“You’re supposed to wait till I’m done explaining,” Er Jid dressed me down when I returned. “You visited somewhere, didn’t you? Where?”

In real time, I’d been gone less than a minute. The return walk had been faster than the outwards journey, at least to my subjective passing of time, but had still felt about three-quarters of an hour long.

I’d wiped the incriminating sand off my boots and the hems of my trousers, and checked on the alternate World Slide. The unabsorbed augment rolled with my changes in stride, fastened securely no matter what form I was taking. It helped it was visible to my second-tier senses, making itself known in a conspicuous lump.

In the Vein, I’d kept glancing at what passed for the sky, half-expecting a wraith to drift by. Of course one never did. I knew what we looked like in the Interstice, but wondered if that would change.

Mostly I’d tried to think of what to ask Near Miss. It hadn’t gone far. My thoughts kept wandering in circles, with too many questions unqueried and too much to fully take in.

“Just testing,” I answered now.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Er scolded, voice stern. “We have to be careful and we have to be prepared. Stupidly wandering in is how you never come out. Some dimensions can kill you just for entering.”

In the back of my awareness, Flinpen’s marker flickered and reappeared elsewhere, which I hoped meant she was checking my summons.

“I won’t do it again,” I lied. “How does one prepare?”

The recruiter’s temper visibly evened somewhat. She beckoned me out to the landing. “Entering a universe undirected is perilous and erratic,” she said, hurrying down. “But with a clear destination in mind, we can exercise more control. Function allows us to do this. When entering an unknown dimension, always aim for a place safe for human life and habitation. There’s always at least one.”

It was something I’d always performed on instinct, even without the guidance of the Machine. Hearing it explained in words felt strange. It was one of the standard features of a core, much like the languages; all manifestations of inherent versal understanding imparted in a dozen different ways. The refined Function I'd taken seemed to cover some of that same ground, but not everything. The latter felt more clinical, impersonal and in need of direction, a hallmark of its communal nature. Not having to use doors to travel was an immense advantage, however, essentially granting the ability to flee with almost no delay. More of my earlier disparagement melted away. The House of Function was formidable in its own way.

I still preferred the Chapel.

Er's words nevertheless hit on a somewhat dissonant note. “Are you saying human civilisation exists in every universe there is?” I asked. “Doesn’t that strike you as strange? Wouldn't there be more variance?”

“Well. Does or did,” Er clarified. “Not all survived, and some evolved. The definition of humanity can also be surprisingly diverse. But I agree it’s strange. It can't be a root dimension; inter-universe fundamentals are far too different. We think it’s from the heyday of the Empire, or possibly even older. Once upon a time, humanity colonised everything.”

“But the amount of time that would take –” I broke off, realising my mistake. As a new recruit, I should have no idea of the true scale of the multiverse.

Fortunately, Er seemed to take it in a relative sense. “The ancient Empire could do many things we consider impossible today,” she explained. “Function enabled greater multiversal cohesion. There was more of it, for one thing, distributed and supplied more freely.”

"What if it had nothing to do with the Empire?" I asked. A reasonable question, statistically.

The recruiter smiled. "It must have. Nothing but Function could achieve it."

I thought on it as she led me through the town, pointing out facilities and services on the way. Between the physical landmarks, she ran through aspects of the Garrison's database. By the time we reached the nearest supply centre, I felt I knew more about adding and updating entries than I probably needed.

The supply centres were quite large, taking up much of the town perimeter. “This town’s so small,” I noted as we entered. Large stacks of stored materials loomed up at us out of a dimly-lit interior. Only a few lonely shuttered skylights angled down towards the stone walls. “How do you source the supplies?”

“Cartography won’t keep us going on its own. We all have a secondary occupation. Mine is recruitment. Others, trading.”

“You have trade partners?” I exclaimed, impressed.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t we?”

“I mean, your lack of resources –”

“– takes a very limited view of things,” Er Jid interrupted with an amused smile. “We act as go-betweens, facilitating the transferral of resources from one universe to another. On another axis, there’s knowledge. Cartography and dimensional intelligence are worth the price of a nation. We’ll share information on any universe for the right price, as long as it isn’t ours or a civilisation we have an agreement with. More rarely there are opportunities in tourism or global technological advancement. So no, we aren’t short on material resources. Only Function.”

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Again, that commonality to the Chapel. All magical bottlenecks, all the way down. The Garrison, at least, could be much bigger expanding through material currency – even despite the poisonous suns. “It’s that important to you that everyone here has access to Function, isn’t it?”

“It is. Function is sacred. We might have shaped it into a network, but it’s the fundamental building block through which all true magic is possible. Its use in the Vein is only the smallest fraction of what it can do, and the specialisation you wear is another. It is, literally, everything.”

Before I could open my mouth, Flinpen hit me with a distant return summons. I couldn’t make it immediately. She’d just have to wait.

I stumbled over my words to speed up the conversation. “What supplies do I need?”

