After so long playing second seat to the others, leading the team was an odd mix of excitement and jarring nostalgia.

Before, when they’d entered the displaced fragment of Millerville? That had been different. More casual.

Now? Climbing a narrow, winding path up the foot of a nearby mountain with three people in tow?

It felt more like leading his old fire team in Forces training.

His orders had taken several minutes to read, but boiled down to three basic things. First, he was to find and render aid to the unidentified contact—AKA, Maybe Friend. He was close enough to connect a local signal to her—and he was assuming she was a she at this point, given the nix’s description—and he’d used the network from the Break in Reality to triangulate her position.

The math was rough, but hopefully it’d get them close enough to find her.

After that, if able, he was to report back to the main network.

The Break in Reality was, however, somewhat fickle. It apparently didn’t always connect, and the scientists on the other side had yet to discover a pattern behind its disconnections.

If he wasn’t able to report back, he was to wait around for twelve hours and keep attempting contact. After that, he was to continue on with his current group—Prince Nales, Catrin, and Doneil—and follow his second set of orders: learn as much as he could about the World Shift Event, portal science (they refused to call it ‘magic’ in the report’s official language), and do his damnedest to find a fix that would put the worlds back how they used to be. He was also to locate and help any stray Earth-World people along the way.

So, his orders were to do everything he’d been doing anyway, but typed out onto official Guardian Forces scandocs.

That worked for him.

Prince Nales had used his authority to accept Matteo’s temporary liaison in his empire’s territory and operations, and promised to provide aid to any refugees from Earth they might find.

Given what he knew of the prince—especially with his recent display when they rescued Lionel and his girls from the pack of hellhounds—this was something he’d also likely done, anyway. But it was always well and good to make things official.

Actually, the prince seemed overjoyed at making contact, and official relations, with another world.

He seemed somewhat less joyful to be climbing a mountain.

Then again, the steepness of the slope was enough to temper anyone’s attitude.

Matteo rolled his shoulders, pausing to look back. Behind him, the forest dropped away, studded with fir and cedar and coated in clumps of tangled nettles and underbrush. He was sweating, and the cold of the misty air chilled his skin. He’d looted spare clothing from a house. Found other useful things, too—he’d have to do a more thorough search once they’d returned, no telling what might be in the other buildings. Down below, the fragment of Millerville was lost beneath a blanket of fog. Through the breaks in the trees, it looked like a river of foamy gauze.

Karel was down there, somewhere, watching the horses. And also watching their new prisoner.

Matteo wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Clearly, he and the nix were of similar origins. But—how similar? Was it like asking a Black guy to watch another person who was also Black, or more like asking someone to watch part of their extended family?

Probably the former.

Also—how much, exactly, was a nix related to a horse? Was it just a shape he wore, sometimes? Something familiar to lure humans in? Did they have a thing for horses?

Why a horse?

He gave his head a little shake and re-checked the tracking app in his HUD.

Without topographical data, tracking the marker’s actual location was a challenge—hence why he’d wanted Catrin and Doneil around. Forest elves had a natural thing for forests. Doneil had tried to explain it to him a few times, but he didn’t completely understand it. Something magical or spiritual.

Whatever it was, Catrin was very good at it.

Hopefully, she’d be very good at finding Maybe Friend.

Currently, she was… ranging. No other word for it. She’d disappear into the forest between one step and the next and reappear somewhere ahead, stepping out from behind a bush or tree like she’d always been there.

It felt a bit like a super SpecOps version of his old dog used to do on off-leash walks, which was a thought he was definitely going to keep to himself.

Just as he was about to move again, the signal on his HUD flickered out.

It’d been doing that off and on as they’d climbed. He only had a vague understanding of how signals worked, but the one through the Break in Reality—oh, screw it. The others were calling it a ‘Portal Seed’, so he would, too—it seemed to have a very narrow band.

Maybe Friend’s signal, however, was on his local connection. Outside the network, so he could still connect with it.

According to his HUD, they were about a quarter mile out.

It worried him that she didn’t appear to be moving. Was she okay? Probably not, since she hadn’t been answering his messages. According to his HUD, she’d been in the same place ever since he’d triangulated it.

