The shelter near the Highnds Quincunx was an honest-to-god geodesic dome of gss, each triangur panel protected by a simple radial design of metal.

  This world being what it was, the colour of the metal shaded gently through a pastel spectrum, making the whole thing rather resemble a sci-fi soap bubble.

  “Well, that’s pretty,” I said.

  “And comfortable, and safe,” Serru said. “Zanshe and I have camped here before, even through a snowstorm or two.”

  “We’ll be fine here,” Zanshe said cheerfully. “Serru and Terenei can go retrieve the ornithians and bring them back here, and it’s all easy from then on. You’ll be out of the Highnds in a cycle and down in the nice gentle civilized Midnds.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “I haven’t decided yet. I think I might come along, though. Maybe I’ll be useful. Maybe I just want to see how this ends. Maybe I like the company.”

  “Or all of them?” I asked, smiling.

  “Or that.”

  “You still have lots of daylight,” Serru said. “I’ll walk you to where the turnoff is, then come back. Terenei and I can leave in the morning. I’d rather spend a night at the farm than camping.”

  I nodded, cimed a few hugs and gave Myu a scritch under her chin, and fell into step beside Serru along the road. The others vanished inside the soap-bubble shelter.

  I ran down a quick mental checklist. I was human form. I had my bag, and it held anything I might need for a few days even if something happened, although not a communicator because that wouldn’t work in the Quincunx. I was dressed for this, with my long-sleeved shirt and sweater and jacket, and I could swap to my long weatherproof coat if I needed to. I could handle being on my own for a couple of cycles.

  “I wonder what this one’s going to do to me,” I said. “And what kind of skill set could possibly fit with the others.”

  “I don’t know. Jotuns are obviously the most common in the Highnds, so it might be a jotun form. Lmids are also fairly common, like cervids in the Forest and centaurs on the Grassnds. There are others, but I only know them by name. Most of my family is in the Midnds where I grew up and spills a short way into the Grassnds and Forest, and my grandmother who taught me is from the deeper Forest. I’m much more familiar with that half of the map. Having near-family in Coppersands and then Jaelis made the Shallows more accessible, and Zanshe obviously gave me the Highnds, but those are still areas I’m less at home in.”

  “And yet you can track underground caves by vegetation on the surface.”

  “That’s just understanding how pnts grow and what they need. It isn’t specific to the Highnds.” Was she blushing? She just might be. It probably wasn’t exertion, although the road did have a bit of an upwards incline.

  “Just as well having Zanshe around, then. If you aren’t back yet, maybe she can help me figure it out when I show up confused and disoriented and can’t remember who I am.”

  “You always know who you are. What you are is not the same thing.”

  “True.”

  We let the conversation drop. There really wasn’t anything to add except specution, and we’d been over it all before.

  Finally, we reached the familiar square pilrs. Much taller even than Zanshe at three to four meters. As big around at chest-height as I could reach in centaur form, but narrowing gradually upwards. Each with the five bck dots, in this case with the red dot at the top.

  “Right,” I said. “Here we go again. One step closer and all that stuff.”

  She id a hand on my shoulder, and leaned in to kiss my cheek. “You’ll be fine. You always are. Come back to the shelter when you’re done. Even if Terenei and I aren’t back yet, that’s where we’ll be going and it’s a good, visible pce to meet up. For real, this time.”

  “Got it. See you in two or three cycles.” I took a deep breath, and stepped past the pilrs, following the narrow track. It was wide enough for a jotun to walk along comfortably, and sometimes wide enough for two to pass each other. Not ideal, but I could live with it. I had a whole new appreciation for the value of roads and tracks and paths in the Highnds rather than cross-country. In the quiet, I discovered that I was humming the Csh’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’. That seemed appropriate.

  As usual with the Highnds, the track tended to run along edges—often with a steep upwards slope on one side and a precarious drop on the other. That made it hard to see what was ahead.

  So I really wasn’t expecting to come around a curve and find one of the occasional twisty gnarled trees growing on the outer edge, with a felid perched in it.

