Rather than linger, I exited the dappled office and emerged back onto the staircase landing, closing the door behind me and suppressing a sigh. I hadn’t shared that my plans had changed.

Until the magma incident, advancement had been my main goal. More augments were always desirable, and gave me a better chance at offsetting part of the Defect-induced damage. If nothing else, it would make me hardier to help withstand an accident – and delay my death from old age, should I make it that far.

But for some years now, Near Miss had intervened. At first I’d thought it simply bad luck; urgent jobs cropping up when I planned to be making the purchase, or typical Defect-related failures requiring me to spend my credit on repairs. When the magma had rolled around nearly killing me, however, I had to assume the pattern wasn’t an accident.

For whatever reason, Near Miss didn’t want me to move up a tier, and I didn’t know why. That it was my core made it all the worse.

The first augment someone absorbed became their core, like Flinq with Long Game. Something about cores gave them additional influence; a near-sentience feeding off the bond with the owner. Only aligned augments were suitable; it was why they were preselected and determined placement in the House. Everyone in it belonged to Fate. In theory another House might have selected differently, but despite the occasional speculative rumours, I wasn’t aware of any existing.

And so I was stuck.

Not that I’d given up entirely. If I couldn’t advance as long as Near Miss had its way, then I had to do something about Near Miss.

Naturally this also involved pay.

Removing augments was impossible, but they could be upgraded. The cost was prohibitively expensive, but not unfeasible for my aims. Not when my life depended on it. All I’d be doing would be upgrading from Defect to Par, enough to finally put me in limited control. Even Near Miss itself seemed tired of misbehaving, since it seemed determined to set me on this path.

Compared to a regular advancement, the cost was exorbitant, but years more of saving – if I could avoid any more serious incidents – would win me the prize.

It wasn’t worth fighting. There were workarounds to Near Miss, sometimes that could be wrangled into benefits. But when it got stuck on an idea, it dragged its claws in and refused to budge, like it had with every augment I’d received.

Nothing I had worked like it was supposed to. It wasn’t normal for a Chapel assassin to turn into a vehicle, try to kill old ladies, or botch every job they followed to the letter. The truck aspect wasn’t so bad once I’d gotten used to it, and had repeatedly saved my life. My transport issues also had a reliable workaround.

But my core was a terror, sabotaging my every decision. If I had to stay on the murder floor another decade, so be it. If Flinq could wait, so could I.

I stared out at the landing. Above and below, the staircase extended into seeming cylindrical infinity. Everyone accessed a different part of it, some nicer than others. My corner was made of plain timber paved with lush carpet exhibiting only a few old bloodstains from my traversals in earlier years. I tried to take care of it. When I did cause it damage, I only had to move up a flight or two to set it to a new landing. It didn’t matter which door you opened. The destination would always be the same.

It looked like it could have been a repeating loop, but it wasn’t. Up far enough, I knew, glitters of translucent green nanofiber would start seeping into the woodwork. Down, you got subtle encroaching carvings. I’d done what everyone else in the Chapel did at some point and tried to find the end, but it was an exercise in wasting time. No one had ever even made it to another person’s segment, let alone a terminus.

It didn’t matter in any case, since all the doors led exactly where they were needed, except in instances of Near Miss. One of the Chapel’s conveniences. I wasn’t entirely sure why it even bothered with a staircase rather than simply moving door-to-door, unless it was that important to have private space.

I reopened the exit behind me – correctly – into a bustling cavity staffed with a single Sol already facing the door. He’d been waiting.

The trainee assassin bowed low, red ribbon at his neck dangling under his platinum hair. I knew better than to wave it off; etiquette was one of those funny beasts. You never knew where someone was from. Better to let them do their own thing.

The bustling came from the several walls of machinery crammed in with us; instruments of Fate installed by the higher tiers. The first time I’d seen it, I’d been awed into stunned silence at the existence of such complex technology. Now it looked surprisingly old-fashioned compared to many of the worlds I’d visited, with its buttons, dials and chaotic blinking lights. Like everything in the Chapel and its associated worlds, technology was capped at pre-computing. Even the Machine.

