The Longest Road by John Stadelman

The Longest Road by John Stadelman

I

Ross pulled the stolen Wrangler over onto the shoulder of the highway. Messy perked up in the passenger seat, a tight coil of sandy-brown fur peeking at Ross, who again wondered if dogs could sense the otherness in these places, how his Shiba Inu processed the breaks in reality that they visited. Hell, maybe Messy understood far more about the Straying sites than Ross ever could.

     A small fossil sat on the dashboard. He’d found it with thousands of others, in the ossuary that held the explorer’s bones. It resembled nothing that had ever lived in this world, and glowed like soft humming, a swirling miasma of teal and cobalt that guided him back to America, to this flatland highway just beyond Blakely. Here, at the hidden entrance to the Straying site, it brooded in blood red. The tangible presence of its being—an incessant voice without words or sound—expanded through his mind, then reached out into the night, up the road.

The molten bands of sunset over these winter-empty peanut fields reminded him of the burning West. The mountain on fire. A ditch separated the highway from power-line poles and a deer-fence, and in it cowered a spit of campfire that lit a pitiful reflection against the side of a rusty camper-shell pickup. Ross ran a hand down Messy’s back. “What do we think?”

He opened his door and stepped out into a warm December night in southwestern Georgia. Winters had been cold, once. He hardly needed the jacket he wore, certainly the campfire wasn’t necessary. He clicked his tongue and Messy hopped out after him. No traffic in either direction. Be it an effect of Straying sites, or the danger of the countryside at night, but nobody else was or would be out here.

They stopped at the edge of the firelight. Messy whined a little.

“Lhaer tildra,” Ross said, speaking the dead language from the book: Lay-air tild-ra.

“Lhaer tildra,” the man repeated. He nodded to the grass across the fire.

Ross squatted across from him. “You arrived first,” he said, “so I’ll wait until you go.”

The man watched the fire. It played odd shadows across his pale face, the hollows of his eyes. He could have been younger or older than Ross, depending on how much of himself he had given for the journey, the Aejsli. He wore a thin coat without a shirt underneath, and dirty blue jeans and cracked boots. The smell coming off him reminded Ross of his years in Chicago: the unwashed stench of human odor.

The man twisted his face into a ragged, spiteful grin and turning it up to Ross revealed one green eye and one blue, both bloodshot. “I’ve been here for two days, working up the nerve.”

“That bad?”

“It has to be, considering that this is the end of the journey.”

“‘A path of inner shadow,’” Ross recited.

The man grunted. “I once met a Searcher who’d gone into this Straying,” he said. “I was on my way to the Cambodia site, on a freighter. He was hopping off in Manila, returning home because he’d given up. Came to this site, went in, and it spat him back out. I asked what was in it, but all he’d tell me is that it shows you who you really are.” He spat into the fire. “Guess he couldn’t handle what he saw.”

Ross watched Messy wander to the fence and hike his leg. Then he took in this man, his ragged state, the cracking holes in his voice. He said that he’d taken a freighter rather than flying, meaning he needed to save money, and keep incognito. Ross knew because he’d been doing the same thing for years, ever since he’d begun the Aejsli journey. If this man had been heading to the Cambodia site, then it would’ve been after completing the one in the Yukon. Ross had already made it through the trials at those sites, and through countless others before and after. Neither man would be here if they hadn’t. Just as neither would have the Lichtenberg scars running fractal veins from their right shoulders down to their fingertips, the result of the sacrifice that the Straying in Peru required.

It shows you who you really are. This path of inner shadow.

Which had been carved into the bones of an explorer thousands of years dead: There, take a path of inner shadow. But that wasn’t all, was it?

The end of the Aejsli awaits.

This was the final Straying site. The end of a journey hellish and beautiful and, if Ross succeeded, the last chance for this awful, monstrous world to survive its self-made annihilation.

“When will you go in?” he asked.

The man chewed his cracked lips. His dual eyes glistened in the fire. “I don’t know.”

“Then you won’t mind if I go now.”

The man glared at him. “You sense the danger up that road.” It wasn’t a question; any Searcher who had reached this point had long since become attuned to the presence of Strayings, existing like a low-voltage hum in the air, growing as they neared it. “You sense it,” he said. “It’s unlike anything we’ve faced before… and still you’ll go in?”

“I sense power,” Ross said. “It and danger go hand-in-hand.” He stood, grimacing a bit as his bad leg yelled at him. “You should know that by now.”

“I know everything you do.”

Ross doubted it. He studied the stranger again, disheveled, shrunken, impoverished by this search. One blue eye and one green, simmering with naked spite. He’d given it all for the path, the Aejsli—his loved ones, his sanity, his life. And it had worn him to this thinnest strand, cut away the excess as it had done to Ross, so that only the core of him remained. The final Straying, translated from the dead language carved into the explorer’s bones, was called ‘The Longest Road.’ Maybe this path of inner shadow cut away whatever last unnecessary bit was left, gave the absolute truth of yourself to yourself. Ross doubted that someone worn as close to nothing as the man before him could survive it; but Ross would, because he knew who he really was, had accepted it a long, long time ago.

Messy padded up to the man. He held a hand out to ward off the dog. “Get it away from me.”

Ross clicked his tongue, then pulled a small bag of treats from his pocket and shook them. Messy perked up, watching with attentive dark eyes, then came to eat a treat from Ross’s hand.

“Never seen a Searcher with a dog,” the man said.

Ross scratched Messy behind the ear. “Maybe I’ll see you on the other side.” He then gave his Searcher name, the one that, at the end of the trial in the Carpathians, scratched itself into the glowing pillar of unidentifiable rock before him, adding his name to the countless others who across countless centuries had attempted this journey. “I am Vaehlgivnid.” Vale-give-nid.

The man stared at him from across the fire. “Zultarlzir.” Zul-tarl-zeer.

“Lhaer tildra.”

“Lhaer tildra.”

Ross clicked his tongue. “C’mon, boy.”

&&&

Back inside the Wrangler Ross he scrounged Messy’s food, water and bowls from the supplies in the backseat and set it all down on the passenger’s side floorspace. Messy, compact Shiba Inu that he was, wedged himself down in there and proceeded to make the mess he’d been named for.

“You act like you’ve never been fed,” Ross told him.

Messy looked up, licked his chops, and hopped up across the center console, tail wagging. Ross again wondered if he should just leave him here—crack the windows, set out food and water and a blanket and his toys—while Ross went into the Straying alone. Because this was the end of the Aejsli journey, of a path composited by these trials which the Architects had built at the intersections of colliding worlds and which had grown progressively more dangerous. Who knew how deadly this final one would be? It scared him.

Had any other Searcher made it through to the end? He didn’t know; the book provided background and context, but it didn’t record other Searchers, just as it didn’t provide the locations of the Straying sites. All it gave of the end were allusions to the power waiting to be granted by Searchers who finished the journey: the power of gods, the kind that could save the world from itself.

