Thresholder

Perry didn’t like to think of it as running away, but it certainly felt like that. Workers had taken the cloning machine apart and shoved it into the shelfspace, not so much to give it to him as to make sure that it didn’t fall into enemy hands. Dirk had said that they would be wanting it back, but he’d said it in a defeated sort of way that seemed to acknowledge that once it went into the shelf it might be gone forever.

Perry was not planning on giving it back. He had plans for it, and besides, they had others.

He had flown away from both Berus and Thirlwell, far enough in a random direction that he would be out of Third Fervor’s range. From what he knew, every time he opened up the shelfspace in the open air, he was pinging Third Fervor’s sense of the volume, at least within her thirty mile range. It was a major handicap unless he could get indoors, and even indoors he would have to make sure there wasn’t some unseen gap for airflow. It was only after he was far enough away that he could go into the shelfspace and speak with Mette.

There was still the question of Kes. They didn’t know whether he was still alive or at the bottom of the ocean, but based on the reports it really did seem like he’d been captured. She could have taken him almost anywhere, and in the end, Perry had decided to hold off on a recon mission given the difficulty he expected to face if Third Fervor showed up.

“I don’t like that,” said Mette with her arms folded across her chest. She had gotten them into that position with a wince, her cracked ribs and expanding bruise causing her to move gingerly. She was laying on a bed he’d pushed into the shelfspace, next to the hulking pieces of the machine, which looked like sections of an industrial art project. “If I had been kidnapped, would you go after me?”

“If I knew where you were being held, yes,” said Perry. “Thirlwell is huge though. The best bet, short of the Farfinder getting off their asses and helping out, is that I can hover within range and get some recordings of conversations. Kes had the bracelet on, but that was meant to be tracking if we got separated, not if he was captured. March designed it to be removable with some effort.” The nanites were perfectly capable of being much stronger than flesh and bone, but he’s worried that would be suspicious and encourage their enemies to cut off a hand to remove the bracelet. It’s what he would have done.

“Mmm,” said Mette. “So we’re just sitting back? Biding our time?” She gave a skeptical look around the twice-flooded shelfspace. There was a definite smell to it.

“Essentially, yes,” said Perry. “We’re putting everything we can into skills and equipment, then we stage a conflict that’s winnable. We pull out all the stops, the neurotoxins, the radiation, maybe even a bomb. I’m still going through the data dump from the Farfinder, but it does seem like I should be able to catch Third Fervor while she’s sleeping. Her armor is too tough to get through, unless I can argue her down. I don’t necessarily like the idea of killing her in her sleep, but if that’s what’s necessary, then yes.”

“If they have him, they’re going to torture him,” said Mette.

“Torture is actually pretty ineffective,” said Perry. “They’ve done various studies on it, at least on my Earth, and the biggest problem is that the information is never reliable because at a certain point people will say anything in order to make the pain stop, and the things they say won’t necessarily be the truth. It’s good for getting a confession from someone, if there’s something specific that you want them to say out loud, but it addles the mind. Better to build rapport.”

Mette blinked at him.

“It’s … just something I had read about,” said Perry. “I mean yes, it’s bad that they might torture him, but if the science replicates, then they would be more likely to try rapport building, which is more effective. That’s all I meant. He might be totally fine.”

“You think they might be trying to ply him with treats?” asked Mette.

“Maybe, yeah,” said Perry. He thought about it some, rubbing his chin. He needed to trim the beard that had grown there, but with the werewolf hairiness it was a constant losing battle. There was probably a way to stop the hair growth via second sphere, but it would take time and effort he needed to spend on other things. “I mean, I guess when I try to think about what it would be like in Thirlwell, I imagine that building rapport with the enemy goes contrary to the strongman nature of monarchies. Even if it’s effective, a king doesn’t always care about effectiveness, he cares about laying his dick out on the table and proving that he’s the biggest and best around.”

“Which means that they might be removing his fingers right now,” said Mette with a pronounced frown.

“Yeah,” said Perry.

“And we’re just going to hide out in the shelf,” said Mette, still frowning.

