Eagle knew exactly what he was dealing with when that weasel brought the mallet out of nowhere. Violence wasn’t as effective in these worlds, even though everyone employed it joyfully and applied it with impunity. A mouse could beat a cat to death with a hammer one hour, and the next hour, sm that same cat’s fingers in a door and hear him scream.

  Naturally, Eagle would rather not be involved here in any capacity. He didn’t mind the physics, and he didn’t even shrug at the rough and tumble, but these guys were outright malicious. See: the weasel in a tiny teal hat chasing him (with a mallet) down a lovingly composed urban street.

  Half the rounded cars didn’t have doors or open windows. He didn’t have time to figure out how to hotwire one. Even if there were keys in the ignition and a seat he could access, there’d be no time. He leaped ahead of the crashing mallet, snatched his cloak out of the way, and kept moving.

  “What the fuck, man?” he panted, when the weasel with the tiny hat wound up for another go. He scraped out from under the gigantic mallet as it swung down from on high. What the weasel cked in head, the mallet more than covered, and arming cracks shot from its impact on the bck and yellow pavement.

  At this point, Eagle would have gdly taken a car. He was exhausted, and he knew he was slow because of it. He kept moving, a hard target to hit at the very least, the way he lurched. At an intersection nearby, a rounded garbage truck idled, dumping colorful trash into its back.

  Eagle wasn’t too proud. He booked it toward the truck and used his momentum to heave himself into a leap. Just as the truck pulled away, he snagged the tailgate.

  A curious fairy made of brightly colored snack bag scraps peeked eagerly over the end of the truck. It rustled his name with savor and crispness.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling himself into the truck. “I can’t stay.” Two straight days he’d been doing this, or it felt that long. How was he actually supposed to know? He’d been through dozens of worlds by now. The weasel gave chase, stretching his legs impossibly far to eat the distance.

  He started catching up. Eagle cursed, then leaped to another car that had driven up behind the trash truck. He nded with a thump on the hood of a yellow checkered cab.

  The cab swerved a tight right and sent him flying. He bumped and rolled across the hoods of three blocky SUVs toward the blessed Door—and blessed be the name of the Door—on the other side of the street. Mouths opened in all the bodies of the cars to yell at Eagle with sun fsh metal lips as he came up on his feet and dashed for the corner.

  They honked and they hollered. “Hey, buddy, watch it! I’m driving here!” “Look where you’re going!” “Hey come on!”

  The cacophony bred. Eagle wanted to shriek in horror. He disliked everything about cars and trucks, and the noise and the stink at his back drove him a little wild—but the long-legged mallet-wielding weasel was on him. He bolted for the street corner and took the Door in a dive, rolling away from the world into what might have been an ash pile.

  Eagle stood; he was on a lonely hilltop. The desote waste gleamed pink and purple beneath a blue moon. He left dragging footprints in the feathery ash on the ground, and it was cold, as cold as death had been when he tasted it. Fky fairies squeaked his name like ice between teeth, scattering dust and tittering foolishly. He’d failed Fox then, too.

  Good thing he found a Door before he had to think too much on it. Getting from pink-and-purple wastend to whatever the multiverse had in store next was no farther than a single grateful step.

  This was more like it; at the very least, it was warmer slipping among steaming chemical pools, but he couldn’t say much for the smell. Almost as bad as the gas shells both sides had been eager to use in the war. By now, Eagle knew that wouldn’t hurt him much either—by and by.

  He could have been spending that many more minutes with Fox. It wasn’t like Eagle shouldn’t have had the minutes to spare. Instead, there would be no Fox for a long time, and he had to worry about Fox for every single moment, because Fox wasn’t like him.

  Without the slightest warning, one of the pools in the distance boiled high. A hot bst of pressurized—whatever—exploded up into the atmosphere. Fox would have known. Eagle could tell you there was probably chlorine in it. It smelled like the swimming pool Jessamine had leaped into like she’d been made for the water (half mermaid, you’d almost have to know about it, except—that was a long story).