It was pretty in an ageless way, either chosen for aesthetic preference or highly specialised functionality. My bet was towards aesthetics. The really advanced worlds were often physically bland, as more and more essential aspects of life were automated out of existence until all that was left was the equivalent of rows of brains in jars. The next step up tended to leapfrog back around to aesthetics. Sooner or later, asceticism became boring.

I suspected the Chapel had its origins in such an advanced world, though it tended not to recruit from them. I was under the impression it only ventured there when it had to. Mostly we bounced around middle civilisation, the sweet spot for recruiting Reins.

Though there were exceptions.

“I’m looking for Jadal Cai in the Black Waste,” I said, once the attendant had straightened up, and held out my hand in greeting. “I’m Lamutri, by the way.”

The young man observed it, flicked a switch on the wall amidst a bank of others with slight hesitation, and captured the small edible tracer that flew out of the chute beside it. He deposited it in my hand, which made me grin.

“Busy day?”

“No more than expected, fortunate one.”

I raised my brows at the honorific, but only a little. “You’re new here, aren’t you? It can be tough at first, but the rewards are worth it. Saving countless universes from ruin, for one. And you won’t have to deal with the messy part for a while.”

Although the toughest part could sometimes be Machine duty, standing cooped up in a box for hours on end wondering what the point of it all was. I was glad my days as a Sol were past me.

“Understood, fortunate one.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Inyu, fortun–”

“Inyusol,” I cut him off with the correction. “At least while you’re here. Trust me, it cuts down on a lot of repetitive questions.”

Inyusol bowed.

Since no further conversation seemed likely to be forthcoming, I glanced down at the tracer in my hand withering in urgent decay. Flinq had been right.

“Looks like I have to go,” I said with some reluctance. “If you want someone to chat to, you know how to find me.” I paused. Inyusol looked very new. “You do know that, right?”

He nodded stiffly. I noticed the skin peeling off the tracer out of the corner of my eye. That wasn’t encouraging. I poured it into my mouth, internalising the contents, and immediately knew where I had to be. Waving goodbye, I exited through the same door and hurried back through to the loading zone.

Imbertri had finished cleaning the blood and was packing away the equipment. She placed a detachable nozzle on a workbench with an audible ‘clunk’ when I arrived.

“Already?” she asked, suit filtering the surprise.

“Apparently.”

My co-worker groaned. “You know what, I’m not rewashing the floor. You can do it next shift.”

I saluted, hit the door switch and transformed into vehicle mode, dropping into a quick reverse turn before heading for the larger exit. Outside, it led to a dead, dilapidated road in a world I suspected had not had the benefit of the Chapel’s services. It was currently night out there, any stars obscured by clouds of choking dust. As much as we did, there were far more universes than agents to go around. We couldn’t save them all.

Time stopped as I hit the threshold, activating World Slide. The tracer dissolving in my currently non-existent blood tugged at me through the Interstice and locked onto its target, a universe as distant as impossibility and close as a heartbeat.

Mists surrounded and blew through me, teasing at my edges while I travelled to the designated place. I waited until I felt it connect, then swerved off-course just as the clock restarted.

It had taken me a long time and hundreds of missed destinations to master that trick, compensating for a broken tool. Normally disobedience would get people into trouble, but Near Miss awarded me the exception. Directions didn’t work for me – or rather, were just wrong enough to put me the next world over, which could easily make the difference between life and death. I had to self-correct, which wasn’t easy when you couldn’t see where you were going. Even now, I still frequently got it wrong.

I knew I had it right this time because the summons in my metaphorical veins switched from interworld callsign to something more immediate.

It was fairly clear where to find my target even without the call of the tracer ahead of me. There was really only one thing of note in the entire black landscape of the Waste, which featured less of the radioactive sludge I’d been picturing and more of the empty vacuum of space. Even the stars were thin, like someone had forgotten how to compose a galaxy, or existed in the dead spaces between them. Corpses of space wreckage drifted nearby, large and small. I wondered if any had belonged to one of the previous assassins.

