“That was a shitty interview,” I grumbled. “I could have been killed, lady.” I began to rise carefully to my feet, not wanting to make my wounds any worse, but as I stood, I realized that the pain was gone. I glanced down at myself and saw that the wounds in my limbs and side were gone. I touched my neck and felt only smooth, unbroken skin. When I moved, my back didn’t protest in the slightest. My exhaustion had fled, and I felt – well, I felt pretty damn good, really. At least, I did until my reflexes kicked in, and I swept the room with my eyes. “What the hell?”

Whenever I entered a new space, I’d trained myself to sweep it with my eyes swiftly and mechanically. I quartered the space, checked above and below. I wasn’t really seeing anything; my eyes looked for possible threats and means of exit without really noting any of my surroundings. It was an old habit, and the fact that it had taken me this long to do it showed how completely shaken I was. Sadly, the glance around didn’t help.

I stopped my scan and blinked in amazement, then did a full 360 and took in my surroundings. The space the old woman and I stood in was vast, stretching out around my in every direction as far as I could see. The floor was transparent, like standing on thick glass, allowing me to see beneath my feet, and no ceiling blocked my view overhead. The sky overhead was a mixture of indigo, purple, and an odd pink color I didn’t recognize and looked to be nothing but roiling clouds lit from within by flashes of colored light. The same clouds filled every horizon and hovered far beneath me.

None of that really caught my attention, though. What drew my gaze were the stairs. The air around us was filled with dozens, hundreds, thousands of staircases of every type I’d ever seen, and some I hadn’t. There were spiral staircases of gleaming crystal, stone stairwells that switched back on each other, metal ladder steps that twisted around in space, and sweeping, carpeted stairs that almost begged to be climbed. The stairs hung all over, seeming to float in midair, twisting and shifting constantly. When I tried to follow any of them with my eyes, though, I realized that none of them were physically possible. The stairs all seemed to lead into one another, winding endlessly around, and doubling back onto themselves without ever changing direction. I followed one set of stairs up into the clouds and realized that I was staring down at it below my feet. Somehow, it had wrapped around and come up through the bottom, video game style. The whole space felt like I was standing in an MC Escher painting.

The old woman’s voice interrupted my musings. “Again,” she said calmly.

I stared at her, not entirely sure what she was talking about. “Again? You want me to go fight those things again? Look, I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, but…”

“No, no, John. You said you could have been killed, but you meant, you could have been killed again, as in a second time.”

I just looked at her, then down at my body again. I was back in my leather jacket and black pants, but the jacket was undamaged, and the white shirt beneath it wasn’t stained with my blood anymore. Somehow, it had been repaired, just as I had been. Something beyond my understanding was happening here, and my mind was having trouble making sense of anything. I stared at her, then sat down heavily on the transparent floor, running my hands through my hair.

“Lady, I don’t know what’s going on here,” I said tiredly as I felt a headache slowly forming in the back of my skull, “but if that’s your idea of a joke, it’s not a funny one.”

“A joke? Oh, no, John, I’m quite serious. When you went through that door, you died. Here, let me show you.”

The old woman gestured, and suddenly the world around me shifted and changed. I leaped to my feet as I realized I was back on the rooftop, and it was heavily occupied with large, armed men. I snatched my pistol from my waistband and leveled it; I’d passed out from blood loss after all, and I’d woken up just in time for these people to kill me…

Before I pulled the trigger, though, I realized that none of the bodyguards were looking my way. They were all staring at something laying on the rooftop, something hidden by their bodies. I looked around almost frantically. They’d missed me somehow, but they’d spot me soon enough, and I needed to be gone before they did…

“Relax, John,” the old woman said. I jumped back and leveled the pistol at her as I saw her standing beside me. She hadn’t been there an instant ago; where the hell had she come from?

She looked at my pistol, her expression amused. “Do we need to go through this again?” she asked me. “Put that thing away, and watch.”

