It was the Interstice, or something like it, but everything had changed. Aside from the impossible fact of being here, doorlessly swept along for the ride, I felt very solid and very grounded, with limbs resembling actual legs. Real lungs to fill with real air.

The shrouding mists pervading the versal space had cleared to reveal a distinct foreign landscape. My shoes depressed indents in tufts of wet, iridescent grass reminding me of its counterpart on Myrd. Impenetrable skies had given way to endless loops of criss-crossing helixes where more paths interlocked and climbed. More lay below. Ahead, the section we stood on dipped in a leisurely concave precipice, beyond which another reared in awe-inspiring, cavernous might. Tremors of vertigo edged in.

Small stones and landmarks, nothing larger than a small bush, were dotted between the versal tears, themselves far more distinct. Normally the gates existed in effortless clusters; now, even the closest would take more than a few steps to reach. They formed physical rifts here; not their usual structures of abstract essence.

Astonishment co-opted my ability to speak. Thousands of trips through the Interstice, and I’d never dreamed I would see it like this. If not for the newly-familiar sigils marking many exits, I’d have wondered if a second versal landscape had existed the entire time.

I dropped into a crouch to pick a blade of grass and rub it between my fingers. Real.

The Recruiter mistook my amazement for unfamiliarity, which helped my charade. Pretending I was seeing it all for the first time was proving much easier than expected. I couldn’t take my eyes off the overhead intricacy.

“This is the Vein,” Twelve said, gesturing around us. She even referred to it by a different name. “That portal behind us is the world we just left, your Geo-International Accord. Each of the others you see is another universe again, with different rules for all. How are you feeling?”

The question took me by surprise. I stood. “Looking for the trick.”

She tapped me with a trimmed fingernail. “Frail? Weak?”

Right. My ‘magic’ was supposed to be gone. I was lucky she already believed my origin so thoroughly, or I might have just raised a red flag. And why wouldn’t she? What were the chances of randomly encountering another versal traveller on a routine mission? Until now, it hadn’t happened to me. “Now that you mention it. I’m feeling like I’m forgetting something. Various things. There isn’t something in the air, is there?”

Twelve nodded. “Different rules. It’ll come back when you return through that gate. Shall we?” She held out the same hand.

It was possible she didn’t know of the Chapel's existence. The multiverse was a staggeringly large place, possibly infinite. If she was aligned with the House of the sigils, they might not have realised they’d caught our attention.

I wanted to ask questions, but accepted the hand. I had an in, and wouldn’t ruin it by coming on too strong. I let her drag me back to the death game, not entirely faking the daze of having my sense of reality disrupted. There was a time when that feeling had been commonplace. For the last decade or so, however, the standard to meet had been raised.

Current events were meeting it.

Landing back in the metal chamber with its sprawled occupants felt both surreal and unreal. All those lives I’d empathised with had been reduced to little more than dolls the moment I could walk away. A necessary defence mechanism; I was strong, but not enough to save them. Maybe at second-tier I’d have had a chance, or if I’d been able to use Near Miss.

The Recruiter – mysterious entity with versal-transcendent abilities I didn’t understand – was waiting.

“It’s a lot to take in,” I said. “But assuming it’s real, I can’t say no.”

“Oh? What about your cause?”

“What about it? You pulled me out of a torture chamber like it was nothing. You could do the same for everyone here. More than that, this could solve the overpopulation problem at its root. Some of those universes must have room.”

“Indeed. Though this isn’t a process that can be automated and mass-produced. It’s an undertaking, and we’d expect other demands on your time.”

“What would you have me doing?” I asked.

“Learning, at first. Then documenting. Mapping. Our mission is to keep watch over all the worlds.”

Innocent answers, and almost certainly misleading in the same way the Chapel didn’t announce itself as a hive of assassins. “You’re controlling this program, or at least interrupting it,” I accused Twelve. “Shut it down fully, and I’m in.”

“I can,” she replied, “though it won’t take the administrators much to discover the glitch. This group could be reassigned in a day. Another option is transferring them to a new universe, about which they know nothing. I could choose a safer one, but they would all leave their lives behind. What would be your call?”

Was this a test? The GIA was a hellish society, but the presence of Two complicated things. By now, I was almost certain he was a post-death Rein. Removing him from his designated universe would have grave consequences. I’d gotten away with it once with Jarome, no harm done – I hoped – but it wasn’t a habit I should get into.

“Shut it down,” I said firmly, hating myself for the decision. Not that either option was perfect. But Two had to remain, or the whole place would be doomed.

“Interesting,” said Twelve. “Very well.”