Not hard to spot the environmental hazard.

My wheels spun uselessly in the absence of friction, and I activated the augment responsible for my nickname. I hadn’t earnt it, like I hadn’t earnt any of my dubious abilities. Gear Shift was supposed to have been an accessibility aid after a few close calls with my Defective copy of World Slide. But Near Miss had Near Missed it, and instead of summoning the vehicle, I’d ended up being the vehicle, which had been a whole adjustment process and required multiple sessions with Chapel-sponsored therapy.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Once I’d gotten used to it, though, the Defect was positively tame. I couldn’t control what I transformed into, but could control when, and it was always appropriate to the situation. Fate coming through again.

The bigger issue lay in paying the associated debt back. I was in so deep I doubted I’d ever have the opportunity to surface. The Chapel owned me; had done from the beginning, and just staying alive wriggled me ever-further into its encompassing embrace.

Fresh, tough plating covered me as Gear Shift triggered. I lost my wheels and grew significantly larger, engines multiplying and shifting from front to the sides and rear. Most of my fine manoeuvrability vanished, replaced with absurd amounts of acceleration and speed. My awareness shifted to account for a longer range. I didn’t have eyes in vehicle form, but by focusing on my surroundings, I could still ‘see’.

Ahead of me waited a far larger construct: a rusted, bulky monstrosity that had definitely seen better days. I couldn’t tell what colour it had once been, but now it was distinguished by a garbled brown surrounded by flaking pieces of its own construction, which didn’t seem promising for the status of its inhabitants.

I fired my thrusters and headed towards what I hoped was a loading dock. Spaceships weren’t a common transformation for me, but even for a spacefaring universe, this one used some interesting technology. The station ahead was covered in large, equally-flaking spikes that made me think of an archetypal mine. Only the tracer indicated otherwise, and if I were honest, I still wasn’t certain. The size of the thing meant I was probably just dead if it decided to blow up.

If I could die as a collection of scattered parts. Not dying would probably be worse.

A video feed reached me over my compatible communications system well before I reached the possible dock, filling itself with a battle-scarred face, eyepatch and loose black fringe.

“Halt and identify yourself. Fail to do so and we will defend ourselves.”

I switched to reverse thrusters, as much in surprise as compliance. I had an odd feeling the speaker might be the Rein, the eponymous Jadal Cai. If the barely-contained hostility and physical characteristics hadn’t clued me in, the signals the Chapel’s summons was sending were certainly enough to finish the job.

And yet he wasn’t quite right. While no two Reins were identical, they still featured an uncanny lack of variety, as though adhering to a template. This one might have used it as a starting point, but looked like he’d then flown off-course and misplaced the instructions.

“We’re in distress,” I lied over the return audio line. “Refugees seeking sanctuary.”

Reins didn’t usually find their way into positions of authority. Not before dying, anyway. And they weren’t usually this old. Either this Rein had lived an especially hard life prone to premature aging, or he had to be at least forty.

Maybe the signals were wrong.

“There are no life signs aboard your ship,” the comms came back. “Explain.”

“Uh,” I uttered convincingly. Normally I didn’t have to talk my way onboard a vessel before getting to the murder part. “Your sensors must be faulty. Please – it’s life and death.”

I didn’t have to falsify the urgency; I could feel the tracer growing more insistent. Whatever window Fate had opened was closing fast.

I resisted the urge to refire my thrusters; failing an assignment came with more negative consequences than no pay. I’d be responsible for dooming a universe, unless someone else fixed it, and have a new mark against my name. Enough of those, and I’d be taken off the roster while still in arrears. In other words, death. The Chapel did want me, was willing to invest in me – but not so much it couldn’t cut its losses.

Thanks to Near Miss, I was already cutting it close.

“Prove you’re not one of them,” the spokesman said.

I was starting to see how the previous assassination attempts had failed. Less so why the details hadn’t made it onto Flinq’s reports. “Of who?”