  He missed her. She’d said she was eleven so he said he was nine but—

  The chlorine-filled pools started to burst skyward in a circumference around the one still erupting in the center. Water—whatever, Eagle remembered, feeling cold in spite of the steam—misted down from the force of the explosions. Fairies drifted up from a few of the more acid green and poisonous blue of the pools.

  He lumbered into motion around one pit and accidentally dropped a coin in another as he sailed over it. It sizzled ominously, but when it erupted, Eagle was already nowhere nearby. He groped desperately for a Door, any Door. In the worlds he frequented, the very fabric of reality was ced and pitted with something like scar tissue—but calling it scar tissue could have been his bias against the Rev Lieseassar talking. Fairies from the pools followed, dripping, as he fled.

  He wasn’t familiar with the worlds he’d been in so far. Maybe that was part of it, too. No way to know for sure, and of course, no Doors leaped out for his attention. He was armed to see the distance between him and the eruptions had shrunk. The steam showed greeny gold in the buttery sunshine. Eagle scowled. Whatever it was, he didn’t want it on him.

  If he died, it would be an inconvenience at best, a disaster at most, and probably closer to the disaster end of things. He already didn’t know how long it had been since he’d left Fox behind. It could have been years. He could already have aged down into death. The thought made his empty stomach pitch and yaw like the worst machines of all: airpnes. The fairies did loops around him so fast they pulled out blue and green streaks.

  When Fox died, he wouldn’t come back like Eagle had, and would again (so Fox said, anyway—and he was probably right). He’d just be dead. Then what would be left for Eagle?

  It was a selfish question. The geysers erupted closer and closer all the time; Eagle had to hustle now. For a little while, he didn’t think. One by one, they cooked off, joining thousands of others in shooting superheated liquid to the sky. The noise alone was absolutely incredible. The geysers rumbled and thundered and sprayed. He groaned in the middle of the tumult and reached somewhere deep for more speed.

  There was a Door deeply to his right, hovering over a quiet pool. The geysers exploded in a straight, sweeping line toward it. If Eagle didn’t make it to the Door before the line of geysers, they’d block his path. He changed direction in a wide loop, the best he could do, and charged for the pool and the Door. Fairies exploded from the bzing “water.”

  If he didn’t jump for it, he’d never make it. What am I gonna get out of it? Eagle mocked himself, airborne. But the thought of losing Fox forever, like he’d inevitably have to face, hurt him somewhere so deep he couldn’t imagine it.

  He crashed on unforgiving yellow rocks, rolled across the gritty earth collecting abrasions, flicked up the rocky protrusions around the pool, and fired himself from one world into the next.

  From chaos to chaos. When Eagle finally rolled to a stop facing the iron sky, the sounds of a pitched battle touched his ears. He groaned. No way he could rise from the ground. Purple and mauve balls of energy about fist size shot one way; green and red ones shot another. He couldn’t quite make out what was happening, but two lines of massive getinous creatures of many colors and shapes—or maybe just two creatures?—exploded at the touch of the energy balls.

  Eagle was little, but he didn’t want to stick around and find out when they shot each other down lower to the ground. It was worth taking a minute to get his bearings, and definitely not to think about the Chosen Ones crammed into one pce like sardines in a can. There was what Eagle was supposed to do, and then what he should have been doing, and the one was incompatible with the other—or rather, he had to do one to do the other.

  This Matil thing was way too big to ignore. He’d heard of them, but frankly, he’d dismissed them as a bogeyman to scare children. Now he knew it was more than that.

  Stories were always true—one way or another. He should’ve known better in the first pce.

  He crawled through bare, sterile dirt, where gobbets of inert jelly trembled. Worse, some of them trembled distinctly toward him. He hated fighting oozes, but most people did. If you met a specialist, ten to one they were very weird.

