“Children are mirrors of their parents. What they reflect is what you show them.”
—Jonathan Healy
Getting ready to leave Pteracercus for Ithaca
TRUE TO WHAT I had guessed would happen when I saw our refugees with the locals, the ones I thought of as their leaders came to us in the morning, explaining their intent to stay in the halting, awkward manner of people who weren’t sure whether or not they were about to cause offense. In the end, Thomas hugged a man who’d been one of his closest advisors, wished them luck in this new world, and came back to me and Sally with a smile on his face and a new lightness in his step.
After fifty years of keeping these people alive, he was responsible for no one but himself and his family, and most of his family was pretty self-sufficient. I slipped my hand into his, matching his smile with my own.
“Well?” I asked. “Can we get to Ithaca from here, or do we need to go back to where we started? Because I’ll be honest, I could do without walking through the giant spider killing chute a second time.”
Thomas responded by closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. When he opened them again, he sighed and pointed back the way we’d come. “I’m afraid the nearest crossing point is some distance that way. Perhaps we can request an escort?”
“If you’re willing to ride, we can carry you as far as you have need,” said Kenneth, looming up behind us in a way that was probably designed to be unnerving. It might have been, if I hadn’t been aware that he was lurking back there. He wasn’t as quiet as he thought he was. I guess you don’t have to be, when you’re the patriarch and no one argues with you about whether or not something is a good idea.
“Ride a giant praying mantis?” asked Sally, and perked right up, suddenly enthusiastic. “Sounds great! And like something I’ve never done before, which makes it awesome. Can we?”
It wasn’t clear which of us she was asking. Thomas stepped in, saying, “If the offer is extended to all of us, then yes, of course we can. It’s faster than walking, if nothing else. Alice?”
“I know how to ride,” I said, trying to push aside the flicker of anxiety that said no, riding a giant flying bug was not the same thing as riding a horse, not the same thing at all. If Thomas was game, I could handle it. Besides, how bad could it actually be?
Bad. It could be very, very bad, as riding a mantis was nothing like riding a horse. There was no warning of motion before the giant insect was in the air, wings generating a backdraft almost strong enough to sweep us all off the saddle. I clung to the ropes securing me to the saddle as tightly as I could, trying to look like this wasn’t the most upsetting thing I’d voluntarily subjected myself to in ages.
Sally whooped with delight behind me, thrusting one arm into the air as she held onto the anchor ropes with the other, and Thomas watched us both, looking mildly interested in the entire situation. Apparently, I was the only one who remembered the existence of gravity and its tendency to pop mammals like water balloons when we fall a far-enough distance. I glared at them both and kept hanging on.
Sally laughed at the look on my face, the wind whipping the sound away, if not quickly enough to keep me from hearing it. I glared at her. She laughed again, leaning in closer.
“So there’s something that actually frightens the great Alice Price?” she asked. “That’s good. I was starting to be afraid you were some sort of sophisticated robot or something, and now I think you might be a real person.”
I glared harder. She grinned at me and leaned back in her rope harness, going back to punching the sky. At least one of us was having fun.
Thomas shot me a more sympathetic look, which I answered with a sickly smile. One of our grandkids, Verity, thinks gravity is a toy. She likes to play with it, push the boundaries and see just how much she can get away with, and generally give me heart attacks for her own amusement. I am a little more sensible than she is, which is a terrifying thought and makes me wonder how she’s managed to survive to adulthood, given that gravity is the only thing I’m remotely sensible about. I fell out of a lot of trees when I was a kid, and broke more than a few bones. It left me with an exaggerated sense of caution.
Everyone else seemed to think this was safe enough, and so I forced myself, bit by bit, to unkink my shoulders. The ground zipped by beneath us at an incredible speed. The mantis couldn’t be flying as fast as a commercial jet, but we were so exposed it felt faster.
Not that I’ve ever actually been on a plane, but I have to assume they have something a little more sophisticated than a rope harness to keep from losing passengers.
The mantis began gliding downward as we approached what looked like a demolition site, or the crater left by a large explosion. The trunks of crushed, shattered trees littered the ground, and the earth itself was torn up, like something large had been dropped from a great height. I blinked at the local who was steering our ride.
“What the hell happened here?”
“This is where our other visitors arrived,” he said, bringing the mantis in for a landing. It landed without even a thump, beginning to wash its scythe-like forearms. The local twisted in his own harness, looking back at me. “We told you they brought their masonry with them. This is where it landed.”