I didn’t see what she did, but a ‘click’ in the ceiling flooded the room with red and the metal slid back in the walls. I found myself looking at four identical corridors full of inactive, sleeping drones.

Emergency systems activated, the collars stated in direct defiance of the evidence. Challenge compromised in contract breach. Overriding recycling protocol to engage direct wipe. Participants will –

It proceeded to make a stuttering series of beeps, and clicked off entirely. A series of further clicks sounded as the collars unlocked.

I removed the one from Eleven’s neck first in case it was rigged to fatally backfire, then proceeded with the rest, paying special attention to Two.

I looked up at Twelve.

Accepting new protocols, the collars stated from the floor, startling me with their abrupt comeback. Securing participant safety at all costs.

In the corridors, lights blinked on in the drones. A few whirred to life.

“That will buy time,” said the Recruiter. She touched me on the arm, and again with no fanfare we were back in the bizarre Alter-Interstice. The Vein.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Huge ribbons of grassy earth floated and twirled around us, making the ground we stood on feel precariously thin. I wondered what Flinpen would say when I told her what I'd seen. “Will that be enough?” I asked.

My eyes scanned the edges of the portal we'd entered by. Unsurprisingly, it bore the post-death sigil. In the Vein, it appeared much less abstract than its Interstitial counterpart; far easier to read. The Chapel had actually copied it incorrectly.

Around it appeared other, smaller writing I’d never seen before glowing in a steady white script. [Geo-International Accord], I read. [Threat: Low. Tech: Verging high. Magic: Emerging. Review in two years.]

Twelve followed my glance. “Oh, you won’t be able to read that yet,” she voiced, making me glad I hadn’t said anything. “It’ll come in time.”

Languages were one of the reasons Sols spent at least a year in training before being unleashed on the multiverse. The first augment needed time to take hold. Nobody absorbed one and started working magic right away. Cores took time to ferment, altering and preparing the way. The Chapel worlds eliminated language barriers except for contact with other Sols, and by the time we were given World Slide, the rest had melted away.

Twelve raised a hand in front of her and gestured as if typing on an invisible screen. Before my eyes, the ‘Review in two years’ scrubbed itself out in twinkling disintegrating letters, replaced simply with the phrase ‘High priority’. I stamped hard on the dread it kicked into being. Priority for… what?

Since my days as a Du, the Interstice had been a comforting refuge. Time never passed in it; I could think without pressure. It offered freedom, escape and the option to look homewards, despite it being a road I’d yet to take.

The Vein was both more beautiful and awe-inspiring, and being here made me feel hopelessly lost. I couldn’t feel my way home from here, whether my birthplace or the Chapel. I couldn’t sense anything I wouldn’t in a regular old universe. The mists of the Interstice had hidden many details, apparently among them distance. I preferred its secrets: shadowed and ethereal before knowledge scoured possibility from existence. Which made sense; I did belong to Fate.

Wherever I walked now – in whatever warped variant of the versal gap – it didn’t feel friendly to Fate. Daunting and long, it was measurable, visible and dangerous, with previously accessible destinations perversely obscured and hidden.

I had a core theoretically dedicated to keeping me out of danger, I reminded myself. Unless you were a Rein or operating under special circumstances, relying on Fate only worked on the Chapel worlds anyway. It had never been the ubiquitous force the ignorant claimed.

Finished with whatever she was doing, my guide set off towards the hovering path’s convex dip. “Come, then,” she said, gesturing at me to stay close. Up ahead, I could see the next rift had also been assigned and labelled. No Reins and low everything. Then the word ‘Seed.’

Seed?

“I can’t keep calling you Twelve,” I said to cover up my interest. “I’m Tidu.” I didn’t think Second Father would mind if I repurposed it.

It had been a while since I’d thought of my fathers’ names, but losing track of my birth world was elevating them front of mind. The idea hadn’t crossed my head that I might never get it back, and only now did I realise how much it frightened me.

“Tidu,” my navigator acknowledged. “My name is Er Jid.” Carefully, she approached the near edge of the grassy strip and pointed over it into the bottomless depths. “Do you see that node? That’s where we’re going.”

I followed her finger to a relatively close but disconnected series of loops across the expanse. In the Interstice, I would have been there in instants. From a distance, nothing obvious discerned it from any of its neighbours, nor any of the portals from each other.

Above us, only slightly above our heads at a diagonal jutting angle, lay a closer portal. I could almost reach out and touch it. I tried to read it without obviously tilting my head. Pre-death Rein, low threat, high tech and no magic. Ready.