And he was nearly there. He couldn’t imagine reaching the end—the end!—and accepting the power alone. Especially since, other than Messy, nobody was left to be there with him.

He reached up to the gold band that hung from his rearview mirror, but didn’t touch it. It served as a reminder that he couldn’t go back. Not after everything he’d given. Everyone.

The fossil on the dashboard glowed hellish-red, as if pulled fresh-smelt from a foundry. The stars spread out before them, except for in one place: a band of darkness, utter empty void like a lane in the sky. It ran parallel to the road.

“Last chance to bail,” Ross said.

Messy remained seated, panting and grinning.

“Well,” Ross said, “if you want to come with, that’s on you.” He popped the Wrangler into drive, angled them back onto the road. “Goodbye Earth.”

&&&

Night was built by interlacing shadows: ambiguous treelines and fallow-earth fields, solitary houses that like towns had been abandoned, or burned by marauders. He’d seen this in countrysides all over the world, but the abandonment didn’t compare to the cities. There, the dark and monolithic skyscrapers stood so lightless that you could count the stars from the rooftops, as prolific over concrete and asphalt as they were out here. Night in this world had substance, geometry.

When he crossed over into where this world met another one the night lost those shapes, grew uniform, thicker than mist, air like water, you felt it: the boundaries loosening, sliding into each other, straying. Darkness solid, yet swirling with the paradoxical familiarity of his world against the stark otherness of elsewhere. The trick wasn’t to fixate on the safety of his, but to accept the otherworldly strangeness, to slide with it, to change. Become, be. Stray.

But sometimes you had to force it, such as when the otherness overwhelmed the known and it was like being catastrophically high, your mind unable to focus, everything just sliding around you. Ross gripped the steering wheel tighter and in his mind manifested a spear-point driving through the swirl. Since perception here was as tangible as reality, so was the spear. He settled into the wake of clarity left by its passage, until the car died.

II

The engine-hum dropped into nothing and the heat cut off like a stolen breath. Then the dashlights blinked out and left them in near-total darkness.

Only the headlights remained, staring out at a slice of road.

And the fossil glowed red.

Nothing made itself known, not by sound or sight or a presence sensed within the mirky reality… other than the headlights staying on while everything else went out. Ross didn’t bother trying to start the Wrangler back up. He knew better.

He pulled from his travel bag a large book bound in an ancient, stone-like material. He also took out a stolen pistol in a holster, which he clipped to his belt, then did the same with the book; he’d run short, thick chains through the top corners, so that it hung at his side.

He reached up to the gold band Everett had given him, dangling from the rearview… but instead he grabbed the fossil off the dashboard—it glowed a red so fierce it should’ve burned to the touch—and opened the door and stepped out. Messy hopped out after him, his stance hesitant, unadventurous and afraid, pressed up against Ross’s leg.

The old familiar weight set against his chest. He reached into his shirt and touched it, the small wooden sphere that held Casey’s ashes. Like the gold band, it reminded him that he could never go back.

So he walked up the road, with Messy at his side.

&&&

The air grew warmer as the darkness coalesced into smoke, grainy and thick and behind it glowed hellfire. He could breathe it fresh as air, and Messy seemed fine, too, as they passed through a world of enraged orange-red-yellow filtered by ash barring them from the sun. Douglas fir and cottonwood stood as torches spitting embers—this wasn’t the kudzu-strangled oak of Georgia. And the road wasn’t flat across coastal plain, it twisted, rising, toward the mountain.

He was in Oregon. He was nine years old, watching from the backseat of his mom’s Jeep as they sped over melting highway and whipped around fallen trees. He was crying, in awe of the wildfire and its hellish beauty—and already grieving Casey, because she was supposed to be next to him, panting in his lap as he petted her and he was so scared without her where was she was she burning alive with the whole valley the whole mountain which was his whole world?

Ross knelt and pulled Messy to him, breathing in, out. Steeled himself. Then he stood and they walked on.

Shapes flickered through the smoke, sensed more than seen. They flew between the burning branches and between the grooves of his mind, exploded through the crackling underbrush and his synapses. They didn’t match the shapes of deer and bear and squirrel, didn’t belong to this world but had been caught in its slow destruction.

Ross placed a hand on the pistol grip, the other on the book.

When he reached the top of the slope the trees on each side of the road collapsed with a lazy, tectonic groaning, shooting up miasmas of embers like souls on fire grasping toward the smoke-blocked heavens. That smoke had risen, leaving a clear vista of the glowing expanse of ruin across the valley. Above it all, the mountain burned.

He knelt on the bubbling tar but didn’t sink into it. He ran his hand into the fine, cold ash on the shoulder of the road, pulled up a handful.

Across from him knelt a nine-year-old boy, dirtied and cut up, exhausted from days of searching, clear tear-streaks scarring his ashy cheeks. Casey was lost, taken by the wildfires that had grown worse with each year, torching the West. But he didn’t care about the West, only about who had been taken from him: his best friend.

The boy held his own handful of ash. He stuffed it into his pocket to put in a box with one of Casey’s toys, that octopus squeaky she’d loved so much. He’d lose the toy but transfer her ashes into a tiny sphere of carved cherrywood and wear it around his neck. They weren’t her ashes but they were—it was all the same, because it had all burned the same.

They held each other’s stare. The accusation in that boy’s eyes.

Those eyes widened, widened. Crackling rose from under his skin… then sharp pops, his head tilting sideways in increments of breaking bone. His arms rose and broke, crack, rearranging, crack, and the smoke whirled around him, veiling him into a silhouette. But not before Ross caught a glimpse of his face splitting open.

Messy growled. Ross set a hand on the book.

From the other side of the smoke issued a hiss that liquefied into a gurgle. The silhouette, shuddering, pulled itself forward.

Ross lifted the book and undid one of the chains. The silhouette hiss-gurgled again and Ross glimpsed in the smoke claw-fingers dragging through the tar. The book opened on the page he needed and without questioning it he read aloud in the dead language.

The broken arm shot upward, flinging a comet-tail of searing tar. Ross snapped his right arm up and runnels of pain lanced down the length of it as the lightning scars glowed red, matching the fossil in his hand, and the tar dissipated before his fingers. The book flipped to a new page as if guided by unseen hands and Ross read another passage and the smoke crashed down between him and the boy.

Ross shut the book and let it fall dangling to his side. He closed his eyes, touched the sphere of Casey’s ashes. After the fire, his mom had moved them to live with family in Chicago—trading out the burning West for the freezing North. When they’d finally moved into their own place, she’d brought up getting another dog.

“No,” he said.

He’d never forget the surprise on her face, or in her voice. “Why not?”

“I don’t want… another one.”

He called Messy to him, calmed his whining. “I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said. “Not to this one.”

But the trial had begun, and couldn’t be stopped. There was now, there was forward.

Just below the threshold of hearing it, but just above the threshold of feeling it… that bloody hiss-gurgle.