I lowered the pistol but didn’t slip it back into my pants. I didn’t really want to tussle with the old lady again, but I still couldn’t understand why the guards weren’t attacking us. That is, unless…

“Is this one of those, ‘They can neither see nor hear us, John’ things?” I asked.

“Precisely,” she smiled. “We aren’t really here, at least not in a way they can perceive. In fact, this moment is in what you would consider the past since it occurred a few minutes after you stepped through the door.” She gestured at the men. “Go take a look. They can’t hurt you.”

I looked at her, then cautiously back at the men. Every instinct I had screamed for me to run, but I took a deep breath and slid carefully up behind them, holding the pistol low but ready to lift the instant I saw recognition in one of their eyes. No one even glanced at me, though. Their focus was totally on the object hidden by their legs. I slipped up beside them and peered between two heavy shoulders, then did a classic double take as I saw what they’d been staring at.

It was…me. Well, it was me in my guise as Frankie the dishwasher. My hair was dyed dirty blonde and fell around my face. My blank, unseeing eyes were dark blue thanks to tinted contacts, and my face was rounded out with theatrical putty and makeup. That probably doesn’t sound as cool as those full-face prosthetics that you see people wearing in the movies, but those things don’t work. Human faces are incredibly expressive, with lots of tiny muscles that move our skin in minute ways, and those masks don’t move that way. A person wearing even the most high-quality mask looks like, well, a person in a mask. Makeup is a much better way to disguise your face.

“Think it’s really him?” someone spoke up, their voice almost reverent. “The Faceless Man himself?”

“Dunno,” someone else replied. “It could be. Or it could be someone pretending to be him to try and scare off pursuit.”

“He went down awful easy for the Faceless Man,” another voice said dubiously.

“He took out Mike’s whole crew,” another person pointed out.

“Yeah, but if he was the Faceless Man, he’d have taken us all out. I’ve heard stories about this guy. They say he once killed everyone in a nightclub, then burned half the city to the ground to cover his tracks. I don’t think this was him.”

“Do you see?” the old woman spoke up, suddenly standing beside me.

“Is this real?” I asked woodenly, my brain refusing to process what it was seeing. “I’m really…what, am I a ghost, now?”

“No, nothing so simple, John,” she laughed. She waved, and suddenly the rooftop vanished. We stood in the impossible space among purple-black clouds once more.

“What the hell is all this?” I growled. “What did you just show me? How did we see that? What do you want from me?”

“So many questions,” she sighed. “Very well. Have a seat, John, and I’ll explain what I can.”

“A seat?” I looked around, and sure enough, there was a leather armchair behind me that I knew for a fact hadn’t been there a moment ago. I touched it, and it felt completely real, so I eased myself into it gingerly. Something told me that I wanted to be sitting down for this.

I looked back at the woman, and she was seated in a chair similar to mine. I hadn’t seen it appear or her sit down, but my numb brain didn’t even consider those facts extraordinary anymore. I’d seen too many impossibilities for one more to have much effect on me.

“As I said before, John, this is the Nexus,” she said, holding her hands out toward the drifting, twisting staircases that couldn’t exist. “This place allows someone with the skills, knowledge, or sheer dumb luck to traverse the worlds of the Doorverse.”

“You keep talking about that,” I interrupted. “What the hell is a Doorverse?”

“The Doorverse is everything, John. It’s everything that is, was, or will be. It’s every realm, every world, from those that you’d find so familiar you’d wonder if you’d never left Earth to those so alien your mind would shatter just looking at them.”

My confusion must have shown on my face because she sighed again and leaned back in her chair. “Earth scientists have come to the conclusion that their universe is infinite,” she told me. “You know this, yes?” I nodded. “Good. In an infinite universe, anything that can exist, does exist. If it’s possible for it to happen, it does happen. There are only so many ways for particles to come together, and eventually, they’ll do so in every possible combination. Do you follow that?”

“Yes,” I said slowly.

