Page 43 of Spelunking Through Hell

“They don’t have a lot of resistance, so they can pass through the membrane easily,” I said.

“Precisely. Meaning that when a snake cult manages to summon one, they can harvest the membrane that has adhered to their new ‘god’ and use it to do great things. Pure pneuma is one of the most powerful magical tools there is. A dimensional traveler should be dripping with it. Especially one who’s been pushing through membranes for fifty years.” He paused, clearly expecting me to pick up on the thread of what he was saying.

I’ve never been a fan of picking up on threads. If you can’t punchthrough something or blow it up, what’s the point? I looked at him blankly for a long moment before shaking my head. “Okay.”

He looked confused by my lack of curiosity, then shrugged and said, “You should be. And you’re not.”

“What?” I looked at my arm, like I would somehow be able to see the dimensional membrane that had never been visible before. “Not at all?”

“Oh, you have quite a bit adhering to you now, and I’ll peel it away later, with your permission, to add to the standing effects. We’ll be able to run the translation spell for longer than I thought. But, Alice, you don’t have fifty years’ worth. You could have been keying your tattoos to the pneuma you were harvesting just by moving between dimensions.” He looked at me gravely. “You could have set up your own anti-aging tattoos.”

I blinked slowly. It sounded like he was saying that it had never been necessary to flense me; like the energy generated by my travels would have been enough to do the same thing with substantially less trauma. But that couldn’t be true. Naga had been helping me. Naga had been making sure I was put back together every time things went wrong, supplying me with maps and directions and bounties to collect while I’d been out there anyway, and...

“So every time they skinned me, it peeled off the pneuma?” I asked slowly, feeling out the words.

“Yes,” said Thomas. “Every time. After fifty years, you should be carrying enough of a magical charge to power a continent. Or destroy one. Right now, you’ve got enough of it stuck to you to destroy a city, not crack a world in two.”

“Naga... told me... he said there were no worlds capable of supporting human life in this direction,” I said, still speaking slowly and deliberately. It felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff that had started to crumble under my feet, throwing everything I thought I knew into disarray. “I tried to come this way more than forty years ago, and he said no. He said I’d never survive. He said there was nothing here to find.”

My heart was beating too fast, and my chest was getting tight, making it more and more difficult for me to breathe. I stared at Thomas, but I wasn’t really seeing him anymore. I was seeing the cracks in my relationship with Naga, the places where the things he’d told me and the things I’d been going through hadn’t quite matched up, all the things that had never made sense.

The questions I should have asked—the questions Helen said Ihadasked but didn’t remember asking. His personal Johrlac took my pain away every time they laid me down and covered my skin in new ink. What else had they been taking away? And for how long?

“Heliedto me,” I said wonderingly. Thomas reached over and pushed my hair back from my face.

“Yes, darling, I’m afraid he did,” he said. Then, with more alarm: “Alice? Are you all right?”

It was getting harder to keep breathing. I dug my hands into the blankets, balling them into fists, and bent forward to stare at my own knees, shaking. I was distantly aware that I was having a panic attack but had no idea how to make it stop.

Thomas got off the bed. I grabbed for his hand, suddenly certain that if he left my sight, he’d be gone again, and I’d have to start looking for him from the beginning. Gently, he extricated himself and leaned over to kiss the top of my head. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “You have my word. I’ve made no further bargains, and even if I had, I have a snake to kill, meaning I can’t go off to get abducted by cosmic forces of ultimate evil right now. Stay here, all right?”

I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. I managed to nod, barely, and dug my fingers into the covers again as he walked away, breathing faster and faster.

Naga had been lying to me.Nagahad beenlyingto me. This could have been overdecadesago. I could have gone home to my children while they were stillchildren, I could have been a part of their lives, I could have saved my family, I could—

I could hear the click of the window being opened, and the snick of small shears. Then Thomas sat back down on the edge of the bed, and said, voice reasonable and very distant, “I want to give you something to calm you down. Do I have your permission?”

I still couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even nod anymore. Everything was crashing down on top of me, walls eroded by relief and finally feeling like I could relax. How much damage had I done to myself in the process of running? How much of it could have been avoided?

“Oh,Alice...” Thomas put his arm around me, drawing me up against his body. “If I wasn’t already convinced, this would convince me. I never wanted to see you fall apart like this again. But it’s not something you can fake. Here. Please.”

Carefully, he peeled the fingers of my right hand away from the snarl of blankets, lifting it in his own. I didn’t try pull free, not even as he turned my palm upward and pressed the long, thorny stem of a swamp bromeliad into it, not quite hard enough for the thorns tobreak my skin. He gave me an expectant look and relaxed slightly as I curled my fingers closed around the stem, driving the thorns into my own flesh.

As always with swamp bromeliads, they were wickedly sharp, but so thin I barely felt them entering me as I slowly turned the flower toward my face and inhaled the smell of apples and strawberries. A wave of exhaustion swept over me, accompanied by a loosening in the bands around my chest, and I toppled gently over into the bed.

Thomas was still there, stroking my hair and watching me with open, obvious concern.

“Rest, love,” he said. “Just... get some rest. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

You better be,I thought but couldn’t quite say as my eyes drifted shut and I drifted off to sleep, soothed by the familiar, soporific scent of swamp bromeliads and sweat. It smelled like home. I inhaled deeply, and I was gone, slipping into the comfortable dark of peace.

Thirteen

“I only ever wanted to get her clear of the blast radius before the bomb went off. Was that so much for a father to ask?”

—Jonathan Healy

Still in the same bed, still naked, and somewhat tragically alone, because sometimes the world isn’t fair

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