Ross led them up the road.

&&&

“I think it’s magic,” Everett had said, the night after they completed the trial in Peru. They lay in their zipped-together sleeping bags in an abandoned mountain shack, listening to the distant gunfire of skirmishes on the lower slopes. He ran his hand down Ross’s arm, tracing the length of new scars that matched his own. “How else could it heal so quickly, then stop those things?”

He referred to the creatures that had emerged from the stone itself, flesh of another world, after Ross and Everett had stuck their arms into the opening in the altar. Agony seared them and imprinted the scars. From it: conduits for the power they could unleash from the passages in their respective copies of the book. The creatures advanced, Everett had hesitated. Ross had not. The devastation he unleashed left images seared as deeply into his mind as the scars in his flesh.

“And are there going to be more of those things?” Everett whispered.

Ross answered his first question, figuring that the second was a given. “It’s not magic. It’s the power we’ve been looking for, a natural force in that other world.”

“Obviously, it has to do with elsewhere,” Everett said. “But I wonder… if it might be the result of both worlds intersecting, straying into each other.”

“Does it matter?”

Everett stared at his own scars. “No, I guess not.”

Ross was drifting off, blocking out the faraway violence, the cold. With Everett’s body against his, calm came easy.

Everett touched his chest, then the sphere of Casey’s ashes. “Why are we doing this?”

“For power.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Isn’t that what you want?”

Silence. Ross could sense Everett turning it over in his mind. “I want the knowledge. And to see the other world… since it can’t be any worse than this one.”

“If those creatures are any indication, it’s probably worse,” Ross said. “But you get the knowledge, then what do you do with it?”

“I don’t know… find more?”

“But what good is knowledge if you don’t use it?” Ross said. He rolled onto his side, facing the shadow of Everett’s face. His bad leg yelled at him, and he hissed out against the pain.

“Your leg?” Everett asked.

“Yeah. All that climbing didn’t help.”

Everett pulled them together, and that actually did make the pain go away, just a little. “So you’re on the Aejsli journey for… power?”

“Yeah.”

“And what are you going to do when you get it?”

The sphere was pressed between their chests, so Ross couldn’t hold it. He held Everett, instead. Gunfire whispered up to them.

“I’m going to stop us from killing ourselves,” he said.

He could sense Everett’s smile, even before hearing it in his voice. “Really? Ross Greenwood, stoic, tough-as-nails Vaehlgivnid, is doing this to save the world?”

“I didn’t say that. The world is fine, it’ll go on long after we’ve blown ourselves up, and drowned ourselves, and burned ourselves to ash.”

“So you want to save humanity?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I just… didn’t expect that.”

“What did you expect?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. You don’t seem like…”

“Like I care?”

Everett traced his hand down Ross’s arm again. “That’s not what I mean.”

“It is. And it’s fine,” Ross said. “But sometimes you have to… not care about the individual, so that you can save the group.”

A longer silence, in which Ross wished he could see Everett’s face… but was frightened of what it would tell him. An explosion rumbled, somewhere down there, leaving a break in the gunfire. Everett snuggled tighter against Ross.

“How much would you sacrifice for it?”

“Everything.”

“And everyone?”

Ross hesitated. He didn’t know how Everett took his silence, and neither of them broke it.

III

The smoke thickened, snuffing out the wildfire’s glow so that the fossil’s red light glowered alone in the dark.

Cold seeped into him. A dry, ice-prickled cold: crisp, mixed with the human odor of unwashed bodies that reminded him of how Zultarlzir, the green- and blue-eyed Searcher back at the campfire in Georgie, had smelled. Pebbles of rock salt dragged in by commuters ground under his boots. Messy sniffed everywhere, overwhelmed by the smorgasbord of new smells. Ross pulled him along by his collar. “Don’t eat that. C’mon.”

The mountain road had become the stark linearity of a train car on the Chicago L. The January night pushed against the windows, touched through with less citylights than there had been the year before, and even less than the year before that.

The train was close to empty, since the L wasn’t safe—people would rob you for your shoes, stab you over the bag that you might have food in. Or the cops would get on, pick out the most homeless- and defenseless-looking people and take them away to wherever they took people.

Which was why, at twenty-three, Ross wore a shabby suit that at quick glance made him look like someone with a lease and a job, because he was more afraid of the cops than muggers. He was on his way to his friend Bianca’s house with some dry goods hidden in his backpack because she’d just had a kid, and needed the food more than he did. He had the bag on his back even as he sat, so that it couldn’t be snatched away, and he kept a hand in his coat pocket, gripping a switchblade that could be traced to a couple of attacks, if anybody cared to investigate. Some of those attacks were in self-defense. Some of them.

This was a time of food riots, police death squads and heavy-security lux penthouses. Squat-houses that the previous generations called DIY, but now everything was DIY. Friends disappearing, or frozen on the sidewalk overnight. A look shared with men he’d never talk to again over the top of an alley fire and then gripping each in the dark, fucking bundled up in rock-salt-stained blankets. Hunger. Hunger. Hunger. This was his life, the life of the world now.

A woman sat across the aisle from him. Older, as pale and bag-eyed as the rest of them but in those eyes there was… what? Life? Excitement? Much later, Ross would realize that it was purpose he saw in her, purpose like a miracle in this world of deprivation and aimlessness.

She stared at him. After looking away a few times—giving her the chance to disengage—he glared into those living eyes. “What?”

She smiled, in this knowing way. “Do you read books?”

Not what he was expecting—more like a Fuck you, creep or a slip of skin and Do you have food? He said, “Sure.”

“You should read The Aejsli.”

He tried to sound it out. “The… Age-slee?”

“Close enough. Ever heard of it?”

“No.”

“It’s good. It’ll open up your mind.”

The train slowed at a stop—downtown, where nobody went after dark. She grabbed a handrail, which pulled her sleeve up and revealed a branching vein-work of lightning scars.

“The Aejsli,” she said. “You’ll find it, if you want to.”

She got off, and the train moved on.

The young man looked up at Ross. His eyes had grown larger. His jaw expanded, slowly, pulling his chin apart.

Ross pulled Messy to the door to the next train car and hauled them through onto a bitter cold street somewhere in the industrial flats of the West Side, a year later. A blizzard flooded the world. Ross stumbled along after the young man whose backpack was empty of food but had the antibiotics that Ollie, Bianaca’s kid, needed. He had what they hoped was just the flu. While Bianca and his other friends argued about what to do, Ross went out. Trekking through this arctic hellscape—for years the winters here had been as cold as in Siberia—to get to the medical dealer. Money was useless and he didn’t have food to trade, so he’d sucked the dealer off for it but when the dealer wouldn’t hand it over, Ross put the switchblade into his kidney and dragged the blade through his gut, grabbed the little bottle of antibiotics and fled back out into the blizzard.

