Page 15 of Spelunking Through Hell

“May I suppress?” asked Lybie.

This was a familiar script, and one I had learned to follow. “Please,” I said.

What little pressure I could feel from the chair went away, taking every other sensation with it. It felt as if my entire body had been dipped into Novocaine, as if it belonged to someone else; I was inexplicably able to operate it. I tilted my head back, focusing on the feline.

“Standard array, two more bone sets, any extra healing you can cram in without killing me, same number of transits,” I said.

“Keep the transit power at the same level?” he asked, always the professional.

I used to find the artists cold. There was always someone who could speak my language, always a telepath to make sure the pain wouldn’t interfere with the procedure, and the two artists of Naga’s own breed, who viewed me as a renewable canvas, a palimpsest girl somehow wiped completely clean over and over again for them to practice their art upon.

And theyhadimproved over the course of our time together, even as they grew too big for the room and their equipment and were replaced by their apprentices. In the beginning, almost everything I’d had tattooed on me had been brute force, the magical equivalent of using a crowbar to open a motel window. Some things probably got broken in those early rampages through the dimensional walls, and they learned more and more about what they could pack onto my skin, and what I needed to have in my pocket, as it were, if I wanted this to be a trip that I came back from.

Currently, my dimensional punches were set to carry up to three people, designed when I’d been traveling with my mice, before I’d passed them off to Antimony for safekeeping. That had been a reduction from four, and it had taken my number of jumps from ten to fifteen. But I couldn’t just add more dimensional crossing charms without exceeding the amount of magic we knew my body could handle. I still hesitated before I asked, “Would reducing the number of people I can carry with me from three to two let me have more jumps?”

The feline turned to the artists and hissed a long series of sibilants, which the artists answered in kind. He nodded before returning his attention to me, and replying, “Not in any meaningful way. If you’d allow them to reduce the number to one, we could double your number of potential transits.”

“No,” I said immediately. Reducing the number from four to three had been an admission that I was starting to lose hope, starting to believe that Thomas wasn’t out there to find. Now I knew he might be, now I had hope again, and dropping the number of people I could take with me would be the same as giving up on him completely. I might as well get out of this chair and go back to Earth if I was going to do that. “Tell them to keep the power levels the same.”

“If you’re sure...”

“I’m positive.” I closed my eyes. “You can start whenever you’re ready.”

There was no pain when they set to work, only a distant feeling of vibration, like being on a moving train. I’d been running hard for a long time, and being knocked out after being skinned alive isn’t the same thing as sleeping. Gradually, I slipped under, until even the vibration was gone, and I was alone with my dreams.

They might not be the kindest dreams I’d ever had, but they were mine, and I welcomed them, even as I remained distantly aware that Lybie could see them all. My brain’s private movie was playing for an audience of two, and while I could probably have pushed her out if I’d woken myself up and made a genuine effort, that would have been enough to bring back the pain. I didn’t want more pain today.

According to Mary, pain leaves marks on the nervous system, and enough pain, over enough time, can scar. She said it was a miracle the pain hadn’t scarred my mind beyond functionality already, after everything she knew I’d put myself through—and everything she didn’t know but had come to suspect from the times when I wasn’t careful enough: the times she’d seen me flinch away from the light glinting off a knife or refuse to pick up a scalpel. She knew that there was damage she couldn’t see, damage that I wasn’t ready to tell her about.

I’m notstupid. Yes, my family thinks I’m delusional, thinks I’ve left my sanity behind somewhere in one of the uncounted dimensions I’ve gone running through over the last fifty years, one more trinket tossed aside because it didn’t fit in my pocket anymore. That doesn’t mean they’re right, and it doesn’t mean I’ve lost what sense my mama gave me. I know enough to know that if I told my babysitter that the reason I’ve stayed young and functional for all these years is because I’m letting my childhood friend skin me alive on a regular basis, she’d nod and listen and say all the right things to make me think she was going to keep my secrets, and then she’d run straight to Kevin and tell him what had been going on.

