Page 65 of Spelunking Through Hell

I raised my free hand and pressed it against the side of his face though I didn’t say anything. Every word sounded like it was hurting him, and I needed to let him get this out.

He turned his head enough to kiss my palm, then returned to looking at me solemnly. “Before the two of you arrived, I thought I’d lost everything, and finding a way to get myself out without giving up theselfishness that got me here would be proof that all my punishment had been completely earned. I didn’t want to be the man who deserved to feel like this. I wanted to be someone better. So I would probably have said no.”

“And now?” I prompted gently.

“When we found Sally wandering the wastes, when she told me what she’d done to get taken away, when I knew for sure that Earth was still there, and how long it had been...” He sighed. “I knew you were gone. I knew everyone I’d known was gone. But the children might still be alive, and I owed it to them to try to make it back, and Sally was desperate to get home to James, who was her brother in every way that mattered. If I gave up, I was giving up for her, too, since any way out of here would have to come through me. And so I knew that if I had the chance to leave this place, I’d take it, whether or not everyone agreed to come with me.”

“Good,” I said.

He wasn’t finished. “And then she brought me your guns and told me they’d been taken from a woman found unconscious outside our walls, and that she thought you might be another assassin. She didn’t tell me how much you looked like your picture. I think she was trying to protect me. Sally got to watch the first time I mourned for you, you see, when she told me where she was from and what year it had been when the crossroads claimed her. Before her arrival, I’d been telling myself that time ran differently here, and it hadn’t been as long for you. I think the crossroads knew, and wanted me to suffer with my hope for as long as possible, because Sally was the first person from Earth I’d seen arrive in almost fifty years.” He sighed heavily. “There may be another world like this one out there somewhere, filled with its own captives.”

“We’ll find it,” I told him. “We’ll get out of here, and we’ll find it if it exists, and we’ll get them out.”

He smiled a little. “You always were so damn convinced that you could fight the world and win,” he said.

“So far I’ve been right.”

“Except when you’ve been wrong.”

I squeezed his fingers again. “Shush, you.”

“Yes, dear.” He said it with such immense fondness that my heart ached a little. “Sally brought me your guns, and I knew you were gone and that the crossroads had sent someone else to kill me. For a moment I let myself hope that it might be a grandchild come to bring me home again, but surely they would have been carrying something todistinguish them from you, not wanting to cause this exact confusion. I mourned you all over again in an instant.”

“And while you were doing that, I was waking up and getting ready to murder you for replacing me with a couple dozen new wives,” I said.

He smiled again, more broadly this time. “As if I could ever have replaced you.”

“Hey, didn’t mean you weren’t willing to try,” I said, as lightly as I could manage, and tugged him toward me. “Come here.”

“We need to go join the effort to gather my subjects, and your ribs—”

“I know both those things, and I know we’ve both been alone for fifty years, no matter how many people we had near us, and I know you need to be close to me as much as I need to be close to you. Much as I don’t like it, I’m okay not making out like teenagers behind the Red Angel while my ribs hurt this much, but I want to hold you for a little while, and you’re going to let me. You can’t go to the front line, and they’re not counting on me yet.” I let go of his hand and pulled my hand away, leaving him looking momentarily bereft at the loss of contact before I spread my arms and said, “Just get over here.”

He sighed as he climbed onto the bed beside me, and we wrapped our arms around each other and lay down, still fully clothed, with our heads against the pillow.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” he replied, with faint amusement. “Are we returning to introductions?”

“Not nearly enough mud for that,” I said. “But I’d be happy to keep meeting you over and over again, for the rest of my life, if that was one of my options. You talked a lot, but I’m not completely sure you answered my question.”

He sighed heavily. “My apologies. I... yes. Yes, Alice. Yes, if they won’t all agree to come inside and let me try to save them, if they must persist in making war when we should be making peace with one another, then yes. I’ll leave them here, and I’ll come home with you.”

“And Sally.”

“And Sally,” he agreed. “You were telling the truth when you told her that you’d spoken to James, yes? I don’t know how she’ll react if you were lying, and that’s a fight I’d rather not have to witness.”

“I can’t say for sure that he’sherJames,” I admitted. “Maybe there’s a bunch of boys named James who fit that story. But that seems a little unlikely, and everything I said about the boy I met was true. He’s fromMaine, the crossroads took his best friend, he’s a sorcerer, and he’s with our granddaughter. She’ll keep him alive until we get home with Sally.”

Thomas sighed, an almost imperceptible worry leaving his eyes. I hadn’t realized it was there until it was gone.

“You care about her a lot,” I said.

“She’s the closest thing I’ve had to family in a very long time,” he said. “I would have been able to understand the reasons for your falsehood, if youhadbeen lying, but I would prefer not to see her hurt.”

“Nope,” I said. “Not lying. About anything, including being okay with the fact that you’ve apparently adopted a teenage girl who doesn’t like me very much. We’re going home, Thomas. I have faith in us.”

“It’s an impossible task you’re asking me to achieve,” he said. “You want me to work a kind of magic that’s never been done before, with limited resources, without exhausting myself so severely that we simply wind up stranded in whatever dimension we’re spilled out into.”

---