“I can fly overhead,” said Perry. “Try to pick up a signal that way. The nanites can’t transmit much, and he’s probably indoors if not underground, if they’re holding him at all …”

“But you’d rather just leave him?” asked Mette.

“No,” said Perry. “But … we literally have a machine that can make more. I think we need to have an understanding of the clones and who they are. I didn’t get it when they made him, but I think I do now, the mindset that you need, the understanding of the other.”

“You want to make more?” asked Mette. “You’re just going to treat them — people who think like you and have all your memories — as disposable?”

“It’s a philosophical question,” said Perry. “He’s got what, only a few days of unique memories? He’s his own person, but if we made a clone of me, it would be ninety-nine and some nines percent equivalent to Kes. I think he would agree, for what it’s worth.”

“Blegh,” said Mette. She had a look of visible disgust on her face, like she’d just sipped at her tea and got a bug in her mouth. “I need you to go make an effort to find him.”

“I’m going to,” said Perry. “I’ll check the logs from the listeners that I have in place, then do a canvas, listening to his signal. I’m making a plan for getting him back. I said I wouldn’t rather just leave him.”

“He also has the tooth,” said Mette. “He might use that.”

“No way,” said Perry. “The wolf is strong, but the change is hard to control, and when I try to imagine all the places that he could have been stashed, assuming he had the tooth on him and kept it with him, which — I mean, I just don’t see it.”

“I think we should switch me over to a wolf,” said Mette. She still had her arms crossed.

“I need you on engineering duty,” said Perry. “I need you making me things.”

She looked down at her bruised body and almost laughed before thinking better of it. “I almost died,” said Mette. “I’ve got broken ribs. How much work do you think I’m going to be doing like this?”

Perry sighed. “Alright, then let’s turn you,” he said. “There’s an island marked on the maps that held a naval base and not much more, defunct now. It’s a hundred miles away. Can I drop you off, or do you need me to trip sit for you?”

“I won’t … go into the ocean, will I?” asked Mette. “As a wolf?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “I’ve tamped down on all the instincts, can dodge the transformation if I want to … I wouldn’t think you’d swim out into the ocean to hunt the monsters there, no. You’ll be hungry, but I can kill something large and leave it for you.”

“Or I can just use the lanterns,” said Mette. “Make food that way. They can make meat. Ish.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” said Perry. “Do you need me?”

Mette closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Dump me on an island. Make sure I have meat. Then go find him, or try to.”

Perry nodded. That was sensible. “I’ll check in on you when I can, pick you up when I’m able. But we have to prepare for it anyhow.”

Lukoo’s Island was the tiny exposed tip of an undersea mountain, with a footprint barely bigger than Perry’s old high school. There were three buildings on it, all made with heavy stone which had been shipped there from elsewhere: a tower, a warehouse, and housing for the people who had once lived there. It had been established as a waypoint by the Kingdom of Berus at considerable expense, then been abandoned with the rise of air travel and lantern-powered ships.

Almost the moment Perry landed, he got a notification that he’d received an email.

Subject: Rescue Operation

To: Peregrin Holzmann

Perry,

Sorry for the lack of contact. Things have been moving fast here, and we’re still hoping not to get entangled with the predictive aspects of the Grand Spell, which we think would be bad for everyone involved. We think it’s probably safe to feed you information, but we’re still concerned that anything we do to help you will imperil us while also not actually making the coming fights any easier for you. We hope you understand. We’re watching from a distance, which we think we can do safely. Most of the time we’re in orbit around the planet, which helps with our ability to predict the future. Intermittent communication makes prediction more powerful. Intervention is a last resort.

Following the attack on your camp, Kestrel was captured and taken to a jail cell. There he was interrogated by the Thirlwell spymaster, who is apparently another clone of this Dirk Gibbons. Dirk tried to kill Kestrel to keep his cover, Kestrel ate the tooth and escaped, and we picked him up before Third Fervor could get to him. He’s with us and safe.

DO NOT go to Thirlwell. We only had a chance at getting a single relatively weak prediction off after the rescue, but in it, you died to Third Fervor in an aerial battle.