“Imagine, then, that in this infinite universe, there are regions where what you would call physics works in a different fashion. In some places, the differences are so slight you’d never notice them, while in other places, the alterations are extreme to the point that your mind would have trouble recognizing them as being real or understanding them if you saw them. Places where time and gravity have shifted roles, or where energies you’ve never even dreamed of have replaced the forces you know. Can you picture that?”

I could. In my mind, I could see the universe as a kind of patchwork quilt, where each patch had different laws governing it. I seemed to remember that there was math that was supposed to prevent that, but I didn’t really understand why that was so. “I think I’ve got it,” I finally told her.

“That’s not really the case, but it will work,” she said. “All of those pieces of reality, all of those disparate regions flung across infinity, taken together make the Doorverse.”

“Why is it called that?” I asked somewhat petulantly, I have to admit. “That’s kind of a dumb name.”

“It isn’t really called that. It’s not called anything. Every civilization that’s discovered it, that’s found the Nexus, has come up with its own name for it. Most of them can be translated, more or less, into something like ‘Doorverse’, and it’s accurate enough, so it’ll function for our purposes.

“Before you ask why it’s accurate,” she held up a hand to forestall my obvious question, “think about how you left that rooftop, and how you got back here.”

“By going through doors,” I said slowly.

“Exactly.” She gestured around us again. “Every doorway and portal, anywhere in existence, is linked to a place somewhere in the Nexus. A person with the talent or luck can step through a door, pass through the Nexus, and emerge anywhere else in the Doorverse – and any time in the past or future, as well. The Nexus is linked not just to different places, but to different times, as well.”

I considered that concept. “So, is this place the center of the universe?”

“An infinite space has no center, John,” she corrected. “And the Nexus doesn’t exist in a specific place or time. Or, rather, it exists in every place and time at once.” She shook her head. “Don’t worry about the how of it all; it’s beyond your understanding. All that matters is that, through the Nexus, you can travel to infinite worlds and see things that almost no human has ever seen before.”

I sat quietly for a few moments, thinking through what she was saying. “Assuming that I accept what you’re telling me,” I said slowly, “what does this have to do with me? I’m not saying I believe in all this, but even if it’s true, why am I here?”

“You’re here because it was your time to die, John,” she said as calmly as if she’d been talking about the weather. “Nothing you could have done tonight would have prevented that. One way or another, you were going to die, either on that rooftop or in a dark alley somewhere. That death would have been – wasteful.”

She rose to her feet and walked away from me, staring out into the distant clouds. “I’m here to offer you a choice, John. You’re dead. That happened, and it can’t be undone. Your Earth body is deceased, and the only reason you still exist is because you’re in the Nexus. Now, you have to decide what comes next.”

She held up a hand, and one of the staircases twisted around, black onyx steps sliding until they connected to the glass floor beside her. I watched as a plain, wooden door appeared at the top of those stairs. The door was totally nondescript, made of old, gray wood with a tarnished brass doorknob. She reached over and touched one of the stairs.

“Option one. This door will lead you back to Earth the moment of your death. Step through it, and you’ll die. Your soul will move on to whatever awaits it in the afterlife. Choose this, and it will be as if we never met.”

I stared at the door. “Do you…do you know what’s waiting for me?” I asked hesitantly. I knew the answer, of course. I didn’t really believe in God, but I believed in the Devil, and I was sure there was a spot reserved for me in Hell. Sometimes, I thought that was why I refused to admit God existed; oblivion was my best option.

“I can’t tell you that,” she sighed. “It’s forbidden by the Pact. I can’t tell you anything that would interfere with your choice in this matter.”

“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned that,” I noted. “What’s the Pact?”

“The details aren’t important. What matters is that sometimes, under certain specific circumstances, exceptional mortals who are fated for death are given a choice. Someone like me will give them the chance to live a new life, the way I’m giving you that chance. The Pact basically ensures that these mortals act of their own free will and not through coercion or pressure.”

My eyes narrowed. “When you gave me the choice to go through that door on the roof or die, that felt a lot like pressuring me.”