“So you’re telling me they went full Dorothy and brought a house?” I began untying my harness. “Damn, Sarah, I didn’t know you had it in you.”
He blinked. “My name is not Sarah,” he said, politely. “They call me Ciferol.”
“Sounds pharmaceutical,” I said. “Sally, Thomas, you ready to get off the big bug?”
“Can’t we go for another ride first?” asked Sally plaintively. I turned to glare at her, and she laughed. “Yeah, I’m good to go.”
“The channels feel cleaner here,” said Thomas. “I should be able to open us a doorway to Ithaca with the pneuma I’ve already accumulated.”
“Then we’re good to go. Ciferol, thank you for your help. Can you drop the ropes so we can get down to the ground level?”
“Of course,” he said, politely, and unhooked a bundle of knotted ropes from behind his position, tossing them so they dangled to the ground. More opportunities to fall a nice, long distance. Goodie. Falling is my favorite thing.
Falling is no one sensible’s favorite thing, which means it’s probably Verity’s favorite thing, and sometimes I think passing my genes on did no one any favors, even if I continue to hold up my descendants as proof that Thomas did the right thing by keeping me alive. I grabbed the rope, squirming into position to begin my descent.
“Tell your leader that you were of great help to us, and we appreciate it immensely,” said Thomas. “We hope our people will be happy here with you.”
“And if they’re not, we’ll be seeing you soon,” said Sally, in an ominous tone. Ciferol shrank back in his rope harness. I laughed but didn’t contradict her.
We weren’t coming back here for a long, long time, if we ever did. Dimensional travel isn’t meant to be undertaken with the sort of frequency that we’d been demonstrating since we left the bottle dimension. This was a special case. There was every chance, if we were lucky, that the three of us would never be leaving Earth again.
Well, maybe the occasional visit to Ithaca, to check in with Helen and Phoebe, but that wasn’t travel, that was . . . being a good neighbor. More importantly, that was only one hop.
Helen thought that with the crossroads gone, Earth’s pneuma would begin to recover from the damage that had been done to it, and sorcerers like Thomas would find themselves getting stronger. Opening a door as far as Ithaca wouldn’t seem so unreasonable. If she was right, we could keep in touch with relative ease, and I truly hoped she was right. Thomas had gone from starvation in the bottle dimension to a constantly renewing supply of pneuma from a dozen dimensions, and I was suddenly worried that Earth would seem like a return to famine, rather than the feast it was.
Honestly, I was worried about a lot of things. Thinking about the future has never been my area of expertise. Hell, thinking beyond what I was going to do tomorrow has never been my strong suit. Reacting is my primary way of dealing with the world. Planning is for people who have more complex needs than “figure out what’s for dinner,” “kill the thing that’s been killing Missus Norton’s chickens,” or “find your husband and bring him home while he still knows who you are.”
Okay, so maybe my problems get sort of complex sometimes, but it’s rarely the sort of complex that demands a lot of long-term planning. I shimmied down the rope, resolutely not looking down until my feet were firmly under me, then looked up to watch Thomas and Sally make their descent.
The mantis took off as soon as they were next to me, and the three of us were alone in a strange world, too far from the mound where the locals and our former followers were located to make it back before dark.
I wasn’t sure I’d been happier since we left the bottle dimension. Sally and I fell in behind Thomas, one of us to either side of him, ready to muster a defense if anything went wrong.
He glanced at me. I smiled.
“Come on,” I said. “Get us home.”
This time, when he raised his hands, the bruised spot in the air clarified on a meadow dotted with tiny white flowers. A house stood in the distance, oddly Greek architecture with a modern sensibility that I couldn’t have described if I’d been paid to do it, but recognized all the same. That’s the thing about time periods. Sometimes you just have to know them when you see them. The spell, seeking the easiest option, had seized on the dimensional crossing circle Helen and Phoebe had on their property. We were finally going to wind up exactly where we wanted to be.
A light wind blew through the opening, smelling of wildflowers and herbs. I smiled. “Ithaca.”
Sally looked less enthusiastic. Well, she’d only been there once, and then only in the process of passing through with our train of survivors. There’d been no time to linger or relax, which was a shame, since Ithaca is one of the nicer dimensions that I’m actually familiar with. The places Naga liked to send me were much more likely to fall under the heading of “horrifying murder world,” and since Sally knew Ithaca was one of my regular stops, it made sense for her to be wary.