We personally think that you need to go after Fenilor while you have the chance. There’s something strange and complicated here, and we have two main theories. The first is that everything is fucked because Fenilor has been camped out for five hundred years. The second is that everything is fucked because you came through with Mette. It’s possible that it’s both of them working together to make things weird. I don’t know exactly what of the data dump you’ve read through so far, or what Marchand had summarized for you, but this is the most complicated matchmaking setup we’ve ever seen.

Attached are some coordinates, along with a system for Marchand to map them against the planet. We’re using a better system than the locals have. The coordinates use what Dirk was gathering for you on Fenilor, mapped against our own inability to pierce into the past. Our approach has been to find all the places we don’t have eyes on, but it’s slow and tedious. These sites have a permanent umbra, and we’re hoping that you can visit them. We would do it ourselves, but again, there’s the risk of entanglement. We think that Fenilor would react better to you than to us, if he has a way of sensing a breach, but we don’t know whether he does. If you think of a way to tell whether our arrival was predicted by powers far greater than our own, let us know.

Kes is going to stay with us for the time being. That’s his preference.

We’re going to be low/no contact, trying to get some better predictions from in orbit. We’ll be watching you from afar. Unless Fenilor has his umbra over you (which we’re dying to get for ourselves), assume that we’re watching. Also assume that we’re keeping an eye on the future.

Captain Hella Farrin,

SS Farfinder

Perry looked at the coordinates. They were all for places that were far off the beaten path, away from major cities. Marchand pulled up the map and when Perry’s attention went to it, the map expanded. There were three sites, labeled and listed, all under a haze of anti-magic that was apparently stymying the Farfinder.

When Perry pulled Mette from the shelfspace, he gave her the good news and the bad news.

“Ha, I knew he’d wolf out the first chance he got,” she said. She looked around at the abandoned buildings. It had been twenty years since anyone had set foot on the place, given how out of the way it was. Weeds had overgrown the paths and vines clung to the buildings. She didn’t think much of her new home, even if it were only her home for the next day.

“I can stay here with you then,” said Perry. “Help you through this.”

Mette smiled at him. “You’d do that for me?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?” asked Perry.

“I mean … yeah,” said Mette. “Though now that I think about it, I’m wondering whether ‘help me through it’ was a euphemism.”

Perry rolled his eyes and almost kept himself from blushing, but he remembered that he’d told Mette he’d hold back less and let his face be whatever it was going to be. He didn’t think he was visibly blushing. He had always been a pretty tightly controlled person.

“Aw, it makes it even sweeter that you weren’t even thinking about that,” said Mette.

“Let’s get you some food first,” said Perry. “I’m going to go hunt a whale.” He paused for a beat. “See, in my culture that would be a very offensive thing to say, which is what makes it funny.”

Mette shrugged in the careful way that one does with broken ribs. “I don’t know what a whale is,” she said.

“Yeah, I know you don’t know, I could feel it not translating,” he said. “Look, pretend that I said something that was offensive to your culture but made sense in context.”

Mette thought about that for a moment. “Wow, rude.”

“What did you — you know what, never mind,” said Perry.

He left her in the bed, locked the helmet in place, and dove into the sea. The slope beneath the waves was gentle, which was good, because it meant that he would be able to get away from any of the larger monsters. He wouldn’t have actually been able to take down a whale, and if he could, he wouldn’t be able to bring it to shore. He was looking for something more like a shark or a tuna, meat that he could bring ashore that would hold Mette over while she went in and out of rage mode. He wasn’t sure that would actually work, but it was worth a shot. The transformation came with hunger, which needed to be sated, but also anger and a desire to hunt. A carcass would satisfy the need to rip and rend away at flesh, but it was necessarily a dead thing.

It took an hour before Perry decided that it just wasn’t happening. He’d gotten an alert from Marchand about some massive shape moving in the water, far bigger than Perry could fight, but he’d stayed for a bit, hoping that something smaller would come his way. He had hoped that Mette would be well enough to set up a lantern for food, because if she couldn’t set it up, he would have to. He’d have no idea what he was doing unless it was dead simple.

He trudged up out of the water, feeling disappointed, though he’d known going in that he wasn’t really set up for fishing. Going into the water like that always brought back memories of Richter; they had gone walking along the bottom of the Pacific together, looking at fish and some of the artificial reefs that her alternate California had set up.