“Was it, though? I simply explained your options, nothing more. The circumstances were something you created, not me, so the pressure was of your own making. You can’t blame me for that.”

I frowned. There was something off about her reasoning, but I couldn’t quite pin it down. I didn’t know that I wanted to, in any case. What she’d done had kept me from dying on that rooftop, in a way. Now, I just needed to know why she’d done it.

“What’s the point?” I asked her. “Why did you come to me, instead of someone else? Thousands of people die each second on Earth alone. So, why me?”

“Because, John, unlike most of those people, you have both the talents I’m looking for and an incredibly dirty record that you may want to try expunging.” She walked back to the chair and sat down, leaning forward and holding up the tablet that had once again materialized in her hand.

“You’ve been what some might call a bad boy, John. As I said, it’s all right here. Every person you’ve killed or tortured for information is listed. Every lie you’ve told, every official you’ve bribed; every person you’ve seduced to get the job done is detailed right here, if you’d care to read it.”

She held out the tablet, and I took it from her. The screen was a list of my crimes, and it was a ridiculously long one. It had everything from the time I cheated on a math test in fifth grade to that bar in Morocco…

“I never killed a man with a dollar bill,” I said, exasperated, as I read that entry. “That’s just a myth!”

“You obviously did, John. It’s right there in front of you. We can go there and relive the moment if you don’t believe me.”

I sighed. Technically, the dollar bill hadn’t killed the man. The dart I’d blown through the dollar bill had done the job thanks to the dose of sarin gel I’d smeared on it. Contrary to movies and the like, though, those little blow darts aren’t very accurate and don’t travel far at all, so I’d had to get right next to the mark to get the needle in far enough to actually inject the toxin. That had started the rumor that I’d killed him with the dollar bill, because I palmed the needle afterward and no one found the tiny puncture wound.

“The point is, there’s a lot of things on that list, John, and what I’m offering you is a chance to wipe that list clean, or at least trim it down some.”

“How?” I asked bluntly.

She leaned back, and suddenly the tablet was in her hand again. “The Doorverse isn’t a very kind or forgiving place,” she told me. “It can be amazing and beautiful, but it can also be deadly and cruel. Many of the Doorworlds are filled with energies you’d consider magic, but as you’ve seen, they can also be filled with monsters – and not just the bestial kind you fought on Lunaya.

“In fact, the Earth Realm is something of an anomaly, not only because it’s a Realm almost devoid of magic, but because it’s one utterly lacking in powerful beasts that prey on humanity. Without those sorts of predators, humans have come to dominate the Earth, but that’s not the case in other Realms. In some, civilization hangs in a precarious balance with the creatures that hunt sapient beings, while in others, that balance has been shattered, and species like humanity exist as cattle or slaves to powerful beasts.”

“Sounds terrible,” I shrugged. “What does it have to do with me?”

“That depends on your choice. You see, John, you can choose to go back to Earth now and die as you were supposed to, or you can join me. I’ll send you out into the Doorverse, to places and times where that balance I was talking about is at the tipping point. Your job will be to fix it, to put the balance back as it should be. By doing so, by saving lives, maybe one day this list I’m holding will be cleared. Or maybe not. As I said, I can’t tell you that one way or the other.”

“So, basically, you want me to keep doing what I used to do – but for your cause,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s not my thing. The last time I killed for someone’s cause was in the Army, and you know how that turned out. I work for my benefit, no one else’s.”

“It’s not quite that simple, though, is it?” she chuckled, glancing at the tablet again. “You won’t take just any contract, John. You’re that classic dichotomy, a killer with a conscience. What is it you always say to justify what you do?”

I sighed. The bitch really did know everything about me. “If I take your contract, you should have known I was coming.”

“Yes, that’s it. You only kill the bad guys, right? Let’s take that last target of yours…”

“Mark,” I corrected.

“I’m sorry?”

“Mark. They’re called marks, not targets. People miss targets. I never miss the mark.”