I gestured her through. She shook her head, gesturing for me to go first. I sighed.
“You know I don’t go before Thomas does,” I said. “I didn’t spend this much time trying to find him to voluntarily go into another dimension without him.”
Sally rolled her eyes. “Codependent much?”
“Ladies,” said Thomas, sounding faintly strained. “If one of you could go through, I would very much appreciate it.”
Sally shot me a dirty look and stepped through, onto the green, flower-speckled ground. I wondered, somewhat idly, whether she was going to step on the wrong flower and invoke Phoebe’s wrath. Should probably have warned her about that. Oh, well.
I stepped in front of Thomas, breaking his line of sight on the portal, and took his hands in mine. “Come on, baby,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
He blinked at me, dazed as he always was by holding a gateway—although not as dazed as he’d been when we had to hold it long enough to usher dozens of people through—and smiled as I tugged him through the opening and into another world.
Ithaca is not a preindustrial dimension, for all that it tries very, very hard to look like one. What it is is a dimension with incredibly strict ecological protection laws, which has always taken “we live in concert with the natural world” very seriously indeed.
The gateway closed, leaving us in the meadow. Sally was already on alert, scanning for threats that were unlikely to materialize this close to a residence. Helen says they have excellent perimeter fencing, and since I’ve never been attacked while I was at their house, I’m inclined to believe her.
Thomas wobbled, unsteady on his feet, and looked at me. “Are we safe?”
“We’re safe,” I assured him. “We’re on Ithaca, you, me, and Sally, and all your people are settled where they can figure out their lives and what they want to do with them from here. You did it. We won.”
“Oh, good,” he said, closed his eyes, and collapsed.
There are a lot of ways people can collapse. Blood loss is one. Getting shot is another. This, though . . . this was boneless exhaustion, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I lunged to catch him, not quite fast enough to grab anything more substantial than the wind left by his passing, and landed on my knees next to him, grabbing his arm to check for a pulse.
It was there, solid and a little faster than I liked. I looked over my shoulder to Sally, who was staring at us in open-mouthed shock.
“The house,” I said, curtly. “Helen and Phoebe live there. Go tell them we’re here, and Thomas has exhausted himself by pushing the dimensional crossings. We need help.”
She didn’t move. I narrowed my eyes.
“Go!” I snapped.
Sally turned on her heel and ran for the house, doubtless trampling dozens of Phoebe’s precious flowers in her flight. I ignored her, focusing on Thomas.
He was still breathing, which was good. Collapses like this were familiar from my own time opening dimensional gates, when my body had cannibalized itself to try and let me go farther than I should have been able to. I’d never seen it happen to a sorcerer before, and I suddenly had to wonder whether he’d been intentionally overstating how much pneuma he’d been able to draw from a few of the more dangerous worlds we’d passed through, in order to get us out of there just that tiny bit faster than would have been possible otherwise.
If I had no sense of self-preservation when it came to him, it was balanced out—and not necessarily in the best way—by his absolute lack of self-preservation when it came to me. We might destroy each other. We might be blissfully happy in our little house in Michigan. Either way, we’d be together, and for both of us, that was what mattered.
When I’d pushed myself to this point, I used to handle it with glucose gel and electrolyte powders, both of which had run out half a dozen dimensions ago, and which I hadn’t been trying to restock, even if it would have been remotely possible, because I’d had no idea they might be needed. I positioned myself so I could pull his head into my lap, leaning down to straighten his limbs. Wouldn’t do to have him wake up having strained something.
Thus, having reached the limit of my usefulness, I settled in to wait.
Sally came running back across the field, followed by two satyrs, one carrying a wicker basket over her arm, neither hurrying half as fast as Sally was. The taller of the two actually looked faintly amused, like this was funny. I swallowed the urge to yell at her for that. Sally had probably communicated the situation in a way that sounded entertaining, rather than the taller satyr finding the fact that Thomas had collapsed in the first place somehow funny.
“Hoy, Odysseus!” called the taller satyr as they approached. “Broken your Penelope already? For shame. I expected you would be more careful, all things considered.”
“Thanks, Helen. You’re very sweet.” The other satyr laughed, kneeling in the grass next to Thomas. Watching a woman with the lower body of a goat kneel was a spectacle in and of itself. As a human, I find digitigrade anatomy unaccountably complicated. But they probably feel the same about my weird-ass knees, and so it all works out in the end.