Behind them—behind young Ross, and the Ross who walked with Messy—a slash of grainy darkness in the whiteout shuddered after them. Arms far too long for its weedy body, it hiss-gurgled in the wind, a monster smelted in wildfire, cooled in blizzard.

The young man fell up against a brick wall. He could hardly breathe for the ice in his lungs. It didn’t feel like his toes were there. He slapped himself to make sure that he could still feel his face and yeah, he could… just not the hand that struck it.

An open door stood in front of him. He didn’t know this building or care—he’d stumble into a nest of cops or cannibals if it got him out of this, so he climbed the wide granite steps and disappeared inside.

Ross hesitated at the door. But the silhouette had grown larger, its hissing-gurgling grown louder and accompanied by a bony click… click… click.

Messy had been having a blast in this snow—he was bred for it—but as the silhouette drew nearer, his hackles went up and he growled at it. Ross pulled him up the stairs, following his younger self into the library and slamming the door closed behind them… and trying not to think about what the young man would find, when he left here.

Young Ross staggered through an atrium and into a cavernous, comfortably-lit room. Bookshelves stretched backward down impossible aisles that had no end. By the door were set a few chairs and tables, making up a reading area which was dominated by an immense pink granite circulation desk.

A young woman sat behind it, as surprised to see him as he was to see her. Later, Ross would suspect that it wasn’t the sight of a homeless man with blood drying on the front of his coat, but because nobody ever came here. Here, this unguarded, unlocked building that just anyone—raiders or cops or cannibal bands, which could be all three at once—could just step into. And a library? Most of those had closed by the time he’d dropped out of high school.

The woman asked in a small, exploratory voice, “Can I help you?”

He pulled off his gloves, grimacing, flexing his fingers. The tips on his right hand weren’t too colorless, but he stuffed the hand into his armpit to be sure. The warmth made the skin on his face hurt.

For no real reason, other than to seem like he’d come in here on purpose, he said, “I’m looking for a book.”

“Okay… which one?”

“The Aejsli.”

She typed into an ancient computer, the kind that you plugged into a CPU tower… another novelty that he hadn’t seen in god knew how long. And her denim jacket and mom jeans combo looked like something out of his mother’s photos from her twenties, back in the 2010’s. The smartphone by her hand—its screen pulled up to show that she’d dialed 911, but hadn’t pressed Call—was also far older than the models that so few people could afford nowadays.

He didn’t have to tell her how to spell the title—even though he didn’t know it himself—which he didn’t think about until later.

She pointed down an aisle, gave him a section number.

Ross watched him trudge down the aisle, then he turned to study the woman who stared at his back, at his wet footprints on the white marble floor. Hadn’t thought about this, about her, in years.

A bang and then rattling exploded the silence of the library with insistent violence—from the atrium, from the front door shuddering open, bit by bit. Snow gusted in, and a claw-hand on a too-long arm snaked around, toward the push-bar.

Ross didn’t have to grab Messy this time—his dog had already booked it down the aisle, after the young man.

How far had he wandered that day? He hadn’t cared, really was just there to warm up—but the book being there, the one he’d tried to find in the abandoned libraries and bookstores for a year now, pushed him onward. By the time he came to the right section, the lobby had disappeared into the vanishing point where bookshelves met marble and ceiling.

It took him a minute to find it, since he didn’t know the author’s name. It turned out to be one Shelley McIntyre, on the spine of a decently-sized tome he pulled from the bottom shelf, weighty and bound in a thick material solid as rock, but still light as bound paper—later, he would discover that same material in Straying sites all over the world. The top of the book had two empty holes in it, which he’d loop through with chains. Ross touched the book on his hip, this catalyst, the beginning of the journey. Watching the young man flip through it, unable to parcel out the dead language and not sure what to make of the bits in English—the instructions, explanations of Straying sites and, ultimately, the reward of transcendent power at the end of the Aejsli journey—this boy couldn’t fathom the places it would take him, the wonders and horrors and awe that would greet him as he made his way from this starving place across the landscapes of collapsing civilizations.

Hiss-gurgle.

Ross watched the aisle back up the way flicker into darkness, one light at a time. He stepped around the young man, clicking his tongue to pull Messy along. When he looked back, the young man was at the vanishing point. The silhouette reached him and, slowing, seemed to roll over him, just glomped the young man onto itself, and sped back up.

The lights overhead disappeared. Ross knew that he wouldn’t see what lay at the end of the aisles… if there even was an end. If this could be counted as a true visit, then it was only the second time he’d been in this library. He’d tried to find it again, but the building he returned to was an abandoned warehouse, packed in with a community of squatters who wouldn’t let him in. It was as if the library had been there when he needed it, and only because he had chosen to seek the book. Once he had it, there was no reason for it to remain.

The shelves filled in, book spines solidifying into the crumbling plaster walls of a two-flat rowhouse without electricity or water or heat. The uncharacteristic silence warned the young man as he pushed on, desperate with hope, that the antibiotics could still help.

Ross closed his eyes and gripped Messy. Not this, he pleaded. Not this.

When he came into the room it was to a vigil, gathered around a toddler-sized bundle laid out on a rotten coffee table. Bianca, his friend—his former friend—turned a face of grief so utter and unknowable up to him. Before anybody else could speak, she said, “Where were you?”

“I…” He sank against the doorframe. “… the storm.”

“The storm was two days ago. You went out two days ago. While you were gone, my son died.”

Somebody put a hand on her arm. “Bianca—”

“Get the fuck out.”

Ross said, “But I was only gone for—”

“Get the fuck out.”

So he did. And he never came back. He spent that night under a bridge, trying to understand how two days had passed when he’d only been in the library for half an hour. In the paltry light of a campfire, he read from the book. And learned. And came to believe.

But that was for the young man. Ross understood: the library had appeared only because he wanted it, and it showed him—in the cruelest way—the cost of this journey. Ollie had been the first sacrifice. Ollie, and his mother, and all the friends Ross had never been able to face again, after that. He’d run from Chicago as much to get away from the poverty and starvation and violence as it was from Bianca, and friends who had to hate him now, and that bundle on the coffee table. But he was also running to something: the power at the end of this journey, and the immeasurable good he could do with it.

He and Messy went out the back door of the house, because something was coming in through the front.

&&&

Another living room, gray afternoon. The conversation between the young man and his cousin Les played out before Ross. It was a year into his journey, he’d been gone for months—freshly back from Sudan, a trip that he started by hitchhiking to an East Coast port and then signing on as a deckhand on a freighter that got him across the ocean. He’d stepped into his first Straying site and emerged after an hour that in this world was a month. And after witnessing the truth of the journey, elsewhere and the power it promised, he couldn’t turn back.

And this visit, it turned out, would be his last time in Chicago.

Les handed over a voice recorder. “She made this for you, right before the end.” He nodded to a spare bedroom—at least they’d given her that. “By the end she was rambling, out of her mind. Calling out for you, something about a fire and that you had to find someone named Casey.”