  Eagle hustled again. Before long he had to crawl along on his belly; the energy balls sizzled across the ndscape lower and lower all the time. Just a little bit farther, he told himself, as the first ball clipped his head. He didn’t know it until a few hairs drifted down in front of him, and then he scrambled the ten feet left faster than a scalded cat and slid down a heap of the loose dirt to retive quiet. Behind him, the slimes battled on, as determined as ever.

  The ndscape was a waste of loose, dark gray dirt in heaps and valleys. It’s probably shit, Eagle thought dismally. No worse than I deserve.

  He’d just left them behind: the tiny proud-jawed girl, the determined woman, and the knight, all three of them—and Fox, Fox, Fox in every beat of his heart. His face stretched like he’d cry, but he didn’t. Then he gnced back at the oozes facing off. They had been big, ragged walls, but now they were knee high on Eagle at best. Shaking his head, he plowed on.

  It was an hour before he found a Door. Eagle was ready to drop dead. Shit fairies—because by then he’d seen the oozes drop it as they, well, oozed by, you couldn’t escape that—scattered bck bits that stuck to his skin while they wheezed like punctured bellows. As if he hadn’t encountered enough glitter or enough shit. With what seemed like the st of his strength, Eagle toppled through to somewhere blessedly quiet.

  He didn’t dare open his eyes. The birds that sang melodious songs around him probably had teeth, or knives for feathers, or something equally stupid, but at least the scent in the air was familiar. Rushing water—he hoped—sounded close by.

  A bird flew overhead—a totally normal-looking bluebird singing away as it flew from branch to branch. It was suspicious, no doubt, but Eagle almost wept again. He could have been hallucinating. He’d seen bluebirds living in hundreds of worlds, if not thousands, and heard their song more times than that.

  He took a deep breath of the smell. It was sweet, all right, but lurking underneath was an unmistakable kind of BO he’d seen even more pces than bluebirds. Eagle was unhoused by choice, but he wouldn’t have had to be. He owned houses. He just didn’t live in them. Most hobos didn’t have that. He sat up cautiously.

  I’ve been here before!

  Eagle’s heart clenched with hope. He sat marveling at the vista spread before him. Vast, translucent rainbow mountains fuzzy with green growth and golden fields were ced everywhere with train tracks. Rickey barns and sunny yards with henhouses stood out at many distances, from nearby to tiny flecks.

  “I’ve been here before!” he shouted excitedly, then leaped up to dance on the pastel blue ledge. The rock candy was slightly tacky, but Eagle wouldn’t compin. He shook his ass like he remembered what his mother gave him. Even better than knowing where he was, he’d come out close to where he needed to be—just one world over from the bolt hole he wanted. Pce-dependent magical portals could be great, but beyond an undeniable degree of utility, they caused more trouble than they were worth.

  It was warm enough to take his hood off and let the sun spill over his face. Before he found the god killer, Eagle needed to rest. As he rambled on down the road, he stopped to stick his head in a lemonade spring burbling from the rock candy. His face came back to him after he drank, yellow and distorted, a dark dirty man in a drab brown pile of clothes.

  He sighed. Fox would have hurried him into a bath, and he could have scrubbed the possible otherworldly parasites off his skin, but he’d have to wait. There was so much to do, and so little time.

  Two retive days ter, when Eagle had struggled his way through a hobo’s paradise and gotten somewhat embroiled with a roving gang of bean-loving career rail-riders (and somehow the beans themselves? It was a long story), when he hadn’t slept in days before that, he fell out of thin air and ft on his face on a neat, but dusty board floor in a cold, dark room. His own.

  Finally, finally, really and truly alone, where he knew without question no one would find him, Eagle wept. That morning, because time had always been funny as he accounted for things, he’d been worrying about when he could get his dick sucked. Now—

  Now—

  Tears puddled under his face. He y prone on the floor, beyond exhausted. It was hardly a moment by anyone’s count before he cried himself to sleep.