The video feed cut out without reply. For a few seconds nothing happened, and then a cross-section of the mine rotated clockwise on a diagonal shift, moving until one of its spiky protrusions pointed in my direction. It didn’t look like a loading dock.

Now I did step on the thrusters, cursing my lack of manoeuvrability. I shot forward, edging towards a turn, but the construct was faster. Fuchsia light emanated from inside the turret. I strained left, putting as much speed as I could behind it, and only barely escaped being fried by a pink blast wider than I was large. The sizzle of it heated the nearer half of my outer plating to searing levels, and it hadn’t even made contact.

“Shit,” I cursed on the audio line, even though I no longer had listeners. A second beam parted the void of space ahead of me, followed by a third in quick succession.

My summons was reaching critical levels; if I didn’t complete my task in the next few minutes, the job would be a failure.

“You’re in danger,” I bluffed again over the comms channel, resorting to desperate measures. “They’re trying to kill you. At least two attempts now. I can help. If we could just talk –”

The last part was cut off by a breach to the side of my hull from a refire from the initial spike. They had a cooldown between shots, at least. Air rushed out through the hole, and I winced internally. That would probably be a broken arm when I changed back. Months of healing or another repanel. It could easily have been worse, which could have been Near Miss being useful for once. But also could have been luck. I increased my speed again, using the cooldown on the nearest turret to cover more distance.

I was fast in my current shape, unexpected for a short-range vehicle. Not a fighter, although I did have one measly laser installed as a token insult. Probably transport or cargo meant to outrun and keep going until reaching a safe distance.

In this case, it was towards the mine. The station had been optimised for long-range precision. Up close, the space between turrets was enormous. In better days, it should have had fighters covering it closer in. I barely dodged another intense blast and zoomed behind the nearest protrusion, slamming my reverse thrusters before I could crash into reckless scrap.

Sections of the sphere rotated towards me as I painstakingly lined up a turn, transitioning into sideways battering rams. I accelerated past at an unfinished angle, completed the turn and tried not to panic.

Without a miracle, I wasn’t going to complete this mission. And I needed a door to get back. Mission rules stated there had to be one nearby – the Chapel didn’t leave its operatives stranded. Presumably there was one on the sphere somewhere, but I couldn’t see where and I had several dozen death spires doing their best to dispose of me in the meantime.

My only other alternative was drifting into space for hundreds of thousands of years aiming for a star, and my fuel and sanity definitely wouldn’t survive that.

“I surrender!” I lied over the comms channel, or told myself I did. “I’m not a refugee. But I came here to warn you, not attack. Look at my ship; we both know I don’t have a chance.”

I wasn’t expecting an answer, but the approaching turrets slowed to an avoidable crawl as the comms channel flared back to life. “If you’re not one of them, you’re an AI,” Jadal Cai’s voice stated flatly. “Enough with the lies.”

“I am not,” I retorted. “And your last victims weren’t, either. They were killers – dangerous ones – and they’ll keep coming if you don’t give me a chance to explain what you’re up against.”

“You can explain here,” announced the Rein. “If I let you on my ship, you’ll try and take over. You wouldn’t get far, but I don’t intend to give you a chance.”

‘My’ ship? Jadal Cai wasn’t just the death machine’s comms guy; he actually ran the thing. I wondered if a human-AI war had been responsible for the state this universe was in.

“Please,” I said dismissively. “If I was an AI, I’d have already sent hundreds of malware-loaded drones swarming all over you looking for cracks. It isn’t as though there’s a shortage. But I haven’t, so maybe you should believe me.”

I had killed a Rein that way once on an unusually advanced recruiter world. Though usually my forms were far less versatile.

“Hmph.” Static-punctuated silence hovered over the channel for a moment. “State who you are.”

“A friend.”

The channel went dead. Around me, the turrets flared back to fuchsia-coloured life. Wonderful.

I wasn’t used to Reins not being pushovers. They were the kind of people who would run into the path of a truck, after all, in addition to being bland and all weirdly similar.