What had happened? According to the nix, she’d been mobile enough to shoot him in the arm and leg and get away from him. But that had been… a while ago. The same night as the World Shift Event, apparently.

He hoped she was okay.

She was probably not dead, at least. If her HUD was anything like his—well, Guardian Force had Death Knells programmed in. If he died, his HUD initiated a security lockdown and transmitted the death. That way, his team could react accordingly.

Hers wasn’t transmitting a Death Knell. Not from what he and his HUD could tell, anyway.

She did have different security, however—and the nix had said she’d come from a different world.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Was she from one of those other Earths?

Just how much could they trust what the nix said?

Not very far. Not very far at all.

Movement caught his eye from farther ahead. He looked up to see Catrin come out of the trees again, her attention on something in the distance.

As he watched, she tapped the side of her head next to her eyes and pointed.

It took him a couple of seconds to see what drew her attention. Then, he went still.

A few hundred feet away, the steady slope and dappled shade of the trees broke. At first, he thought it was another of the cliffs or small meadows they’d passed. Golden light filtered on the other side of the trees, filling the air with a hazy glare. Shade showed on the other side of the break, where the sun hadn’t quite nudged its light around the rest of the trees.

Except, as he looked… some of those trees were looking awfully like the straight edges of a building.

He made his HUD zoom in, wincing at the dizzying sensation the sudden change in perspective wrought.

Yep. That was crenellated metal siding.

Definitely not trees. And definitely not from here.

He narrowed his eyes. Had Maybe Friend found another fragment of Earth to hole up inside?

Good for her.

Matteo finished taking a sip from his water bottle, put the cap back on, and nodded them all toward the break in the trees.

*****

The building was definitely not from Fantasy Land. It wasn’t new, either, but he recognized the style, and it was far too new for this place. It had a boxy structure. One side had an almost entirely glass facade, with the rest caged in a siding made of metal strips rather than the crenellated sheet he’d originally thought. Thick concrete supports showed prominently. Partly brutalist influence?

He had no idea. He wasn’t an architect. But the glass and concrete alone was far too smooth to be anything from this world—especially in this part. From his conversations with Doneil and Nales—and from what Nales had told his superiors on the network through him—this world was in the baby stages of industrialization. Rail networks connected much of the continent, and there was some version of the telegraph available.

But here they were in the backwoods part of the empire. Which probably explained why he’d only seen one set of train tracks and zero telegraph lines.

He wondered how much the prince would pay him for all the random electrical knowledge he’d just downloaded.

A few pieces of furniture—tables, mostly, and also largely made of metal—sat on an extended porch-like courtyard, shaded lightly by the dirty and tinted glass roof above them. The rest of the glass was almost as grimy. Clearly, no one had cleaned it in the month it’d been here.

He didn’t blame them. He wouldn’t either. Made it easier to hide.

From the inside, he doubted anyone would have a problem seeing out.

What little he could see past the glare and grime on the window looked like it had shelves of books inside.

Prince Nales would be happy.

Matteo signalled the others to stop and began unfurling the flag he’d found in one of the houses.

“You stay here,” he told them. “I go first.”

As he made to take a step, however, Catrin caught his elbow.

“I smell demon,” she said.

He stiffened, turning his attention back to the building with some alarm, and took a deeper sniff of the air.

He couldn’t smell anything yet, but he trusted her.

“You come,” he amended. “They no. You stay behind me.”

Damn, but he sounded like a caveman. With the HUD’s new translation recognition, he was noticing it even more.

She understood his meaning, though. That’s all that mattered.

No one shot at them as they approached the building. They had to lift themselves up onto the porch—wherever this building had come from, it was not sitting level with the ground here. The small ravine dipped under it, exposing the concrete foundation and all its plumbing.

An odd sense of nostalgia came over him as he walked up to a door. It all felt so surreal, being here, doing this. It still felt like he’d been put into a video game as a character.

But no. This was real. Yesterday had established that.

He opened the door and called in.

“Hello? I anyone here?”

He listened hard, the same way he had in every shop and building he’d gone into in Millerville.

And, like every other time, only silence answered him.

He stepped inside, holding the door for Catrin to catch and let herself in.

“Hello?” he called out again, glancing around the space.