“Across that gap?” I stopped reading and traced the loop as far as I could in one direction followed by the other, in case it connected eventually. If it did, I couldn’t find the intersection.

“We’ll get there. First, walk with me.”

I did, making my way towards the dip ahead.

“The first thing to understand is that space in the Vein doesn’t behave how you’re used to.”

I glanced at the spiralling promontories in their lightless surroundings. “You don’t say.”

“Not just the obvious. We could walk down this strip for years and find many worlds, all unique but none of which were our destination. Or we could make it come to us. The way we do this is by exerting Function.”

“You mean magic?”

“I mean Function. They seem related on the surface, but are two separate forces. Magic is a product of individual universes and wildly variable. Outside them, it loses all power. That’s why you’re currently feeling weak. Function, on the other hand, is sacred and fundamental. On a multiversal scale, it’s the only one that matters.”

She was describing versal magic, I was fairly sure, but couldn’t say anything. I was still waiting for us to reach the dip, but the distance had been deceptive and we were yet to reach the downhill swing. A new universe had come partly into view beyond it, marked with a pre-death Rein and still too far away for me to make out the other writing.

Thinking about it, I glanced at the loops in the sky and noticed they’d shifted angle. We had reached the curve of the dip, only gravity was moving with us. Just in case I needed another factor contributing to losing my way.

“So how does one use it to travel?” I asked.

“By calling attributes into being. The universe where we’re headed – our universe – sits at the very centre of the multiverse where all things converge. Evoking aspects to which it is aligned – civilisation, centrality and advancement – will inevitably bring it closer, and us to it.”

I stared at her blankly. This all sounded unnecessarily complicated.

Er Jid’s expression softened. She smoothed down the collar of her jumpsuit. “It will make sense eventually. The Garrison is the easiest to find. All paths lead towards it. But the same method can be applied to any other universe, if you know what characteristics you’re looking for.” She hesitated. “Almost anywhere.”

For something supposedly so central and discoverable, I’d never heard of anything like the Garrison, to the point I wondered if I’d somehow glitched my way to some alternate variant of the entire multiverse like some kind of absurd meta tier up, where all the rules changed and the Garrison was its iteration of the Chapel.

More realistically, I’d just found the other House. But nothing about it made any sense.

“Where can’t it take you?” I probed.

“I don’t want to overload you,” Er Jid said in the tone of someone who’d made up their mind. “Look there. We’re getting closer.”

Over the ridge beyond the loose whirl of loops lay a denser cluster of paths converging in a three-dimensional spiral of knots. Somehow I hadn’t noticed it earlier.

While Er Jid was distracted, I spared a quick glance towards the pre-death portal we were now passing. [Nanner. Threat: Low. Tech: Mid. Magic: None. Ready.]

The sense of purpose contained in those messages continued to make me uneasy. For now, I turned my attention back to the cluster. “It all looks the same. How can you tell the difference?”

“We map,” the older woman answered. “Function provides a shortcut, but also an interface. It shares characteristics with the holograms of your universe. That’s what you’ll be doing, in fact – discovering new worlds and adding them to our collective knowledge.”

“Why?” I asked. “Just to document for its own sake?”

“Not just for that.” Her footsteps slowed as she gave me an appraising look. “Do you believe in gods?”

I vaguely recalled Ten mentioning something that might have been a deity’s name offhand, but wasn’t sure what I was supposed to know. “That’s a loaded question,” I evaded.

“Well,” said Er Jid, “the original Garrison was supposedly established by one. Unifying the universes was their divine vision. This was many thousands of years ago. Protecting that vision is what we attempt to carry on.”

“As in, building some kind of inter-dimensional network?”

“In ideal. We don’t really have the resources for it, which is why I’m out here recruiting,” she replied. “I believe others have also tried, only to run into issues with diplomacy. Mostly we uphold our mandate to preserve sacred Function. Without it, we would lose the Vein and all of our knowledge, and the multiverse would truly be cut off.”

Chapel agents regularly pretended to be gods, and it was common knowledge third-tiers rarely – if ever – died. I wondered if the Garrison had been some ancient operative’s idea of a good time. Or perhaps the reverse – the Chapel being the spinoff. At some point, after all, somebody had to have founded it. I had no idea who, or if they were still alive. I wasn’t sure any first or second-tier knew the answer.

There were so many questions I couldn’t ask without tipping my hand. Things were easier when I was just killing Reins. Short-term commitments and saving universes; no dancing around the issue.

On the other hand, I’d asked Near Miss to start with the sigils, and that was what I’d received. I had only myself to blame.