The young man glanced into the spare room—a family of three had moved in, the entire building like so many others had become a sort of self-sufficient community, with multiple groups sharing one block, confined to their own buildings, like vertical towns, territories, growing corn and potatoes and all sorts of crops on the roofs, chicken coops on balconies, country life packed into high-rises.

“Thanks for… taking her in,” the young man said.

“I wouldn’t’ve had to,” Les said, “if her son had been here.”

“You’re right.” He ran his thumb over the play button, but didn’t press it. He asked the question he didn’t want the answer to. “What did you do with her… remains?”

Les hesitated. They listened to his kids playing in the hallway, to the neighbors walking around upstairs. Music, from somewhere.

“It was a hard winter,” he said. “But I guess that’s stating the obvious? Crop didn’t take well, and if the gangs aren’t shaking us down for what little we got then it’s the cops. We…  ran out of food in January.”

He didn’t have to finish. The young man knew that she’d died in January. And that Les and his family were all here, alive. Not well-fed, but just enough to keep going.

Les whispered, “I’m sorry, Ross. I’m so…” He swallowed, looked away. “But what else can we do? We’ve all had… to do it.”

The young man closed his eyes, pushed it all down. All of it. “You survived. That’s all we have anymore, isn’t it? Thank you,” he said again, “for taking care of her.”

He stood. Les wiped his eyes and stood with him, walking him to the door. “Where are you staying?”

“I’m not.”

“Going off into the blue again? Ever going to tell me where you just came back from?”

“Yeah. Elsewhere.”

Ross and Messy followed them out into the hallway where the kids played. They said goodbye, and the young man led Ross down to the street, where men in alleys watched for lone wanderers like him. He drew a stolen pistol from inside of his coat and kept it at his side, visible, a warning, as he walked those streets for the last time.

Then he was walking between rides on a country road, not unlike the Georgia highway where he’d left that other Searcher, Zultarlzir, sitting and brooding—except here, the small leaves of early spring rustled around him, and the sun was out, the air pleasant. He was heading to the next Straying site. He pulled the recorder out and finally listened to it.

“No,” Ross said. He turned to walk away, but the world shifted around with him: he was facing the young man again, who stood frozen at the side of the road.

This was what the trial wanted.

Then he would endure it.

Her voice, so frail and nearly impossible to make out.

“… love you so, so much. No matter what you do, what you need to do in this horrible world, I will always, always, always be proud of you… Even if this world hurts you, you’re still a good man, Ross… I’ll tell Casey you said hi, and we’ll be waiting for you up there.”

Lies. All lies from the most biased perspective—parenthood. And from a woman who hadn’t believed in any of the afterlife shit until the cancer scooped all reason out of her. The worst lie of all? You’re still a good man. He hated that now, still, and watching how the young man collapsed onto the shoulder of the road, crying, Ross saw that this was the moment he stopped believing that about himself. That he was a good man doing good. No. He was a bad man doing good things—sacrifice the individual for the group, a man for the world. A bad man.

Only a bad man could leave his mother dying, forced to make a deathbed recording. If he was any sort of worthy of her love, then she’d never have had to make it. Because he would’ve been there.

His mother, the second sacrifice.

&&&

The spring day darkened. Smoke grained the air, thickened.

From around a turn in the road it came, shuddering: the silhouette.

He was a bad man. And this thing was the trail of himself that he’d left in the wake of evil years.

Ross advanced toward it, undoing the chain on the book. He wouldn’t run. This Straying site showed yourself to yourself… but he already knew who he was.

The book wouldn’t open. He pried at it, but it was like it had been bolted shut. So he unholstered the pistol and fired at the silhouette twice but it didn’t respond, didn’t even twist from the impacts of the rounds hitting its disgusting body. He reholstered the pistol and raised his arm, willing, willing the power he had accumulated within him forward. Agony seared down the framework of scars, drawing the smoke into a funnel. He willed it forward and slammed it into the silhouette—but it flattened, halted, like hitting an invisible wall.

Ross held his ground, arm raised, watching the smoke drift. His mother’s tinny voice carried back to him from the voice recorder, impossibly, as if she was speaking directly into his ear.

Love you so, so much.

Gurgle. Hiss.

I’ll tell Casey you said hi.

Ross bellowed and willed the smoke into a boulder and slammed it into the invisible wall, pulled it back and slammed again, and again. “Die!” he roared. “I’m not afraid of you! I know what I am!”

Bad man. Monster.

Monster.

The boulder broke apart and through its wreckage charged forward the twisted monstrosity wearing his shattered split-chin mandible face, whipping at him with a multitude of flesh-snake claw-arms.

He hunched down and shielded himself with his arm, which flamed in agony as he willed it to deflect the blows, but the monstrosity slid around him and flew up the road.

At Messy.

“NO!” Ross willed the asphalt between them to crack upward. The monstrosity knocked the shards away, slowed but not stopped as reached for the yelping scampering dog.

Ross moved as lightning and slammed into it as thunder, knocking it sideways so that they rolled into the ditch, flesh-claws slashing at him, his own fingers burrowing into its chest and seeking to tear out its black rotting heart. In their rolling he caught a last glimpse of Messy just as the dog—his dog, his Messy—was tackled by the young man who had sat crying on the road. This new monstrosity snapped at Messy with vampiric fangs, hounded him with selfish eyes.

The silhouette heaved Ross backward and they fell into the forest and liquid-smoke void and all else disappeared.

IV

The absolute darkness of the open ocean at night. He stood at the rail of a freighter, while Everett shivered next to him in the cold. The young man who was much older now hardly felt it, not against the white hell of Chicago winters.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Everett said. He was looking off into the night. Bags under his eyes, which had been glazed over ever since they’d made it out of Russia. Ross wasn’t unaffected, either—he’d witnessed the violence that had grown across the world, the civil wars and invasions and oppressions. It maintained his resolve, that humanity had to be saved from itself. And that the power at the end of the Aejsli could do just that.

But Everett wasn’t like Ross. He sought knowledge, and that alone couldn’t carry you through these horrors.

“This is the world now,” Ross said. “And if we want to complete the journey, we have to make it through those things.”

Everett whispered, “Do we?”

Ross wanted to take his hands, but couldn’t bring himself to. Everett swallowed, and finally looked at him.

“I’m going home.”

Ross closed his eyes—and saw the bodies, entire villages massacred. The toddler-sized bundle in Bianca’s room. He opened his eyes so that he could see Everett, instead.

“Back home?” he said. “To Iowa?”

“At least it’s safe there.”

“Safe? They nearly lynched you.” Ross didn’t have to add: Just because you’re gay. “You think they’ll take you back? What, are you going to marry some cornpoke Ashleigh and knock her up with a couple more recruits for the militias?”

“At least it’s safe with those militias.”

“You’re not serious.”

“No. I guess not.” He took Ross’s hands, pulling their bodies together, and looked at Ross with eyes that meant everything. “Remember Cambodia?”