It felt fairly untouched. As if nothing had moved since the World Shift Event. The tap of his boots sounded loud in the quiet, still room. The place was some sort of bookstore or library. Real paper books, mostly hardbound—so, probably a library. He didn’t see any prices for them, anyway. A cafe sat to the right, separated from the rest of the space by a group of indoor planters, stanchions, and a different color of flooring—checkerboard vinyl instead of fake-marble vinyl. A university insignia on the nearby wall further cemented his guess that this was a library,though he didn’t recognize the name or crest. MacDonald Free City University?

This was their law library, apparently.

He eased himself deeper into the building and found the first signs that someone had been there.

Two vending machines, one for food and one for drinks, sat in the hall, nearly empty and with their doors slightly ajar.

He bet that if he checked the cafe’s storeroom, he’d find a similar theme.

Animals hadn’t done that.

“Hello?” he called out again. “This is Sergeant Matteo Rossel from Nashville. My friend and I are here to help.”

Coming up alongside him, Catrin suddenly stiffened, lifting her nose to the air. “Demon.”

A second later, he smelled it, too. The distinct sulfuric tang that was the hallmark of the demons they’d fought. It reminded him of the time he and Alex had tried burning strands of her hair on the stove—that godawful stench it had made. In his mind, he could still see the way the strand had glowed and curled as burned up, the wisps of smoke it produced.

Around the corner, the building’s untouched, pristine facade ended abruptly.

The hallway was a disaster. Dirt tracked and smeared across the floor, some of it bearing the distinct pattern of boot prints, but the rest a confusing, chaotic scream of activity. Deep gouges cut into the drywall, some of them slashing right into the wooden structures underneath.

Someone had been running—and something had been chasing.

Toward the end of the hall, the someone had put up a fight. Scorch marks in the walls, floor, and ceiling showed where she’d fired. Splatters of ichor-drenched blood ran down the walls like diluted tar. A dark patch of it had dried in a puddle at the bottom of the stairs.

He eyed the scratches. A hellhound, perhaps?

Christ, he hoped not. Those things were brutal to deal with, especially in packs.

These scratches also appeared to be climbing the ceiling.

Something else, then.

He moved down the hall, blaster out and tracking the lay of the fight. More scorch marks on the stairs, hitting higher on the wall than he liked to think about a demon climbing. Temi, perhaps? No, they didn’t climb like this. Or chase. They were ambush predators. The second floor had another decorative series of scorches and splattered blood. Pieces of the vinyl flooring had bubbled into black, molten disarray. The smell of rot and sulfur choked the air.

About halfway down the hall, the trail took an abrupt turn—and the smell of death and demon hit him like a sewer trap.

His jaws clenched.

Bracing himself, he walked through the door and stepped into a scene from a horror movie.

The demon’s corpse lay in a sickening slump across the floor, bloated and grotesque. Not a centipede like he’d been picturing, but looking more like some giant lizard. A dinosaur? Someone had said there’d been dinosaurs getting into his world. But no, this was definitely a demon. The smell was more than enough to prove that. Flies buzzed heavily above it. There was blood everywhere, dried into hard, foul-smelling scabs of obsidian-like ichor. The room was a mess. Whatever fight had happened here had knocked the bookshelves and tables into chaotic disarray.

Matteo lifted his arm to his nose and mouth in an attempt to block the stench and tried to make sense of the room.

Someone had shot the demon. Multiple times, but the final appeared to have gone straight through its mouth and out the back of its head. Black blood sprayed the wall and ceiling to his right, part of it catching on one of the few remaining upright bookshelves in the room.

Under the death and chaos of the room, though, he started noticing other things. A make-shift bed roll in the corner. Stacked cans. A camp stove by the window. A hand-drawn map tipped onto the floor, with notes in carefully-scribed English. On the wall by the window, a rolling caddy was stuffed full of medical supplies.

Someone had been living here.

Maybe Friend? Were they still here?

Gods, where was she?

Matteo scanned the room again, but Catrin beat him to it.

“There!” she said, pointing. “Underneath.”

He followed her gesture—and found movement.

Under the slump of a fallen bookshelf, underneath the dead demon, a limp hand moved over the splayed pages of a book, making a slight rasping sound.

His heart leaped. Jamming the blaster back into its holster, he strode forward and began pulling books away.

“Get Doneil! Fast!”