The woman laughed. “I stand corrected. That last mark of yours. Let’s see…Daquain Lemons, age 47, of Jamaican descent. Supplier and distributor for half the drugs in three states, and a quarter of the narcotics in the Pacific Northwest. Also, a sex trafficker who kidnaps girls and sells them into slavery overseas. What happened there?”

“He took the wrong girl,” I said flatly. “The daughter of someone with enough money and influence to hire me. He knew who she was, too, and thought he was immune to consequences.”

“Obviously, he was wrong, as he’s dead, now.” She looked at me. “That’s what I need, John. I need someone who won’t hesitate to kill, who can do it in multiple ways, but who still has enough understanding of right and wrong to be useful. I need you.”

“So, why try to kill me with those…things?” I asked, leaning forward as my anger flared. “And why mess with my gun? What the hell was that about?”

“As I said, that was an interview,” she shrugged. “I didn’t do anything to your gun; the world you were on did. Lunaya is a world of low magic and even lower technology. In five thousand years of civilization, no nation there has moved past the early medieval period of Earth, technology-wise, because more advanced tech like chemical explosives, electrical power generation, and metallurgy simply won’t work there. The gunpowder in your bullets was nothing more than fancy dirt, there – and the same thing will hold true in most of the Doorworlds, I’m afraid. That was the entire point of that test, in fact.”

I leaned back as understanding filled me. “To see if I could kill without needing the pistol,” I said slowly.

“Not just kill, but kill something stronger and faster than a human. The craven, those creatures you encountered, are empowered by Lunaya’s lesser moon, the purplish one you saw. The larger the moon, the more powerful they are. I sent you to face them when the moon was half its maximum; they were stronger and faster than you, but not by a lot.

“That will be the case in most of the Doorworlds. The things you face will be stronger and faster than humans, and your gun will rarely work against them.”

“So, what the hell’s the point?” I asked in disbelief. “You expect me to knife everything I see to death? I might as well head back to Earth and die quickly instead of being torn to pieces and eaten!”

“There’s no need to be quite so dramatic,” she chuckled. “If you accept my offer, I’ll send you out with the tools you need to do the job – or, at least, the ability to find those tools.” She looked around at the tumbling staircases.

“That’s another thing about the Doorworlds, John. While they can be dangerous, even deadly, traveling them can also bring you great benefits. It can make you stronger, faster, smarter than any human on Earth can imagine. Yes, you’ll face things from your darkest nightmares, but eventually, you can become those things’ nightmare.” She shrugged. “Or you might be eaten alive on your first mission. It depends on you, really.”

I sat quietly, thinking over what she said. From the sound of it, I was going to be some kind of interdimensional clean-up guy. There would be messes on worlds, and I’d be sent to fix them – or at least, to make sure they didn’t get out of hand. That wasn’t that far off from what I’d been doing for years. The old woman was right; I wouldn’t take jobs unless I felt like I was doing the world a service by removing my mark from it. I never got involved in politics, religion, or business. I killed people because they deserved to be killed; they needed it.

“If I say yes, what then?” I asked quietly. “What if I change my mind? Will that door be waiting for me?”

“I’m afraid not,” she shook her head. “If you agree, then that door will be closed to you forever. That moment will be sealed, the choice made.”

“So, if I agree, I’ll never get back to Earth?”

“I didn’t say that. I said that the door leading to whatever is waiting for you now will be closed. There are other doors to Earth, and one day, when your service is complete, you’ll be able to walk through one that takes you home. You’ll get a new body, a new life. But that old life as the Faceless Man, as John Gilliam – that will be gone forever.” She shrugged. “I don’t know how much of a loss you’d count that, to be honest.”

The sad part was, neither did I. I’d entered that world for a reason, but that reason had seemed less and less valid as time passed. Ten years of killing, of becoming one of the most elite assassins on the planet, had disillusioned me to any kind of ideals I might once have had.