Ross smiled. “Of course.”

“And that village… we’d sleep in, then just go walking. I miss that cafe, the one on the river? And the little kids who’d run up and down the road playing, and trying to teach us Khmer? It was so peaceful there, and… quiet. Even with the kids shouting, and all the rain, it was just so, so, so quiet. I think… I think that was the happiest I’ve ever been, Ross. It wasn’t just the R&R, or the people, or the peacefulness. It was because you were there, too. Us. For a little while we were… normal. It was a little life, or a life lived little, I don’t know.” He sighed. “That’s what I want, now. You and me and just a little.”

The plea in his words, which he couldn’t hide no matter how softly he spoke. Ross couldn’t pull away from him, but… nations were killing each other, collapsing, and everyone was starving, and there were toddler-sized bundles held in vigil and the mountain was on fire and—

“I can’t stop,” he said. “And I won’t. Not until it’s over.”

“Until you can save the world? Oh, excuse me, you mean the people?” Everett said. “Because the world’s just fine, right, Ross? It’s us who need to be saved from our shittiness.” He pulled away. “How can you be so fucking cynical and optimistic at the same time?”

“How else can you be, and stay sane?”

“No, Ross, you’re not.”

“Sane?”

“Optimistic. You’re not doing this for humanity. The only way you can live with the horrors is by thinking you can do something about them. You grew up starving in Chicago? I grew up under the militias’ terrorism, I watched them burn synagogues and mosques and ghettos and execute people like us out in front of the school! I can’t change that, I can’t fix it! And neither can you!”

Ross struggled to keep his voice level. “I’m not trying to change the past. I’m making sure that it won’t be the future.”

Everett scoffed. “Anything to justify it.”

“What?”

“The men you obliterated with your powers back there!” He flung an arm toward the thousands of watery miles behind them.

“They were in our way.”

“But that’s the thing, Ross! It wasn’t because they were executing civilians, no, if you actually cared then you’d have stepped in no matter what, even if it risked not reaching the Straying.”

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice the individual for the—”

“No! No more of your means-justify-the-end bullshit! You don’t care about anything but this journey, you don’t care about me—”

“I love you!”

“You left your own mother to die alone for this.”

And the cracks that had been forming for months finally broke what was between them. Before Ross turned and walked away, he could already feel the fractured vessels on which they stood drifting apart, into diverging currents. His third sacrifice.

&&&

The water far below him was glowing red, as if thousands of bioluminescent plankton bled in neon, the ocean’s open wound. Floating in its center, sensed more than seen, was the fossil.

A hiss-gurgle rippled throughout the empty deck behind him.

Terror and determination raced through him, as he remembered Messy being slammed to the ground by a monstrous perversion of Ross himself—

No. He couldn’t linger, or hesitate, or go back. All he could do was hope that Messy was okay, or would be okay enough until Ross could find him.

The veiled monstrosity slid across the aluminum deck, dragging the Ross who had just walked out of Everett’s life with it, absorbing him a bone and ligament at a time.

Ross looked to Everett, who leaned against the rail, face destroyed by heartbreak as he cried into the ocean.

You did this to him, Ross reminded himself. Tore him to pieces with the disease of your love.

“I’m… sorry,” he whispered, knowing he couldn’t be heard because this was just the unchangeable past playing back to him. Nothing he could say now would mitigate Everett’s heartbreak, lessen the hurt of Ross’s selfishness. Knowing this was in him, that was why he hadn’t opened his heart to another man since. And why he never would—because he couldn’t stand the thought of hurting someone so badly like this again. He was a monster, yes, but one who could protect people… and one way to do that was by keeping them out.

Who was he kidding? There was nobody left to hurt. Most of them were dead, and those who weren’t he’d cut off, for their own sake… but still. What if he’d left the journey with Everett?

Yet he hadn’t, and there was no point in wondering. It was done, and if he didn’t move, now, right now, the monstrosity sliding across the deck would destroy him.

So he did what he’d always done: he pushed forward.

He clambered onto the railing, and jumped.

&&&

Hitting the water didn’t hurt. In fact, he didn’t even get wet.

He resurfaced in sand, pulling himself out with the fossil in hand. He rested on his knees, squinting his eyes against the washed-out sun.

Desert wind moaned around him, constant. Only this and the coyotes yammering at night. Silence like nothing he could imagine. He sat on the tailgate of a stolen pickup, under a tarp set up as makeshift shade, his shirt wrapped around his sweating head, reading from the book.

After the freighter reached San Diego, he’d headed inland, following the next clue out to this Arizona wasteland. The Straying site lay miles behind him, completed. Now he cross-referenced the newest clue with the writings of Shelley McIntyre, that long-ago Searcher who had recorded her Aejsli journey when this desert was Spanish land stolen from the Pueblo. And he was distracting himself, keeping busy because he was alone for the first time in years, acutely aware of the singularity of his body at night, the rust to his voice, the burning desire to run, swim, fly to Cambodia because he hoped to find Everett there, instead of in Iowa.

A new noise rose out of the monotony of wind. He scanned the scrub-brush flatland before him, seeking movement, a source. The trial was over, and this had to be too far out into the desert for militias… right?

Yipping, on the wind. Another coyote? He slid off the tailgate with his pistol in hand, not expecting trouble, but remembering what starvation did to animals.

It was nearly on him before he spotted it, because its sandy fur blended into the earth. From across the expansive waste, a small dog wandered up. It stopped, ears perked, taking him in. Then it padded right up, tail wagging, all grins and good energy. Ross set the pistol on the tailgate and knelt and petted him. No tag, probably not a microchip, either. Who could afford those, anymore?

“What are you doing out here?” It—he—was a Shiba Inu, and the desert in summer was not what he was bred for. He was panting heavily, fur a matted sand-coarsened mess, footpads cracked. Ross looked out the way he’d come, seeking a wanderer or—god forbid—a white man in camo unslinging an assault rifle.

Nobody. Just this little, friendly, dehydrated guy.

Ross dug a shallow hole in the sand and stuffed a spare shirt into it, then poured in half a bottle of water. The dog didn’t need much prompting to drink from it. By the time he was done, Ross had cut up some beef jerky. He’d made a mess of the water, slinging it across the sand, and left crumbs of jerky all over the place. “Messy eater, huh?” Ross said. The dog looked up at him, whining for more. “Sorry, that’s it. You gotta find your own way, little mess.”

The dog whined.

And would spend that night sleeping next to Ross in the bed of the truck. And then he’d ride shotgun that morning, as they drove back to civilization.

But for right now, Ross pulled out some more jerky. His older self, standing off to the side, smiled. He figured Messy had been dropped off out here—too many mouths to feed? No, if food was that scarce then he’d have been made into a meal or two. Maybe someone who loved him knew that he was at risk for that fate, so they dumped him out here to spare him. Or maybe he’d been born here, and lost his pack? Or he’d just materialized, a snowdog formulated in the heat shimmer, ice living in earth-fire.

