Page 21 of Backpacking through Bedlam

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.