  I paused. “Uh, are you all right? What are you doing in a tree alone in the Highnds a long way from anything?” That sentence just got more arming as I added concerns to it.

  The felid, a rather pretty tortoiseshell, her mid-length coat a mingling of orange and bck but her throat and the end of her tail white, gnced down. “I live there.” She gestured so vaguely that it could have meant anything. “I’m thinking.”

  “Can I help? Why don’t you come down, and we can sit down and have a snack and you can tell me what you’re thinking about.” Did people ever get self-destructive impulses here? Would knowing you’d come back make it more or less likely someone upset might do something drastic? “I’m not from around here and I still have a walk ahead of me alone. I’d love some company for a few minutes.”

  The felid considered that, then sighed, nodded, and climbed agilely down, hopping the st of the distance with typical feline poise. “All right. There’s a ft bit further around the curve.”

  Sure enough, there was, and the shape of the rocks made a convenient bench of sorts for us to sit on. I fished around in my bag for anything a felid would like.

  “Sorry, my friends have the cold bag with the good stuff in it. I have... all the travel bars you could want of multiple kinds, and a few baked goodies, and a bit of a rather hard cow cheese...” I handed her that st. “Oh, and this. These are great.” I also passed her one of Charlisa’s pastries, one designed for felids, creamy and savoury and umami. I took out a sweeter pastry for myself, mostly just to keep her company.

  “Thank you.”

  “Want to talk about whatever you were thinking about? Sometimes a stranger is a good person to tell. I don’t know who you are so I’m not going to be telling anyone else.” I was increasingly certain that she was quite young—not a child, but maybe te teens, or whatever the felid equivalent was. Did they age at the same rate?

  She pondered that, then sighed. “I want to be a warden.”

  “That’s a pretty challenging job, but it has lots of rewards, and wardens are important. Is there a reason not to?”

  “My best friend is a jotun. He wants to be a warden too. And he’ll be good at it. He’s big and he’s strong. He can rescue people if they’re in an accident. That’s an important thing for wardens in the Highnds. I’m a lot smaller than a jotun or a lmid and that’s most of the people in the Highnds. I can’t rescue them. My friend says I’m just a felid and I’m a girl and I shouldn’t try to be a warden. I should learn healing or alchemy. Or become a town clerk. Or both. And I know some healing already. But that isn’t what I want to do.”

  I thought about that, chewing on a bite of pastry. Something in that nagged at me as out of pce, but I couldn’t spot it immediately. I’d track it down ter.

  “Being big isn’t everything, though. Being small and agile can be really useful for rescues, especially if you’re working with a team. A jotun partner would be able to lower you down into some pretty tight or awkward spaces so you can do medical treatment, right? You can get in where they can’t. If there was a rockfall with people trapped, you could get through a much smaller space to help while others keep clearing the fall so they can do the next part of the rescue. A fast agile small scout can be incredibly valuable in a bad situation. Maybe you could focus on that. Teams don’t need everyone to have the same skills. They need different skills and different perspectives.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I promise, I know what I’m talking about. I’m a paramedic, and I’ve done medical care in emergencies lots of times.”

  “Yeah, but you’re tall and strong.”

  Well, somewhere between a felid and a jotun, anyway.

  “I’ll tell you a secret. I’m a newcomer. I’m visiting the Quincunx sites in hopes of getting home to my world and my family. Each site has given me a new set of skills that come with a new form and one of those is a felid.”

  Her eyes widened. “Can you show me?”

  “Probably not this close to the Quincunx.” I tried bringing up my dispy, but just got a few fuzzy and useless white lines. “Nope. No magic until I’m done. Sorry. But I did help rescue a friend who fell down a hole in the Shallows, and my felid form was the best one for the job.”

  That felt like it had happened about a year ago. In actual fact, it had probably been something like a month. Serru’s original estimate of how long it would take us to reach all the sites had seemed like forever at the time; it wasn’t her fault things kept happening.

  “You did? Can you tell me?”