My tracer had almost expired. I wasn’t going to make it in time, even if Jadal Cai let me in. No first-tier could have succeeded on such a tight limit, and even a second-tier would be struggling. This mission had been set up for failure from the beginning.

“I’m from an organisation called the Chapel,” I amended hastily. It was hardly an information breach; he’d find that out anyway once he died. “It takes out hits on people. I found out about yours, and I’m trying to stop it. I’d hardly tell you this if I wasn’t. At least hear me out, even if you put me in a quarantine bay.”

Anything with a door. Then I’d return to Flinq, report the situation and vent about the inadequate briefing. This was above my paygrade.

Once more, the giant turrets slowed. “The Chapel, you say?” Jadal Cai asked.

“You know of it?”

“No.” There was a pause. “You have your chance. Try anything funny, and you won’t last the next second.”

With a place like this, I believed him.

A row of lights illuminated the surface of the titanic sphere, each individual lamp the size of ten of me put together. I followed the trail to a retracting airlock, wincing internally as the mission tracer died in a flurry of expired magic, and aimed carefully for the centre of the gate. The last thing I needed now was for Near Miss to trigger.

It didn’t. I glided harmlessly forwards, passing under the centre of the door, and activated World Slide.

Time stopped, the mist of worlds clouding my vision. Through it, the Chapel shone out in a bright, guiding beacon. Here and there, a few other paths stood out among billions; worlds I’d recently visited and hadn’t had time to forget yet, or that counted among my favourites.

Far in the distance waited the path back to my original universe; a road I’d never forget and would one day travel again. But not today.

I set my sights on the Chapel and crossed the distance in a handful of blinks, prepared for a likely Near Miss.

Unexpectedly, something indistinct flew at me sideways mid-transit, bounced harmlessly off and disappeared into the fog.

I reviewed the blurred smear across universes and concluded it belonged to a person. A survivor among the previous mission assignees made the most sense, except that it wasn’t heading for the Chapel. Barrelling into me was also clumsy, the kind of thing that could only happen when one lacked control.

Encountering anything else in the Interstice at all was a new experience, and I wasn’t sure what to think of it. It was supposed to be impossible. Each time we went in, we went alone.

Had it been something else? Anything was possible where Near Miss could be involved. The Defect was erratic and dangerous but unquestionably powerful, to the point where I wondered exactly how far.

I turned and traced the smear to its exit point, a universe easily lost among billions, and made a note of it. Probably against my best interest, I then backtracked to the Black Waste and re-emerged halfway through the gate. To anyone watching, I wouldn’t have appeared to have left.

I braked on the thrusters to keep myself in the door. “Are you there?” I asked on the comms channel.

No answer came.

The turrets on the mine remained inert and silent. I waited a few minutes, trying the comms channel and feeling increasingly uneasy. If there had been a Chapel survivor, they might have finished the assignment for me, correct timeframe or not. If they’d overheard all my unfortunate lies about betraying my employers, I was probably also in for a lot of awkward explaining.

I didn’t want to think about the other alternative. Everything about it should be impossible.

When no immediate consequences arrived, I cautiously moved further in. A wide loading dock lay ahead of me. Landing on it elicited no reaction, so I relaunched into a slow lap of the chamber. The path remained blocked. Two human-sized maintenance shafts skirted the back of the dock, but both were locked tight. In any case, there was no point in transforming back in the lack of air. I wouldn’t be getting any further answers today.

Unnerving silence accompanied me back to the gateway. Post-apocalyptic universes weren’t all that rare. Intelligent civilisations were prone to burning themselves out whether by war, greed or denial. It was why we needed the Reins to prevent more. Reincarnating humans to dominate other worlds shouldn’t rationally have worked, but it did, and it was better than this.

The Black Waste might just have been on the outskirts of space, but it certainly looked like someone had burnt out the stars. I didn’t want to linger here.

Instead, I slid back home through the Interstice. Wherever this Rein was supposed to be, he now wouldn’t be going. And I had another black mark to my name. At this rate, I’d never stop falling behind.

I had to upgrade Near Miss.