It’s hard enough to keep my family from calling an emergency meeting and trying to nail my feet to the floor of my home dimension without giving them more ammunition to use against me, and Naga was helping me get back to Thomas. He’d been helping me all along. And soon enough, he’d be done helping me, and I’d be going home.

One way or another, I’d be going home.

My dreams devolved into shape and color. There was a mountain made entirely of ice cream, and if I didn’t eat the whole thing, something terrible was going to happen. I approached it with a spoon the size of a snow shovel in my hand and hoped, perhaps irrationally, that it would be enough to let me tackle the problem at hand—

The mountain shattered and fell away as hands coaxed me out of the chair and over to the waiting table, where it was even easier to sleep, stretched on my stomach with my face pressed into the pillow, Lybie sitting beside me with her hand now on the back of my head, keeping me numbed and serene. It was virtually impossible for me to stay awake while all this was going on, even when I hadn’t let myself get beaten to death’s doorstep before the rejuvenation process. Between the sedatives that finished out the flensing and the soothing presence of a telepath I’d voluntarily allowed into my mind, consciousness was something meant for other people.

The mountain came back, and I went to the mountain, and nothing mattered except the soothing numbness that had become the entire world. Everything else fell quietly away and was forgotten.

Once again, I woke up someplace else. I was wearing my robe and had been moved to a low couch at the side of the room, installed for my use after the third session that had ended with someone needing to wake me up so I could walk back to my bed. Naga hadn’t been able to fit in my room since long before it had officially become “mine.” If he’d been married, it would have been set aside for the youngest of their children, it was so small by their standards. It was more than large enough for me.

I blinked at the ceiling for several long seconds before sitting up and pushing the right sleeve of my robe toward my shoulder. Fresh new tattoos greeted me, bright as anything, including a marching line of fifteen runes that would allow me to accomplish the necessary dimensional crossings. I squinted at them. They looked, and felt, exactly like the last batch, and when I checked, there were no matching runes on my left arm. I sighed, relieved. The artists didn’t usually ignore what I asked for, but there had been a few incidents, and being effectively drugged insensate for the whole process meant that there was no reasonable way for me to object.

Lybie had prevented me from feeling the pain while it was happening, and the oil the artists had rubbed into my skin when the procedure was over—and whenever necessary while it was still going on—had repaired all the damage. My tattoos were effectively as healed as they would have been after almost a month’s recovery, and I was ready to get back on the road.

I asked Naga, in the beginning, how I was supposed to pay for all this. He shook his head and said that among his people, there could be no debts between friends. And maybe it was, again, because I was his tailypo, but I believed him.

It wasn’t like I really had a choice.

The hall was empty when I stepped out of the studio and started the walk back to my room. I didn’t pass anyone along the way, and honestly, I was grateful for that. I wasn’t really in the mood for conversation. I wasn’t in any pain—one of the nice things about the way all this was handled, if any process that begins with being literally skinned alive can be referred to in any way as “nice”—but I wasn’t feeling up for people. Most of the people on Naga’s estate were other lamia, and while they were perfectly nice, the majority of them didn’t speak English, and just looked at me like I had somehow slipped my leash and needed to be brought to heel as quickly as possible. No, better to just move quickly, get my stuff, and get moving.

Naga wouldn’t mind me leaving without saying goodbye. He never did. This was just a waystation for me, always had been, and always would be, at least until I brought Thomas home and didn’t need it anymore. I kept my head down as I walked, moving fast, and didn’t relax until I saw the door to my room.

That was when I remembered. Icouldn’tleave, not until I gave Naga the bags I’d been sent to retrieve. I didn’t pay for the services he provided me, but when he showed up with a job—which was almost always, essentially, “go to this world in this dimension over here, get something, and bring it back,” with a decent side order of recreational murder—I did it, no questions asked. I owed him, whether he wanted to acknowledge it or not. Retrieving a person and retrieving an object meant essentially the same thing, and they were part of why the artists had already known how to amp up a gateway tattoo to carry more than one person.

I paused, frowning. I did enough retrieval that they should never even have asked if I was okay reducing my gateway tattoos to a single-person carrying capacity. That was a little odd, and I didn’t entirely like it.

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