-Chapter Fifteen-

This time, Karlene stayed put in the cabin. Even though she had the shiny new equivalent of a don’t-touch sign, she didn’t feel like running into anyone who would feel the need to search for said sign.

She spent some time cleaning up the pillows and blankets so she wouldn’t trip, then plopped down in the middle of the giant bed and dumped out the bulging satchel of books.

As eager as she was to see if there was any useful information in them, once they were spread out in front of her she just stared at their tooled leather covers and gold leaf titles.

The titles she could read, despite having never learned the language. If she focused, she could recognize that one of the sigils that represented the sound ‘dee’ wasn’t actually the letter ‘D’ she knew.

“Nothing here makes sense,” she muttered to herself. Ships and men that flew when they shouldn’t, blood that powered interdimensional voodoo circles...

No, not voodoo circles; keyholes. She’d need to start using the correct terms for things

Karlene returned her attention to the books. Even if she didn’t understand how -yet- she recognized a gift horse when she saw one, and resolved to just be grateful she could read the language at all.

The book closest to her, A Study of Gateways and Their Uses, Vol. 1, by Estiel Adoxacles, looked the smallest, so she started with that one.

Five pages in, and Karlene realized she was holding a new weapon; not because the knowledge it contained, but because of its lethal levels of asinine superiority. The author was a smart cookie, and he knew it. Had known it? Was he still alive? How old were these books, anyway? Was she reading the equivalent of a medical text from the eighteen hundreds, the kind that would advise about wandering wombs and the risks of blindness associated with masturbation?

At least the topic itself was interesting. It was like a whole new version of physics. It seemed she’d picked a good book to start with; it was a ‘droplings and keyholes for dummies’ type, and the first chapter broke down the major components of the runic circles, as Karlene had called them. They were the part of the whole system called keyholes. The blood of a human/enochian hybrid -more commonly referred to as droplings- acted as both the key and the energy needed to turn said key.

The hole in the fabric between dimensions was referred to as the Gate, or Gateway, and the pathway between Gates -between worlds- was called a Corridor.

So far so good, the terms made sense and the basics were easy to follow, in a someone-must-have-made-this-up sort of way. Moreso than some other stuff she’d learned in Physics 101, anyway.

Once she got past the basic breakdowns, however, things got...complicated. Basic descriptions and illustrations that were more artful than explanatory gave way to charts and graphs, signs and sigils she didn’t recognize and that didn’t translate themselves. Through context and inference, she figured these alien symbols were to the science of ‘corridor travel’ as the eternity and pi signs were to mathematics.

‘People smarter than me,’ Sid had said when referring to who it was that charted the different pathways.

“Smarter than me, too, apparently,” Karlene muttered to herself.

She had been hoping she’d be able to figure out how to just draw her own keyhole, knick a vein, and send own self home. And while she could do steps A and B from the book’s instructions, it was step C -the important step- that was the question. Without knowing certain things, certain very specific things, any keyhole she drew would be as likely to send her to Pluto, or empty space, or the middle of a star as a nice, safe street corner on Earth.

Axion found her splayed out on her back, A Study of Gateways and Their Uses, Vol. 1 open to page 234 and laid pages-down over her face, mumbling obscenities to herself.

“I, too, have often longed to curse the long-winded Master Adoxacles,” he said, and the words were mumbled oddly enough to make Karlene tilt her head up. The book slid down off her eyes and nose, and she peered at Axion over the leather edge.

“Food?” she asked in an unabashedly imploring way.

“Food,” Axion confirmed, clearly mocking her monosyllabic inquiry. Still, he was smiling, and that was something. His mumbling had been due to having a large piece of fruit held between his teeth.

Even though she’d eaten earlier, she was starving again. She supposed it was a side effect of all the running and nearly dying she’d been doing, but she couldn’t recall having been this hungry this often in a while. Axion apparently was of a mind with hers, as the platter he’d brought was piled high.