“You’ll need a pack.” Er motioned me to the nearest wall where a large example of the referenced item hung on a rack, picked it up and put it in my hands. She ushered me to the start of a long row of containers. “Then a light.”

I found myself looking down at a sack full of the small silver cylinders the Brightman had carried. Each looked identical. I chose one and, in absence of further elaboration, put it in the pack.

“Next, breathing apparatus.”

A second, third and fourth summons hit me in rapid succession. I took a breath, picked up one of the ornate metal gas masks on display and added it to the bag. It was already starting to grow heavy, and there were many more items to come. I couldn’t imagine carrying all this around for hours on a first-tier's constitution. This was why the Chapel had the Machine – to filter out all the wrong turns and problem environments.

“You’ll need a shield. Don’t test it in here, but it’s activated via Function.”

I eyed the next rack with interest. The Garrison’s defensive implement of choice resembled a brass lace that fit over the fingers and centred on the palm. I slipped a few over my hand to test for a fit, and winced as another two summons landed.

The Garrison could track me across universes. If I skipped out again so soon after my last violation, there was nothing I could do to –

Except for my Arch Near Miss. I wanted to slap myself for not remembering. A cooperative core would take a lot more getting used to.

With what felt like very deliberate timing, it triggered.

Less than a second later, a database notification slid into my awareness. From the shift in Er Jid’s expression, she’d also received it.

I read it this time.

[Wraith sighted at Garrison,] it announced simply. [Calling all available personnel immediately to the Vein.]

“Apologies,” Er said, placing down the next item she’d lined up: a second, smaller bag. She glitched in place as her World Slide triggered, a bare flicker from my perspective, and reappeared already moving to the exit. “I have to head to a meeting,” she called over her shoulder. “We’ll pick this back up.”

I watched as she departed.

“You really wanted to make sure I noticed,” I voiced to Near Miss in the deserted storehouse. “Point taken.”

Every instant counted in the Interstice; I assumed it was the same in the Vein. Logically-speaking, if a battle was being fought there, by now it would already have been won or lost in the blink between moments, with no concept of time in between. It should have been too late for Er, even, but she must have known something I didn't.

Dropping the unwieldy supply bag on the floor – and afraid of what I might find – I pushed into the Vein.

It was lonely, as predicted, as always. The landscape had been altered again. But not like the time before. Not peacefully. Beyond the reoriented outcrops of land, whole segments had been severed and sheared off, chopped by some titanic axe. Once-conjoined paths had been snapped into dangling pieces, collapsed and colliding with others here and there. The lattice I stood in had itself partially shattered, though the portal itself remained pristine.

If I squinted past the holes, I could see the inner pathways had exploded outwards, littered where they slammed into others in a wider impacted sphere. The violence looked ancient, like it had happened aeons ago, with new grass overgrown on the damage and hard edges weathered to crumbles.

No one was here.

Something else was present that hadn’t been here before. A glimmer of versal magic off in the distance, somewhere out to the side. I circumnavigated the lattice remnant until gravity put me above it, then dropped down onto the nearest desecrated path. The versal signature still lay far below my feet.

A flutter lingered where my heart used to be as I gazed down at the fathomless gap. I could try and walk there in however many hours it would take, or chance using Near Miss.

“You’d better catch me,” I muttered, and jumped.

I plunged past broken roads, air whipping my hair around me. Gravity fields teased at me here and there edging me towards the nearest outcrops, but not in time to capture my fall. I was hardly plummeting with dignity, twisting in mid-air through my hair and flapping sleeves to avoid anything likely to hit me.

The anomaly was coming up faster than expected, a little off-trajectory, and I managed to pinpoint it to a specific promontory. It reared up to clip me, and at the last second I triggered Gear Shift, spilling into mist splashing harmlessly against the side.

I pulled myself together, drifted to the top of the path and transformed back at the anomaly, hair a little wild. Near Miss hadn’t caught me, but it hadn’t been needed. I’d been fine.

An uncharacteristic long, grass-covered mound interrupted the path I’d landed on, half burying several unfortunate rifts. The versal lump lay buried somewhere underneath it. I dug with my bare hands through the soil, scooping my way in. It took some time. Eventually, arms up to my armpits, my fingers scraped crystal.

I pulled out first one, then several more slivers of shattered augment. Together they made up only one. The others had been taken. This one contained glimmers of the lingering energy I’d sensed, but had long since ceased to glow.

Dead, the thought came unbidden. I wasn’t sure if I was thinking of the agent or the augment they had carried, but I remembered Er Jid's words. They couldn't be broken by accident. Wisdom I'd also learnt at the Chapel.

Hunted for parts. Poached.

Except this one, for some reason. A prime example of the Garrison's rarest and most coveted resource, deliberately destroyed. Something had made this one different.

What could it be but a core?

Heavy with anger, I added the core fragments to the pouch adjacent to World Slide and checked my map against Flinpen’s summons. Mercifully, her marker was still active; the murdered agent hadn't been her. With luck, she would bring better news.

But I didn’t have my hopes up.