Page 40 of Spelunking Through Hell

—Alexander Healy

Naked in a bed with a man everyone thinks is dead, but who is most definitely and empirically alive, thank you very much

It took a surprisinglylong time for Thomas to stop crying. Surprising mostly because my eyes stayed dry the whole while, watching him closely, but not shedding a single tear. When he finally wiped his eyes, he looked at me somewhat bemusedly and asked, voice soft, “Alice... why aren’t you crying?”

“Oh. I mean, I guess because I don’t have anything to cry about.” I pushed myself into a sitting position again, not bothering to pull the covers around myself this time. It wasn’t like I had anything he hadn’t seen anyway, even if much of it had been substantially more scarred the last time he’d had the opportunity. “You were out here, separated from your family and wondering if we were still alive for you to come home to. Well, I was left on Earth with the kids, and no proof the crossroads hadn’t chucked you straight into the first event horizon they had access to. So I had to convince myself. I had to spend so much energy believing you were alive and out here for me to find that it’s been all that kept me moving for the last fifty years. I’m sure I’ll have a little breakdown later, when I realize I don’t know what to do with myself anymore, but right now, I’m mostly just relieved to finally know for sure that I was right. Sally showing up here and knowing what time it was at home may have made you lose hope, and I bet that hurt. I bet that hurt alot. Well, I never lost hope. I couldn’t. If I had, I would have fallen apart completely. So for me, this is all lessoverwhelming and more... inevitable is I guess the term. It’s inevitable. You were inevitable.” I smiled at him. “We were inevitable.”

“I see.” He frowned. “Can we finish that conversation now, do you think?”

“Unless you want to go for round two,” I offered. We had a lot of lost time to make up for.

He shook his head. “Perhaps later,” he said. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“All evidence to the contrary,” I said, half-grumbling, half-appreciative. “But if it’s answering questions time, can we start with how you’ve barely aged a day?” I paused. “Oh, I almost forgot.” I pressed two fingers to one of the small stars tattooed along my hip bone, concentrating. The star flared and vanished, leaving a blank spot where it had been. My head spun, briefly, before my body equalized and recovered from the relatively small expenditure.

I pulled my hand away to find Thomas staring at me.

“Alice,” he said. “what was that?”

“My tattoos are all single-use,” I said. “They have to be, or I can’t carry them. Anything larger would require me to have the magic to power them, and I don’t.”

“Not naturally, but you’ve been traveling between dimensions,” he said. “The membrane that adheres to you should be enough to power... never mind.” He shook his head, clearly abandoning the thought. “I know you can’t have been doing your own ink, not if it’s magically-imbued, and whatever your artist told you has to be what we go by. But Alice, what was the charm you just activated?”

“Contraception charm,” I said. “I have five more. I don’t think we want to be heading back to Earth with me pregnant, and I think we both have a concerted interest in repeating the activity that might risk it. I don’t have an implant, and I don’t travel with condoms.”

Thomas blinked. “What ‘implant?”

“It’s one of the options women have for contraception these days,” I said. “If you have one, you won’t get pregnant, even if you’re sexually active.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’m sure catching me up on the ways the world has changed will be the work of several years.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“As am I. But Alice... why did you need contraception charms?”

“I’m a woman who’s mostly been traveling alone through some dodgy places, filled with pretty dodgy people,” I said. “It seemed like, well. Better safe than sorry if that makes sense. And it neverhappened.” It seemed suddenly very important to be sure he understood that. “I was being cautious, for once, and I was always, always armed, and the sort of people who want that sort of thing were usually the sort of people who didn’t want to be shot repeatedly.”

“So why so many, if it was just a precaution?”

“Oh, because it turns out they don’t just work to counter possible pregnancy,” I said. “They also work on parasites and oviposited larvae.”

He was silent for a long moment, but I could see his jaw working as he chewed over what he was going to say next, so I waited for him to catch up with his own thoughts. Finally, slowly, he said, “Alice, why do you know that?”

“A surprising number of the dimensions adjacent to Earth are overrun with Apraxis wasps,” I said. “Seems like once they get in there, they tend to take over, and they see anyone who passes through as an opportunity to expand the hive mind.”

“And did you learn this before or after you started requesting contraception tattoos?”

“It takes three days from implant to hatch. I made it to Empusa on time.” I’d collapsed on Naga’s doorstep with almost eight hours left before the infant Apraxis finished their gestation and emerged from my flesh, chewing their way out of me and swallowing my mind in the process. I’d been shaky and unsure of who I was for days after that, although there hadn’t been any permanent damage that we’d ever been able to confirm. Naga had been so angry.

His anger was nothing to what I saw now, brewing in Thomas’ eyes. “And you keptgoingin that direction?”

“It seemed promising,” I said. “Contraception charms are small. They don’t take up a lot of skin.”

“That’s not why I’m... Alice, didn’t you ever stop to ask yourself whether it wasworthit, if finding me meant you had to put yourself through that?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

He was silent for a moment, and then said in a measured tone, “It’s been long enough that I don’t know whether I get to say I don’t approve—I rather feel like I lost that privilege when the crossroads took me away from you and our children—but I don’t like it. You are precious to me, Alice. You have always been precious to me, even when we’ve been far apart from one another. The idea of someone harming you makes me want to harmthem. So how am I meant to react when the person doing the harm is you, to yourself?”

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