“It’s not cridolains or your ‘monkey bread,’ but this will have to tide us over until we reach the capital.”

“‘We’ as in, you and your boyfriend? Or, ‘we’ as in you, your boyfriend, all his slaves and rapey pirates, and me?”

Axion frowned and paused in the middle of the act of laying the platter on the bed.

“If you’re trying to figure out which part of that to answer first, the correct one would be ‘where you plan on taking me.’ Or dumping me. Whichever.”

“You already know this- Cloudhold.”

Karlene sat up and caught the book as it fell down to her lap, then reached for the platter Axion had set down.

“Yeah, but where? Capitals are, in my experience, big places. I need to know how to get around.”

Frowning, Axion sat down beside her.

A memory brushed the surface of her mind. Another time he’d come to sit at her side in a bed, another time a tray of food had been forthcoming. She suppressed a shudder, determined not to think of Diom anymore than she had to, and grabbed a fat grape from the platter to stuff in her mouth. Chewing gave her face something to do other than crying.

“Leontis already told you,” Axion said. He reached for another grape. “You will be given-”

“A sum of currency once we reach...Hysterix? Hesterville?”

“Hesteroix.” Axion sighed.

“Where is that, exactly?”

“The capital.”

“Of?”

“Odriax.”

“Which is?”

“The crowning gem of Enoi.”

“Enoi being the planet?”

“The planet, also the empire.”

“You named your empire the same as the whole planet? Don’t the other nations think that’s a bit...pompous?”

Axion tore of a piece of flaky bread that smelled like a bearclaw dipped in a goddamn rainbow. Karlene grabbed the rest of his loaf. If his highness wanted more, he could have his servants bake it for him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Other nations? There is only the empire, and it’s provinces.”

Karlene stared at him, buttery pastry forgotten. Axion reached over and took it back.

“You’re kidding. That...doesn’t seem possible. Earth history is crammed full of empires and kingdoms and countries merging and splitting again and again.”

“For as long as history has been recorded, Enoi has always just been… Enoi.”

Karlene didn’t say it out loud, but her red, white, and blue heart firmly believed she was hearing some sort of edited version of history. She was pretty sure there were some totalitarian governments in Earth’s history that had also doctored certain accounts to make it seem as if theirs was the eternal, the true way. She had seen nothing of Enoi to make her think its people, its rulers, were exempt from that kind of hubris.

“In answer to your real question, you may go wherever you like. We won’t force you to stay with us, and the funds you’ll receive will more than cover the cost of a guide. History teachers too, if you like.”

“Well, that’s...nice,” she said.

“Nice? Most tal’hozi sign on to work for the one who granted them their als’canil,” Axion told her. “Leontis letting you run off? That would look bad for him.”

“My sorrow abounds,” she said flatly. “Look, Axion, it’s not that I’m not grateful for...all of this…” she gestured limply to the books, the food, the protected letter in its leather wrapping. “But where I come from? I mean specifically, the continent I’m from? Slavery hasn’t been a thing in a long, long time. And it’s still a topic that can get tempers riled, so... so this gratitude you seem to think I’m falling short on? It’s hard for me to feel grateful for being given something that was never anyone else’s to give. I belong to myself, end of story.”

She glanced over at Axion. He wasn’t looking at her, but instead was frowning pensively at the last bit of the bearclaw. Needing something to do to fill the awkward silence following her little rant, she reached over and took it back, again, and popped it directly into her mouth.

Absently, Axion lifted the hand that had been holding the buttery treat, and brought his thumb to his mouth to capture the crumbs caught in a smear of honey.

Oh, that’s not fair, Karlene thought, and made herself look away. Serious Social Rights conversations were definitely not the right place for hormones to chime in.

“I was selected from a collection of specially vetted youths when I was eight,” he said suddenly. “Myself, and three others. We were given to the care of the King’s High General, who trained us for the next ten years.”