The man slid off the tailgate and reached for Messy. His hands crackled, bending into claws.

Ross stepped forward and raising his arm willed the sand to swirl up into the air and slam like buckshot into the monstrosity. It hit the ground, spotted with bloody ruptures across its sickening body.

The sky flashed so bright that his first absurd thought was: Nuke?

But as his vision returned, it was to watch meteors slanting across the sky, and waves of fire on the wind scorching the distant low mountains, leaving the scrub-brush and mesquite as torches standing on fields of glass.

The sun grew, swelled, eating the sky and ending it all.

V

He stood on a mountaintop and looked upon their work. Endless waste: hills of ash, fields of rust and bones and cities empty of their builders collapsing with slow, tectonic patience under a sky thick with roiling chemical smoke that blocked out the sun and suffocated life.

How much time had passed? Had the slow end finally come, while he fought himself in the Straying? No… the acid-trip surreality of the Straying held him still. This was a vision, then? Of what was to come?

He heard barking. And a familiar presence that felt concrete, real.

Messy scampered up a rocky rise, yelping, tail whiplashing the air. Ross scrambled forward and held him tight. “Oh god, you’re safe!” Messy licked at his face, leaving a smear of blood on his cheek—the fur on his face was matted with it. Ross ran his hands over him, didn’t find any injuries. He must have given the monstrosity on the road hell.

Ross held both sides of Messy’s face and stared into his eyes. “I’m so, so sorr—” Messy popped forward and licked him again, and Ross pulled him tighter to his chest.

Hiss. Gurgle.

He shot to his feet and raised his arm, spinning to face it. From the ubiquitous smoke it emerged, the monstrosity wearing his mangled face: chin split open, mandible jawbones clacking together lazily. It drooled sludge, bled ash. The multiplicity of its arms and legs were bent into impossible angles, the claw-arms of how many different versions of Ross across the years growing from its spine, stomach, crotch in disgusting asymmetry. Faces half-absorbed mawed in silent and blind anguish around the hole in its chest, inside of which their hearts congealed into one reddish-black, throbbing, gelatinous tumor.

Messy snarled, and flattened against Ross’s leg.

But his monstrosity wasn’t standing in the vortex alone. Another, also mutated, but in its own way, lingered in that same veil. Ross could sense something… different approaching… not a part of this place… not a part of the Straying… but from outside of it, like Ross.

He faced back the way Messy had come, toward where a scree of crumbled granite formed a walkable slope. A man climbed it. He reached the top, panting, fell to one knee but pulled himself back up and glared at Ross with one blue eye, and one green.

The man from the campfire. The other Searcher, Zultarlzir.

&&&

He stood frail and thin, covered not in the ash of Ross’s wildfire but leaden down with snow that didn’t melt. His mismatched eyes were wide, were madness. He held his copy of the book against his chest with his left arm, which was torn and bloody up to the elbow.

Messy licked his blood-matted chops, and snarled.

Ross said, “You attacked my dog.”

“It was in my way.”

“I should kill you.”

Zultarlzir raised his scarred right arm. “I’ve come through hell for this. You’re not going to stop me.”

“I offered to let you go first. You didn’t.”

“I let you clear the way.”

Ross shook his head. “How about we just continue on? We’re close to the end.”

“So that I can share the power with you? No. It’s mine.”

Ross felt the same. He let Zultarlzir ramble, and waited.

“Everything is for me. I am the man the Architects made it for! I got to the end, I fought myself—” He made a wild gesture toward his own monstrosity, which stood, as burdened down by snow as Zultarlzir. “I alone deserve it!”

Snowflakes fell, tiny and harsh, around him, and flickered into the ash and smoke of Ross’s own hell. Blizzard snow, the kind that took people from you. And that took you from yourself.

“Tell me, then,” Ross said, “what kind of man are you?”

Zultarlzir bellowed and Ross felt it, sensed it, as Zultarlzir willed the ash and smoke and snow into a spear and slung it at his chest. It held shape and coherency for a few feet, then fell apart, blowing away on the wind. Ross willed the granite scree into a whirlwind and launched it but it fell halfway in its trajectory and avalanched back down the slope.

They hesitated, listening to the rockslide die away.

The Straying had taken their power.

Zultarlzir tried again, though, willing Ross’s lungs to constrict—but only for a moment. Ross stepped back, panting, as Zultarlzir fell to one knee, dropping his book and snarling at the agony in his lightning scars. They held stares.

Ross thought: Fuck this. He unholstered his pistol and fired two rounds into Zultarlzir’s chest.

That still worked, at least.

He ignored the screaming and turned back to the pair of monstrosities. He communicated, not like telepathy but by feeling, by intent, that he was ready.

But it had already begun.

&&&

The world was changing—going not forward or back in time, but in parallel. It shifted laterally through the multiplicity of possible futures into one that could become reality, the one Ross could usher in. The sky thinned and lost its chemical grain, letting in brilliant sunlight that illuminated glistening cities that were home to people who worked little and ate well and slept in comfort and found every day fulfilling in which they were loved for who they were. Their children didn’t know war or starvation but instead love and safety and the excitement of youth in peacetime. Farmland stretched beyond sight, a green country in a green world where the crop was raised and harvested by fusion-powered machines that also transported everything on their own and built everything and kept the complicated framework of society running, eliminating the menial just-getting-by jobs of the past and thus leaving everyone, everyone, free to do what pleased them. Work was for pleasure, passions pursued, the only money left was in museums. Armies were for show. The meteorological violence of a raped planet lessened with each year, and rising toward the sky were… spacecraft. They were leaving Earth, expanding out among the stars.

Messy yelped in pain. Ross heard it but couldn’t… quite… register it.

Holding it all together was a singular force, the man who had emerged from nowhere wielding the power of a god. He’d dissolved the nations’ arsenals at a molecular level, torn armies to pieces, removed the ineffectual and greedy world leaders who had forced civilization to destroy itself for so long. And he toppled their mansions and broke apart police states and armed the people who had been held in starvation for generations—but when they tried to form their own governments, he struck those down, too, obliterating without mercy or deference any and all who defied his vision. He then tasked the truly altruistic to rewrite the laws, restructure society so that all lived within the same high quality of life, and they developed miracle technologies such as the infrastructure-running machines, and replaced the nuclear and fossil fuel plants with plains and steppes of windfarms and deserts of solar panels. Maintaining equilibrium, rather than pursuing reckless growth.

Vaehlgivnid.

He who built paradise on a foundation of unprecedented violence, and who held paradise together with the threat of that violence returning. He had long since destroyed the Straying sites that could have allowed others to rival him and break paradise. None of it was for own glory—in fact, he loathed himself as the monstrosity that had pursued him through the final Straying, would kill himself if the world didn’t need him. But the world was safe—because he had sacrificed the individual for the group, a man for a god, a god for the world.

