Page 23 of Spelunking Through Hell

“Not likely,” she replied.

“Ah, well,” I said. “Let’s go eat, and then I’m gonna go do something seriously stupid.”

“A normal day for you, then.”

I laughed and let her lead me to the kitchen. I was feeling better already.

Seven

“I love my wife, but every time she repeats something her father told her, I want to travel back in time and slap the man. It would be worth it, even if it meant she grew up to be someone else. The Grandfather Paradox be damned.”

—Thomas Price

Leaving Ithaca for a series of unfamiliar dimensions, culminating in Cornale, which has never been a pleasant place to visit

I’d been to Cornaletwice before, once with Naga, when he was still going with me on my earliest jaunts, testing the limits of what my body could carry, and once on my own, by mistake, after pushing my crossing charms to the absolute limit of what they were capable of. Neither visit had been particularly pleasant.

In fact, it was the climate on Cornale, coming as it did after a series of increasingly less pleasant dimensions, that had gone a long way toward convincing me Naga was being utterly sincere when he told me there was nothing more in that direction that could sustain human life. I still wasn’t sure he’d been lying. A bottle world was, by the definition Helen and Phoebe had given me, already basically dead, and definitely not a place you wanted to wind up by mistake.

Naga could have had absolutely no idea that the bottle world would be the next place I needed to look for Thomas. He could have been acting in good faith.

And if I kept on telling myself that, I would eventually start to believe it, and everything would go back to fitting together neatly, the way I needed it to.

I stepped into the stone circle that would let me transition to the first dimension on the list of jumps, a place Helen called Mul, where it was apparently monsoon season. My sandwich—which had beencloser to a gyro, packed with onions, tomatoes, mild, soft cheese, tzatziki, and ground poultry of some kind, lightly spiced and as delicious as it was unfamiliar—had come with a side order of both stuffed grape leaves and grudging advice about how to handle the chain I was about to embark on. Don’t try to talk to the locals on Mul; they were aware of the dimensional space between the warp and weft of their local weave, but they didn’t appreciate the people who sometimes came through. They wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t bother them, but if I made myself their problem, they would absolutely answer in kind. My last route from Cornale had been longer and less efficient. This was the straightest shot I could make to the bottle world, where Phoebe still said I shouldn’t go.

And despite that, she had hung a waterproofed woolen cloak around my shoulders before I left the house and thanked me in a low voice for bringing her októfather’s final journey home, even if her októfather himself was lost to them forever. The cloak was warm and heavy enough to feel reassuringly solid against my back, protecting me from bad weather yet to come, even if it was slightly too warm here in the Ithacan sunshine.

Phoebe and Helen both stood at the bottom of the path to the circle, watching me go. Phoebe would return home to her baking and reading after this, while Helen would head onward to request a meeting with Naga. It’s good to have friends.

Transit circles aren’t necessary for movement between worlds—if they were, it would be even harder to accomplish—but they ease the process somewhat when they’re built at the location of a weak spot in the membrane, making it easier to find and push through. That was what Phoebe called “a space between the warp and the weft,” which an interestingly textile metaphor. If I thought of it that way, I started to picture the barriers between dimensions as a pie crust, and the weak spots as the openings in the latticework on top.

Standing smack in the middle of the circle, I pulled another bead off my necklace and ground it under my heel, closing my eyes. Again, a wave of dizziness washed over me, followed by a sheet of stinging rain so cold that it made my skin feel like it was trying to become two sizes smaller as soon as it lashed against me. I opened my eyes on the present, no flashback gnawing at me. A girl could get used to this, if not to the weather.

I was standing on a boardwalk, oil-treated wood beneath my feet, a raging sea all around me, and the distant lights of a village on the shore. At least the local dislike of travelers didn’t extend to routingthe boardwalk around the weak spot and dropping us into the water. Given how hard the waves were roiling, I would have been swept away in an instant, and it would have been a pretty lousy way to end a fifty-year journey.

According to Phoebe, if I wanted to hit the next world on the chain—a place called Hríðarbylur, which I would have had no concept of how to pronounce if she hadn’t said it aloud first—I would need to walk about twenty yards from my starting point, face west, and concentrate on the idea of snow. Going straight from a world of endless rain to one where the key to finding the right place was thinking about snow didn’t seem like a great idea to me, but it was the route I had, and at least my cloak was keeping me semi-dry. Maybe I wouldn’t freeze if I moved fast enough.

There was no need to linger, and it felt increasingly like doing so would result in being swept off the boardwalk by an errant wave. I walked as instructed, turned, and pressed my fingers to the inside of my arm under the cloak as I closed my eyes and concentrated. I hated to use one of my tattoos so soon, especially given how much harder that transition would be, but if I dropped a bead on this boardwalk, I was never going to be able to find it in the storm.

The feeling of wetness immediately went away. That was good. What replaced it was bad. The worst flashbacks are the ones that come with immediate sensory memories. Like, say, the acid burn of Apraxis nymphs gestating inside my flesh, getting ready to chew their way out into the open air and add me to their collection of copied, captive minds. Their telepathy isn’t like the Johrlacs, or like anything else we’ve come across; it’s a unique, terrible thing.

The waves of pain were as intense and immediate as they had been the first time, enough to make me lose track of the fact that this wasn’t really happening; this had already happened. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe I could be happy if I stopped trying to live in the present when I was in the past, even though I was living in the past when I was in the present.

I never said I was psychologically healthy, okay?

I was lying on my stomach on a hard wooden table, and the air against my back was cool verging on cold, almost soothing on the spaces that weren’t on fire from the developing nymphs. A hand touched my shoulder, pushing me down.

“I’m sorry, Alice,” said Thomas’ voice, familiar and tight with fear. “This is going to hurt.”

“I know,” I said, closing my eyes. When this had actually happened,I hadn’t been focused on looking at him, more interested in getting through the removal of the nymphs from my flesh without throwing up or passing out. Keeping my eyes open—fighting the flashback to keep them open—wouldn’t change what had happened.

It never did.

“Take a deep breath.”

I did, and held it as he began digging the first nymph out of my shoulder, fighting to yank it free, and the pain, the pain, thepain—

Again, that feeling of dizzying blur and transition, and the air got warmer. Warmer? That didn’t match up with picturing snow. I opened my eyes, suddenly afraid I’d ended up in the wrong place, and looked around me at what seemed like a cozy hunting lodge. There was even a fire burning in the fireplace, although there weren’t any people in sight. A piece of paper rested on the nearby table, held down with a rock. Curious, I walked over and picked it up.

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