When Perry walked over to where he’d left Mette, she was missing from the bed and standing up on top of one of the buildings in tattered clothes.

“What happened to waiting?” he asked.

She leapt down and sprinted through the tall grasses to him, extending her claws. He was surprised by her speed, but reached out a hand and grabbed her by the throat when she launched herself at him, then threw her to the ground so she was on her belly and sat on her as gently as he could.

His first reaction was to laugh, but he held it in, and instead tried to put himself in her shoes. She had probably eaten the tooth because her ribs were bothering her and her breathing wasn’t quite right, or because of the pain across her chest from where she’d been punched. The feelings came as if from nowhere, and that lack of control had felt scary sometimes, especially when it would be a monthly issue. He remembered feeling like it would never end, like he’d be trapped with having control taken away from him, hurting someone who had shown him kindness, even if it was her own brand.

He hadn’t liked being a werewolf, only the power that it brought, and he’d been thankful that he’d been able to get it under control with only one or two deaths.

Mette screamed beneath him, and not in the good way. She was thrashing around, trying to turn herself to face him, but he’d pinned her hips to the ground. If she’d been fine on her own, he thought she would probably keep being fine, but he had committed to stay with her, even if he thought she had jumped the gun.

Eventually the struggle slowed, then stopped.

“Perry?” she asked in a small voice. “Can you get off of me?”

“Behave,” he said as he took his weight off her. She rolled over and popped to her feet with energy she hadn’t had an hour before. She rolled her shoulders and looked down at her body.

“Every minute I ever spent exercising was a waste,” she said. She flexed her bicep, which had a pronounced bulge, even if it was far cry from what a bodybuilder might have. She was muscular in an understated way, where before she had been fairly soft. She was still soft, just with muscles beneath the softness.

“You never exercised,” said Perry.

“Yeah, because I knew this moment was coming,” she said. “I feel good.” She beamed at him. “Why didn’t you tell me it felt good?”

“You’re going back to rage mode,” said Perry. “It’s a reprieve, that’s all.”

“You’ll stay with me though, right?” asked Mette, looking him up and down. “Because if you took that armor off, we could —”

“I want you to be working on controlling it, fighting it,” said Perry. “It’s going to be a long road, and it starts now. I don’t want you to kill a person because you were indulging yourself rather than pushing yourself toward mastery.”

“No fun,” said Mette. She rubbed her head and then felt her hair. “Is my hair great now?”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Longer, too.”

She looked at her hair as best she could while trying to hold it away from her head, then turned to Perry. “I think I can feel it coming on again. Did you catch a whale?”

“No,” said Perry.

Her eyes were wide and her expression intense. She shifted a bare foot in the soil. “Then I think I’m going to have to kill you.” Maybe it was meant to be a joke, but it came with too much aggression.

Perry smiled beneath the helmet. She could certainly try.

~~~~

It was a full eight hours later that Mette had finally seemed to come down for good. She was wrapped in a blanket and sipping a cup of tea, both sourced from within the shelfspace. She had eaten her way through most of their food supplies, as her appetite was insatiable, but they had very little in the way of meat, and none of it fresh. She had a lantern going, which was making some meatloaf (not like mom used to make), but she seemed very unenthused about it.

“So, we stop by a village on our way to the first of the marked positions,” said Mette. “Find a library, fill up with stuff we need, then get on our way. It’s technically not even wrong, because we’re working in the interests of their Command Authority or whatever.”

“You’re not coming with me,” said Perry.

“Like hell I’m not,” said Mette. She puffed up her chest, which didn’t work at all with the blanket around her and the mug of tea in her hand. “I’m a werewolf, everyone knows you can’t kill a werewolf.”

Perry rolled his eyes. “Alright, fine,” he said.

Mette blinked at him. “Is this how we’re going to do it now?” she asked. “You’re just going to cave at the slightest resistance?”

“You don’t actually want to go?” asked Perry.

“I mean … yes, I do, I want to be a part of this, that seems worlds better than being stuck on this dinky little abandoned island that I would never escape from if you didn’t come back,” said Mette.

“Great,” said Perry. “Then let’s get ready to go.”

“Are we going to see him again?” asked Mette. “Kes?”

“Of course,” said Perry. “I don’t know how or when, but part of the point of what we’re doing is to team up with the Farfinder long term.”

“And … you think he’s doing okay?” asked Mette. She pulled the blanket tighter around her. A chill breeze was coming off the ocean.

“I think he’s doing fine,” said Perry.