Oh….kay? Karlene hadn’t meant to instigate a you tell me yours I’ll tell you mine session, but information was information.

Besides, she’d be lying if she’d told herself she wasn’t acutely curious.

“The king? The letter called Leontis a prince.”

“King Arcestien is Leontis’s father, yes.”

“Of course he is,” Karlene sighed. She made a ‘continue’ motion when Axion looked at her oddly.

“When we finished our training, one of us was deemed insufficient, and was sent home. The other three of us were assigned to Leontis as guards. Over a period of five years, we four were to test our compatibility. At the end of those five years, Leontis chose me.”

“And...the other three?”

“Executed, of course.”

“What?” Karlene shoved away from him on the bed, jostling the platter hard enough to send a few grapes bouncing across the bedspread. “You’re not serious.”

Axion flung his head back, and laughed. The motion did strange things to the column of his throat. Strange things that Karlene, resolutely, did not notice.

“No, I am not serious. They, too, were sent home to their families for a time, then given respectable positions worthy of their training, elsewhere.” He scooped up some of the grapes in a loose fist, and popped one whole into his mouth.

“Your world is weird,” Karlene muttered, and reached for the last fat grape. Seriously, the grapes were the size of plums.

“If you yourself are a reference, your world would be no less strange to me,” he replied.

“So you believe me? Again? First pizza and hotdogs convince you, now it’s my anti-slavery view?”

“No, this time it was your clear disbelief in a global empire.” His lips quirked. “Plus, you didn’t know Cloudhold and Hesteroix are the same place.”

Karlene shrugged. “Global empires are one of those things that only exists in fantasy books and space opera movies. No matter where you go, people are people, and people like to fight.”

“True enough, I suppose,” Axion sighed, and stood. He kept his back to her as he looked out the porthole at the blue expanse of the sky.

“I will help you,” he declared.

Karlene sat up a bit straighter.

“Huzzah for pizza and Abraham Lincoln,” she murmured. Then louder, “Great. What will that entail, exactly? Obviously I can supply the blood, and give me a few days of reading up and I can probably even draw the keyhole, but I still need to know the, uh…” She reached for the book, flipped to a page. “The cross-spectral designation of the embarkation point’s nexus, and the… Oh, hell, I can’t pronounce half of this. The, uh…”

A hand slipped over the page she was trying to read, the wide palm hiding the entire paragraph and then some. He pushed the book down and out of the way.

“Excuse you, I’m reading that.”

“I will help you get home, Karlene. Finding the exact coordinates of the world your kidnappers took you from will take time, however. There are countless variations of the worlds closest to ours, and not even all of those are catalogued. Diom’s people likely used the less frequented corridors, which means it will take that much longer to find yours.”

“But? I’m hearing a but. Please let there be a but.”

Axion removed his hand, and one corner of his mouth quirked. “But,” he said with emphasis. “You and I will be returning with detailed inside knowledge of Diom’s operation and his people. Once they are captured and brought to the Emperor’s justice, I think I could manage to have the information we need be part of a plea deal. For Sid and his ilk, they are low enough on the roster I think it would work.”

“So, that’s great and all, really great…”

“But?” He said, and the other side of his mouth quirked up, too.

“But, weren’t you just planning on letting me wander off once we arrived? My ‘detailed inside knowledge’ can’t be that valuable. I was only with them for a few days, you were with them for a lot longer.”

“Actually, it is that valuable. That’s what I was coming to get from you.” From his back pocket, Axion pulled a leather bound notebook. A cloth-wrapped stick of charcoal was attached to it by a leather thong.

Flying machines and interdimensional travel, but their writing technology still involved burnt, sharpened sticks. Go figure.

Axion reclined on the bed next to her, flipped to the first blank page, readied his stylus, and raised an eyebrow at her.

“So,” he began. “How did you come to be acquainted with Diom?”