I returned my attention to Helen as Phoebe unpacked the contents of her basket, narrowing my eyes. “Is this exhaustion? Because it looks like exhaustion to me, and I don’t think I’ll handle it very well if it’s anything else.”
“Peace, Odysseus.” Helen held up her hands, palms outward. “Give Phoebe the time to work. As it’s just the three of you, I’m assuming your long journey is well complete?”
“All the survivors of the bottle dimension have been settled, either in their original worlds or in compatible communities,” I said. “You need to update your maps. A few of those ‘suitable’ unoccupied dimensions turned out to have some pretty big inhabitants. Bats and moles large enough to eat people do not make for very good neighbors.”
“You asked for places without intelligent people,” said Helen. “You didn’t ask for worlds incapable of supporting life.”
Phoebe had produced a bottle of something pink and oddly sparkly, like it was laced with edible glitter, from inside her basket, and was tipping it against Thomas’s lips, clearly encouraging him to drink. I glanced over and bit my lip.
Helen put her hand on my arm. “Peace,” she said again. “Phoebe will help him to wake from this miscalculation, and you have no further travels from here, yes?”
“Only home,” I said. “We’re going home.”
“The pneuma of your world has continued to recover,” she said, approvingly. “I’ve taken glances at it when the connections were clear, and things are progressing in the right direction. Earth may be a healthy world again someday.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “We’re planning to stay there.”
“Yes, you promised,” said Helen.
Phoebe was still pressing her bottle to Thomas’s lips. Finally, he coughed and swallowed, then began to drink in earnest, all without apparently waking up. I blinked, stroking his hair, then looked back to Helen in silent question. She sighed.
“He is exhausted. Had you no way of seeing that?”
“I can’t see magic,” I said. “Neither can Sally. He wasn’t telling us how tired he was. He’s been trying to keep things moving along. We were safe enough in that last dimension. If he’d said anything, to either of us, we could have stopped for a few days, given him time to rest up. But we were so close to home, and I think he wanted to get to the end as much as I did, so he didn’t tell us anything was wrong. Is he going to be okay?”
The only acceptable answer was yes. Anything else and I was going to tear down the world to make it change. We’d come so far, fought for so long; this couldn’t be the point where my luck—where our luck—gave out.
Phoebe returned her bottle to the basket, giving me a cold look. “You will allow us to open the gateway between here and your ‘Earth,’” she said. “And you will allow us to give you a hamper to take with you, as I doubt your destination will be provisioned for your arrival.”
“I keep cans and shelf-stable foods on hand, but the house is rural enough that I don’t even trust the freezers when I’m going to be away for a long time,” I said. One trip where the power had gone out almost as soon as I left the dimension had been enough to teach me that stockpiling meat was only a good idea when you could be there to make sure it actually stayed frozen. Some smells do not bear repeating. “Oh, and Cynthia from the Red Angel drops off a cake every Thursday, for the mice. But that’s about it.”
“A hamper,” said Phoebe firmly. She stood, taking her basket with her. “And keep your handmaid close to you. She nearly trampled my cat’s brush when she came running to the house.”
Sally bristled at being called a handmaid, but I mustered a smile as I nodded to Phoebe, and said, “She’ll stay here with us, I promise.”
“He’ll be fine,” said Phoebe, taking pity. “No large workings for a fortnight, you understand? Anything that draws more pneuma than he can gather from the air stands the chance of doing him harm, and I feel you would prefer that not occur.”
“I’ll sit on him if I have to,” I said firmly.
“Good.” Phoebe leaned over to kiss Helen on the cheek. “Come to the house for the hamper, my leman, and set them on their way. I’ll see ourselves alone this evening.”
Sally blinked, looking surprised. Helen smiled a small, besotted smile after Phoebe as the other satyr walked away, then turned back to me.
Thomas was making little grumbling noises and shifting in my lap, although his eyes were still closed. I stroked his hair again, watching Helen.
“Well?” I asked. “Other than waiting for Thomas to wake up and Phoebe to deliver our lunch, is there anything else we need to do here?”
“Tell me, precisely, where you want your crossing to conclude,” she said.
I took a deep breath.
“Buckley Township is located in Michigan, on the continent of North America . . .”