~~~~

They sat around a table in what the crew called the ‘rec room’, an extradimensional space that was largely used for what limited downtime they allowed themselves. The window outside showed a vision of where the ship was in physical space, which was up in orbit, floating lazily around the planet. There was a large screen that looked like a home movie setup, a library with three overstuffed chairs, and a large table next to a cabinet filled with games. A large half-kitchen had snacks and food, along with a pantry that had all kinds of things from different worlds.

“There’s absolutely no way that’s true,” said Kes. “I’m calling bullshit.”

“No,” said Cark with a mild expression. “It’s true.”

“There’s no way that eighty percent of thresholder fights end non-lethally,” said Kes.

Cark shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. We can set you up with computer access and you can look at the files. Hella wants you — or him — to be a part of this.”

Cark looked like the blandest guy in the world. He looked like he should have dorky glasses, though he didn’t. His hair was swept to one side and even the color of his skin was a muted brown of a shade that screamed uninteresting. Kes thought that it had to be deliberate. You wouldn’t look twice at him.

“Break it down for me,” said Kes. “Help me understand. Because the lethality should be — I mean, assume that there’s an even split between ideological opponents, power seekers, and sociopaths, right?”

“Why would we assume that if it’s not correct?” asked Cark. He was eating a plate of hard boiled eggs with a fork and knife.

“What’s the actual observed ratio?” asked Kes.

“Did your other not pass this on to you?” asked Cark.

“We only have the one armor,” said Kes. “We don’t have any way of sharing the data.”

The woman that Cark had come in with, Nitta, was sitting next to him. Her meal was a large salad with different varieties of greens and no dressing. She had a fey appearance to her, which was partly because she was worryingly skinny with a head that seemed too large for her body, but her styling played into it too, particularly the shimmering golden eyeshadow and the unruly curls of blonde hair that didn’t quite hide her pointed ears. She was wearing what Kes would have called bohemian chic, loose and well-loved clothes that seemed like they had been recycled a few times and had a few too many baubles woven into them.

“We can get you electronics,” said Nitta. She raised an eyebrow. “What’s your preference?”

“My … preference?” asked Kes.

“If you get her started on this, it’s going to be hard to stop her,” said Cark. Kes watched as he took a bite of egg. There wasn’t even any salt or pepper on it.

Nitta paused with her fork above her oversized bowl of salad. “It’s true.”

“Alright, fine,” said Kes. “If you’re offering me something, I’ll take it.”

“I have to explain first,” said Nitta. She had been eating in relative silence after they’d made their introductions, but at the opportunity she seemed to come alive. “First you have the screens, the physical displays that change based on needs, once you’ve gotten past some technological thresholds — oh, all this assumes standard physics, the kind of thing that should work on every world, but in practice, doesn’t.”

“Got it,” said Kes. He wanted to ask about those other worlds, and what caused the physics to not work quite right.

“So you have the rectangles or squares, sometimes with a separate physical interface, but usually with the display itself being responsive,” said Nitta. “Usually sized for one hand or two, but sometimes set up like that one, big and imposing,” she gestured to the home theater, “or like what we have on our desks.”

“We had those on my Earth,” said Kes. “I would love to have one of those that can interface with Marchand. I’d love to have several, actually.”

“Can do,” said Nitta. “Now, the second type is something that goes over the eyes. Marchand, your power armor, is of that variety. It overlays reality, either by etching the display on glass, beaming it into the eyeball, or just having a close up display at a very high fidelity.”

“And you have one of those?” asked Kes.

Nitta laughed, and Cark gave her a grin. “Hella calls me a pack rat,” she said. “I take everything I can from the worlds we go through, and my collection is very large.”

“It’s tolerated,” said Cark. “Mostly because Nitta keeps the ship running and it’s come in handy more than once.”

