, and anyway, it was all so I could keep looking for you.”
The refugees were keeping their distance. They were smart enough to know when they didn’t want to be in the middle of something. Hell, I was smart enough to know I didn’t want to be in the middle of this, and yet here I was, stuck in a happy ending that involved a really annoying amount of yelling.
“Considering that I didn’t ask you to come find me, I’d thank you to stop reminding me how much damage you did to yourself while you were trying!”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t ask you to sell your soul to the crossroads for my sake, so I guess we’re both going to be a little bit annoyed, okay?”
“Alice . . .” He sighed heavily. “I’m just asking you to please be careful. You can’t receive magical healing right now. You might never be able to again. That means any injuries you get will have to heal the traditional way, and I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“Be careful.”
“Yes. That’s all I’m asking you to do.”
“You’re asking me to be careful, and you don’t see anything wrong with that?”
Thomas hesitated for a moment. Then he grimaced, his own words finally catching up with him. “Alice, I didn’t mean—”
“I think I have a pretty decent idea of what you meant. Try to keep your people from moving around too much. We wouldn’t want to get another mole when Sally’s not here to chase it away.”
I turned and stalked in the opposite direction from Sally, hugging the rock wall as closely as I could without falling into a predictable gait. This time, I was the one who didn’t look back.