  It wasn’t getting me any closer to the site, but I wasn’t going to just abandon her. She really needed a bit of a pep talk. Presumably even here, people could make bad choices they’d struggle to correct ter.

  “Sure. I’m not a storyteller like my friend, though.”

  I did my best to give her the whole tale. I added that Aryennos was prone to accidents and included shorter versions of the river rescue and the lindwurm cave before getting to the sinkhole.

  She was about the best audience I could ask for, listening intently and reacting with gasps and happy sounds at appropriate moments.

  When I finished with Aryennos and I both on solid ground, she cheered.

  “I never could have reached him in any other form,” I said. “And it was a crowded space to work in. And in any other form, I almost certainly would have died from that fall. I haven’t really been trained in warden and rescue skills, either. It could have gone better if I had, and I learned some things from that.”

  Slowly, she nodded. “I think you’re right. Being small and female and felid might actually be a really useful thing. Thank you.” She licked crumbs off her fingers and stood up. “Good luck with your journey. I hope it takes you somewhere you’ll be happy.”

  “I hope so too. Can you get home safely?”

  “Oh, yes, no need to worry about that. It isn’t far.” Tail waving, she strolled away along the road, back in the direction I’d come from, out of sight almost immediately.

  Well, that had been odd.

  I had a drink from my water gourd, then stood up and got on my way.

  The path arced into the cliff, but there was an open ft area there, a perfect circle ringed by absolutely vertical walls. The path in was fnked by two head-height rough-cut stones that were not clones, and beyond them was a circle of the same, and a familiar structure of ft stones forming three walls and a roof.

  There it was.

  I crossed the ft ground and descended the stairs into the gloom. That wasn’t without a twinge of nerves, considering my recent experience with being underground, but I needed this.

  It went down, and then up, and stopped at unfinished stone.

  Speak your goal and enter. Pass this door and be forever changed.

  That didn’t really even come close to being an adequate warning, but then, what would be?

  I id a hand in the appropriate space. “I have to do everything I can to get home to my family.”

  The rock tilted, giving me access to the doorway at the top of the slope.

  I’d seen curtains of glittery beads, of flowering vines, of small metal disks. This one was simply chains, half the diameter of my thumb, bck and bronze and pewter.

  I parted them and stepped inside.

  The others had themes like gold and light, nature and pnts, silver and gss. The theme here seemed to be iron and pragmatism. Bronze and pewter also made frequent appearances. The floor was tiled in terracotta of multiple shades in no particur pattern and with no softening rugs; the furniture upholstery looked like leather in various rusty and dark achromatic colours. Decoration was sparse.

  In the centre was a pedestal that looked like one solid piece of cast iron.

  I approached the pedestal, stepping onto the only rug in the pce, one that felt too thick to be the single yer of woven wool it looked like. Since this would presumably end with me passing out, that was a thoughtful touch. I’d barely recovered from my st concussion.

  In the centre was a little alcove in which a tiny sun burned.

  And in front of it was an honest-to-god touchscreen.

  On it, near the top with plenty of space beneath, rge bck text said:

  2 + 1 + 1 + 2 +1 =

  I looked at it in confusion for a few heartbeats. This was the test? A math problem that wouldn’t even be hard enough to qualify as a skill-testing question in a contest?

  With a finger, I traced out a rge 7 on the screen.

  More text appeared.

  Correct. I would also have accepted Friendship as an answer.

  You already proved your willingness to take risks to help someone in danger. You get a pass on that one.

  See you at the Axis, Nathan.

  Before I could even start to figure out how to process that, the bck bars drew back, freeing the tiny sun to drift towards me.

  I’d done this before. Three times. I could do this.

  I reached out a hand towards it.

  It grounded itself through me, and I watched my hand start to glow from within. Not gold, not peachy, not blue-white, but deep ruby red. It felt briefly cold, but as it spread it warmed up, like a rub for tight muscles. As with the others, it grew and expanded, filling every cell of space within me, crowding out thought and apprehension.

  And, finally, awareness.