Besides, I didn’t need that life. I was rich, with tens of millions of dollars squirreled away in various places around the globe that the greedy government couldn’t touch, all under different names. If I made it back to Earth, free of that old identity, I could live well off that money. I could buy an island somewhere that extradition laws didn’t matter and spend my days sipping cocktails while pretty women waited on me hand and foot. That wouldn’t be a bad way to retire, really.

“What do I do?” I asked at last.

She rose from her chair and reached her hand out toward me. “Just take my hand, John,” she said. “That’s all you have to do, is take my hand.”

I rose slowly to my feet. I knew that this was probably a bum deal, but any way I looked at it, it was better than my other option. Even if this woman was the devil, it didn’t matter. My soul was already damned. And if she was on the level, maybe I could avoid the fate I knew was waiting for me through that plain, wooden door.

And even if I couldn’t…I knew that dream of an island would never materialize. I could have retired years ago, vanished into obscurity, and lived well off my ill-gotten gains. I’d even tried it once or twice. It never took. I wasn’t meant to sit around, watching life go by. I was a man of action; I had to be doing something, or I’d go crazy. This didn’t sound like a great job, but it promised to be interesting if nothing else. I’d hated running through the streets beneath those double moons, but I’d thrilled in it at the same time.

In other words, I was pretty fucked up.

I rose to my feet and extended my hand, taking hers almost gingerly. When nothing happened, I looked at her, puzzled.

“Do you make this choice of your own, free will, John?” she asked me, staring straight into my eyes.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“You have to say it, John. Say that you’re making this choice of your own, free will.”

My suspicions grew, but I brushed them aside. I knew this was a bad idea, but it was a literal case of choosing the devil I didn’t know over the one I did. “Fine. I’m choosing this of my own will.”

“Perfect,” she purred. “Sorry about this in advance, by the way.”

“About wh…?”

My question vanished as her left hand came up, a shape glowing brilliantly on her palm. She gripped my hand hard, then pressed that palm up against my chest. The moment her hand touched me, a scream tore its way out of my mouth. Fire burrowed into my chest, filling my heart and burning its way slowly into my lungs. I could feel the fire worming slowly through my chest, rising up toward my neck and sinking down into my legs. It was agony, torment worse than anything I’d ever experienced. My body was liquefying, my blood boiled in my veins. As the fire flowed up into my face, my eyes burst in their sockets, and my teeth shattered in my clenched jaw. My bones melted, and my skin blistered and peeled off me in long strips.

Then the fire reached my brain, and I realized that what I’d felt to that point was just a warmup. The whole world went red with agony. The pain blinded me, stole my hearing, ripped away any sensation except anguish. The pain was all that existed in my world. I realized that I’d been tricked; the woman was the Devil, and I’d just been sent to Hell. I couldn’t imagine an eternity like this, but that was my fate…

As swiftly as the pain rose in me, it drained away. The fire receded from my mind, crawled back up my limbs, and sank down into my heart. I could feel it curled up within me, nestled in the center of my chest, no longer blindingly painful but a pleasant warmth. The sudden lack of agony drained my strength, and as the woman released my hand, I sank down onto my knees. Tears streamed from my eyes as I sobbed openly, weeping like a child, uncaring that the old lady was watching.

As I knelt there, a flicker appeared in my vision, a shimmer of energy that looked like a shadow flitting across my sight. The shadow vanished, then reappeared, darker this time, more solid. It shimmered, turning into a rectangle of black onyx that gleamed in my vision. I shut my eyes, not caring what it was, but the box was still there, hanging in my sight despite my attempts to avoid it. I blinked, but the rectangle remained; I turned my head, and it stayed squarely in the center of my vision.

“What the hell?” I asked, falling onto my ass and scooting backward. The shape remained planted in my vision, and as I stared at it, silvery letters started to appear in it as if written by an unseen hand.

Neural Network…Initializing…Done.

Analyzing New Subject…Done.

Mapping Neural Pathways…Done.

Assimilation Complete.

Congratulations, Wanderer!

Your System Adaptive Realm Avatar is fully assimilated and ready for use.

Welcome to the Doorverse!