But he’d had to make one last sacrifice, hadn’t he?

This was real. Or, it had just as much potential to be real—instead of the oncoming apocalypse.

But Messy was screaming.

Ross willed the spear-point of clarity back into his mind and found him, on the ground at his feet, thrashing, withered down to nearly nothing. Dying.

He fell to Messy’s side. He shouted at the monstrosity, his monstrosity, himself, “What are you doing!”

He felt its response in the core of him, as a simple understanding. The closer to this future the world came—the closer to his accepting the power that was just within his reach—the further Messy withered. Soon, into nothing.

This was the last sacrifice: to let die the final piece of your life as a mortal, tied to morality by the last sliver, the last remaining one you loved.

The one you loved the most.

Ross held Messy to him, felt the dog relax to his touch, but he was so… cold.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, staring out at the saved world through the tears he’d shed for all the toddler-sized bundles in the Chicago winter… and for his mother, the voice recording she’d been forced to leave, that he had forced her to leave… and for Everett, alone, abandoned, suffering in those Iowa cornfields. This was what he’d allowed, what he really was: a succession of absences, a thin being defined by the negative spaces where love had once been.

Messy licked his face, just a little. Weak. Hurting.

Dying.

Messy, his impossible Shiba Inu trotting up across the desert wastes, wagging his tail and licking at Ross like he’d always belonged there.

The mountain was on fire. He was a nine-year-old boy, tear-tracks down his cheeks, grabbing a handful of ashes on the shoulder of the road and telling himself that this was Casey. He’d failed her, couldn’t save her and never would. He didn’t deserve the sphere of her ashes against his chest. He’d given everything else for it—his life, not a self-sacrificial death, but the short years he had, and no family, no lover, just this moment in the nexus of two worlds.

Was the world worth Messy’s life?

It didn’t… work like that. Lives aren’t an equation, and what… what responsibility had he ever actually had, to this world? It had taken so much from him before he had ever been able to make the sacrifices, it had driven him to this. Why did he have to save this horrid place?

Why did he have to let his best friend die?

Ross took in the potential glory spreading out before him, and said, “No.”

&&&

Paradise fell away.

He held Messy in the dark and cold, watching the life wither from this planet. Messy grew warmer in his arms, regained weight and mass—what little he had to start with, but it was good. Was right.

Ross couldn’t breathe through the lump in his throat. Messy licked at him, and the lump broke as he laughed, just a little. He sat back, running a hand down Messy’s back.

His monstrosity lost coherence, blowing away as ash in the wind.

While other monstrosity grew up into prominence.

Zultarlzir crawled forward, gasping, dragging his bleeding chest through the snow. The madness in the man’s eyes, his desperation, fear.

“It’s not worth it,” Ross said.

Zultarlzir held himself up on an elbow, and raised his arm toward his monstrosity. The vista scoped out before them showed a possible world not dissimilar to the apocalypse, a world of wreckage and despair. Humans lived—barely: slaves with short miserable lives under the absolute will of their god, all work and suffering meant for his glory. Unwavering fealty was met with reward. Disloyalty with punishment. The greatest of his servants lived in glistening white towers that rose over the clouds and basked them in sunlight. The disloyal were cast into the underworld: a system of planet-wide tunnels in which industry perpetuated the infrastructure of their god’s glory, and the deepest pits had been carved out for the pleasure of torment.

Ross wouldn’t allow it. He grabbed at his holster, but it was empty; the pistol had disappeared. And the power no longer flowed in him—its absence a scooped-out void. All he could do was watch. If he had known what Zultarlzir intended then—

No. He would have made the same choice.

Zultarlzir spread his arms in acceptance, in maddened ecstasy. “Yes!” he screamed. “I renounce it all!”

And Ross saw it, just before Zultarlzir did: the ingenuity of the final trial, how the Architects had constructed it to prevent men like him from gaining this power.

Zultarlzir’s scars glowed red… and redder… and redder… then burst open, pulling his blood forth and disintegrating it into the air. His body withered, skin pulling in against his skull, his bones, a husk sucked dry.

You had to let die the one you loved the most.

And for Zultarlzir, that was himself.

His monstrosity bent and picked him up in its multitude of claw-arms, shearing through what little remained of his body as it pulled him into the cavity in its chest. His bones crackled as his body was folded to fit into it.

Ross held Messy to him, understanding that he had just made the most unquestionably right decision of his life.

Then it all fell away.

VI

They sat on the road. The sun cast a weak but present light through clouds that weren’t as thick and grainy as what he’d witnessed in the Straying’s vision of the future—but close. On its way to that, he figured.

He pulled himself up, his bad leg sparking with old pain. Messy scampered up with him and padded around the area. The humidity was absolutely hellish, yet it was winter. The Wrangler was still on the shoulder, where he’d parked it to get out and speak to Zultarlzir, whose ratty truck was where he’d left it. Down in the ditch, you couldn’t tell that there had been a campfire, as the grass had grown back up. The power-lines had fallen, poles leaning and snapped from decay and the violence of years of hurricanes.

Both vehicles had been broken into, windows smashed. The supplies—food for himself and Messy, spare clothes, camping equipment and tools and a first aid kit, all gone. The wheels, too. Taken by raiders, likely.

How long had it been? The part of him still attached to the Strayings, to elsewhere, told him.

Years.

What world stretched out before them, now?

At least the gold band was where he’d left it, dangling from the rearview, likely not taken because gold had no practical survival value. Ross slid it off the rearview and went into his emptied backpack and found… it. The voice recorder, the tape still in. He wondered if it would still play, where he’d find batteries for it. He didn’t try it now, though. Just put it back in the bag.

The book still dangled from his waist by chains. He wondered what to make of this—why the Straying hadn’t taken it from him. But he decided that he didn’t care, and unhooked it from his belt and put it on the dashboard.

Maybe somebody else would find it, somebody who needed it more. They’d head off on a journey that would, eventually, take them back to where they’d started. And maybe, at the end, that person could do what Ross wouldn’t—but that was on them.

He stepped back out onto the road and for a moment couldn’t see Messy. He clicked his tongue—then shouted his name.

Messy bounded out of the trees, ran up and dropped a pinecone between them.

“Fair enough,” Ross said. He picked it up and lobbed it down the road, watched Messy shoot after it.

Then he pulled the fossil from his pocket. It held no glow, was just the shape of a long-dead animal that didn’t match the physiology of this world.

He dropped it onto the road and walked after Messy, wondering where they would go, what they would do with their lives. But he knew, didn’t he? Even if it had been years, even if the man he sought was far more aged—Ross would find him. And if he was in Iowa, Ross would save him. But he hoped, hoped more than he had for anything in such a long, long time, that he’d find Everett at a riverside cafe in Cambodia, learning the language from the children. That was a journey worth making, wasn’t it? Messy ran back to him with the pinecone.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright John Stadelman 2023