“Technology never fails,” said Nitta. “Except when it does. And I mean that in two senses, because some people build their high technology very sloppily, and because sometimes you run smack into a world that doesn’t allow it for one reason or another. Plus the interoperability of machines from different worlds is a complete bitch.”

“So you could get me some goggles that let me have something like Marchand?” asked Kes, leaning forward slightly.

“We’ll go down to my workshop after this,” said Nitta with an eager nod. “I have all kinds of gifts to bestow on you. The captain doesn’t feel safe giving things to Perry, not yet, but you’re not Perry. Anyway, the third type is the best type.”

Cark was already shaking his head. He’d polished off his eggs and was leaning back, watching Nitta with some affection. Kes couldn’t tell whether it was romantic or not, but neither of them were quite baseline humans.

“With the third type of interface, you go directly to the brain,” she said, grinning. “Lots of ways to do that, but it’s always very complicated. However, once you get around the technical hurdles, it’s by far the best.”

“Until you get to a world where it doesn’t work,” said Cark. “Or it fails and you have a useless piece of metal lodged inside your skull.”

“Technically not necessary,” said Nitta. “There’s a type that you could do, in theory, using what’s basically a hat.”

“And do we have one of those?” asked Cark.

“No,” said Nitta with a sigh. “Someday.” She looked at Kes with a raised eyebrow. “We do have one that would slip into your brain. Very non-invasive, doesn’t hook itself in, mostly just sits there.”

“She’d need to open your skull,” said Cark.

“That seems pretty invasive,” said Kes as he watched Nitta eat. She was trying to eat quickly during the gaps in conversation. He was going to have to get some food for himself soon, but no one had offered anything to him yet, and he didn’t want to impose, not when he was learning things and being offered gifts.

“The device isn’t invasive,” Nitta clarified. “It just sits inside your brain, it doesn’t rip anything out or drive its tendrils in. Replaces nothing. And now is the perfect time to do it, because in this world, we have access to mind-boggling healing.”

“You do?” asked Kes with a raised eyebrow. “Boggle my mind then.”

Nitta glanced at Cark, her bright and eerie eyes meeting his dull ones.

“She said to tell him anything and everything, just not to give him weapons or let him loose without consulting her,” said Cark with a glance at Kes. He shrugged. It was pretty clear that ‘she’ referred to their captain, Hella. They had a particular way of talking about her, an intonation to the ‘she’ in question. It was trusting and almost reverent.

Nitta began putting up fingers. “H-class gives us ideal-state mending, J-class gives us rapid biological healing, K-class gives us helical diagnostics — you know how you get healing when you go through the portal?”

“Uh,” said Kes. “No? Kind of?”

“Well, you do, of a sort, at the destination,” said Nitta. “We think it’s because the Grand Spell is set up to make for even matches, or something like them, and it wouldn’t be an even match if someone stumbled through the portal and died on the ground. But the portals themselves don’t heal, they just have predictive power and leeway to set a broken, injured person down in a time, place, and world where they get the healing they need.”

“Even if they’re badly injured?” asked Kes. “On death’s door?”

Nitta nodded. “And since we can see the moment they come in, we can see what healing they get, and sometimes, we can learn those techniques or borrow that equipment. Which is why we end up with a lot of healing, enough that we have solutions pretty much no matter what rulesets we’re constrained by. Technology is the best though.”

“Until it’s not,” said Cark. He pushed his plate forward.

“Could you bring someone back to life?” asked Kes.

They looked at each other for a moment, having a conversation without words. “Technically,” Nitta began, then frowned. “It’s complicated.”

“It depends on how dead they are,” said Cark. “It depends on whether they have a soul or not, and which kind of soul they have. This world has high-grade H-class thaumics, but the people don’t have a soul, which means there are all kinds of H-class magic that won’t work on them.”

“We could probably bring back someone recently dead,” said Nitta. “Especially if the body was relatively intact. If someone died of a heart attack and then was left unmolested for six hours? I could do that. But I’m not a doctor.”

“You’re the closest thing we have to a doctor,” said Cark. “Which is scary.”

“Wait,” said Kes, turning to Cark. “Is this what you meant about nonlethality? The person would have died, but made it through the portal in time?”

“Sometimes, yes,” said Cark. “But most of the time, it’s enough for the thresholders to beat the other person. Killing isn’t the point, even if they’re comfortable with killing. Your own record is abnormally lethal.”

Kes wanted to object that it was Perry’s record, but he kept his mouth shut. “Do the others not want to stop their opponents from going on?”

“Some do, some don’t,” said Cark. “If you think about your opponents, how many would have made that a priority?”

Kes thought on that. He wasn’t sure. The answer might conceivably be ‘none’, which was a little shocking to think about. None of his opponents to date seemed like they would have minded if he died, but if he’d been beaten to within an inch of his life, and the portal had opened, how many would have stopped him from going through? He didn’t know. Possibly none. Possibly it would depend on what they had going on at the time.

“I don’t know,” he finally answered.

“I wouldn’t have been surprised if you had answered ‘most’,” said Cark. “We’re still going through the logs on you, beyond what we were able to gather from Esperide or the Great Arc. Thresholders often have different experiences.”

“The worlds we visit are tailored to us,” said Kes. “Or … the conflicts, anyway.”

“Seems to be the case,” said Cark. “It’s very difficult to say how it works and what it’s doing though. The Grand Spell is a mystery at the best of times. And … well, there’s Fenilor.”

“Who hasn’t budged for five hundred years,” said Kes. He paused. “Five hundred years, is that right?”

“It is,” said Cark. “We haven’t been able to locate him in the deep past, because even a year stretches our abilities, even here. We’re not sure where or when he got the ability to cloak himself, or how that cloak works.”

“The timeline doesn’t match up,” said Kes. “The revolution isn’t that old. If you said he’d been here for eighty years, or even ninety, I might think that he was planning and plotting, but what was he doing that whole time? Just living his life and occasionally getting attacked by an enemy thresholder?”

“That’s what we’re sending Perry to find out,” said Cark. “Hopefully he doesn’t get his head chopped off.”

“And we’ll be blind when he’s in there,” said Nitta. She bit her lip and looked down at the empty place in front of Kes. “Do you … eat?”

“Yeah, I eat,” said Kes with some relief.

“Hella should have gotten you something,” said Nitta. “What do you eat?”

“Meat,” said Kes. “Any kind of meat you have.” He hesitated for a second. “Raw, or close to raw.” Somewhere in his stomach were human remains. He tried not to think about that and failed. It almost killed his appetite. If he was thinking of himself as divorced from Perry, a separate and new person, then that was his first time killing. Some of it had been intentional as he’d escaped, not simply the mindless ravaging of a beast.

Nitta popped up from her seat and went to one of the cabinets, which was apparently a refrigerator of some kind or another, though he suspected that it was something more complicated given that she pulled out a plate with a two pound steak on it. It was completely raw, and she set it on the table in front of him, then watched him with interest.

He felt self-conscious as he dug in, but he’d been feeling the werewolf’s hunger, and he soon forgot they were there watching him. At least he wasn’t eating a plate of boiled eggs.

When he finished, he washed up at the small sink, feeling much better. It would take some getting used to. Perry had always felt a craving for meat, but hadn’t had too much chance to indulge it. For Kes, it would be different, and he fully intended to fill the Wolf Vessel, if he now had one of those.

“Not that I haven’t enjoyed the company after a traumatic day,” said Kes as he wiped his face on a cloth. They didn’t seem fazed by his diet, which he was thankful for, but he supposed with their ability to watch the past, they had seen him do far worse. Possibly they had seen him eating guards several hours prior. “But I’d like to help somehow, if I can.”

“Let’s get you set up with some toys,” said Nitta. “Then we’ll get you familiarized with the scan tools. It’s time for you to start watching and seeing if you have any insights. Perry is going toward one of the targets, and he’s going to be invisible soon, but you can check in on Nima or Third Fervor. We’re trying to keep an eye on them at all times while the prognostics do their work.”

Kes nodded slowly. He was being given the keys to the kingdom, and it was only a question of whether they’d let him entangle himself back in the conflict instead of sitting on the sidelines.