Thresholder

My first world, my home world, I’m not going to tell you about. It’s painfully boring, and kind of personal, so we’re skipping that one, thanks. I had a career there, the kind of job that people say ‘oh, that’s a good job, you’ve done well for yourself’, but not the kind of job that parents brag about to the other churchgoers. I had a life there, a boyfriend of four years who didn’t think of himself as the marrying type, a cat who hated me, and an apartment with blessedly thick walls, earthquake proof. I was close to the metro, which was nice.

I didn’t go through the portal right away. It took me about forty-five minutes. It had appeared inside my apartment, scaring the crap out of me, but I sort of knew what it was, not in the specifics, but at least in the general sense. Since it was staying open, I took my time, and wrote some notes to people in case I wasn’t coming back. I packed for a long trip with my hard-shell rolling suitcase and a backpack, food and water stuffed inside.

I’d felt kind of ‘meh’ about my life. I spent a lot of time at work, then a lot of time decompressing from work, and I was happy enough, but there had been some stuff going on that was making me think about who I was and where I belonged in the world. Turns out, I didn’t belong in the world at all.

The first world I arrived in was a desert world. I actually saw a map of it two months in, and it turned out that it wasn’t only desert, but by that point I’d been thinking of it as desert as far as the eye could see for so long that hearing about forests and mountains and tropics somewhere else didn’t seem real.

The first shock was that everyone looked like me. They weren’t clones or anything, but the place I came from, I wasn’t in the majority, not by a long, long shot. I could blend in sometimes, pass, but people would sometimes just straight up tell me that I had an unusual look to me. This world, it was like we all came from the same nation, and I guess I have to explain that I’ve got mixed parentage, mom from one part of the world, dad from the other. People complimented me on it sometimes, which I always thought was a little gross. This desert world though, I blended in really, really well, better than I did in my own world, except for the fact that I was dragging a suitcase with wheels through the desert sands. The cheap plastic wheels gummed up almost immediately.

When I came through, I was on top of the dunes, and had to trudge through them toward an oasis on the horizon I worried was a mirage. I always expect deserts to be hot, but this one was mild, and stayed pretty mild the whole time I was there, the nights not all that much colder than the days. The closer I got, the more I realized that I was in a weird fantasy land, some place like from the books I’d read as a child. The oasis had lots of buildings around it, tall phallic ones and domes at the base that looked like balls. I found out later that was on purpose, a deliberate invocation of ‘fertility’, but it was hardly the weirdest thing I’d see there.

The first thing I noticed was how many homeless people there were. The world I come from, or I guess the city I came from, had a lot of homeless people, but this was different, partly because there were more of them, partly because every single one I saw seemed strung out or high out of their minds. Most were naked, or only barely clothed. I stepped around them, kept my eyes focused elsewhere, and made sure that I could grab my knife out of my purse. I’d been short on weapons in my apartment, but I had more than a few knives.

I got a room at an inn by trading away one of the shirts in my suitcase. I’d end up regretting that later, since I hadn’t known just how valuable my clothes were. Textiles are like gold in a lot of places, and if I’ve got time with a portal, I’ll grab stuff to wear before heading through. For the shirt that I traded away, I should have had a place to stay for a month, but I’d only bought myself a night.

I felt awkward and out of place for a few days, then traded away more of my clothes at a market to get something like what the locals wore. That helped a lot, and after that I was in business, able to make deals easier, feeling more at home. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was enjoying myself, even though I was worried about my dwindling stash of supplies I’d taken with me. It was a fucking adventure, a shake-up, a very rewarding mid-life crisis even though I was a bit young for that.

Four days in, something happened that I’d been preparing for since grade school: someone offered me free drugs. He was the shadiest of shady guys, hunched slightly like his shoulders were going to hide him from the cops, and he had a leer on his face as he explained that the sticky brown tar he’d rolled in a ball between his fingers would give me pleasure beyond dreams.

I declined. Going through a portal in my apartment was one thing, but free drugs was something else entirely. Back in my home world I’d stayed more or less clean, aside from some light binge drinking, getting high on the weekends, and a few times I’d taken unmarked pills at parties, or a few marked pills from friends, and snorted some things.

Turns out, almost all the people I’d thought were homeless were using drugs of one kind or another, but they were magic drugs, ones that could bliss a person out for a month, a year, maybe more. They’d feel no need to eat, no need to sleep, or maybe would drift in and out of sleep, and stay in a kind of stasis while they had their pleasure. It depended on which of the drugs they were on, but there was a reason that there were so damned many of these people lining the streets. The city was like a ghost town sometimes, too many people having taken the drugs.

And of course, once the high was over, they’d be looking for their next fix, but often they had nothing to their name, not even clothes. The solution was usually to get them another hit so they could slump by a doorstep and not bother anyone, which wasn’t really a solution at all. They’d built a house for them a few decades prior, a place where the dreamers could be stacked up like bones in a catacomb, but it had filled up, and no one wanted to do the hard work of moving bodies, especially when those bodies would sometimes ‘dream walk’ in the middle of their high, going back to line the streets.

I’m going to tell you about my job in my home world now, and it’s lame, but you said that you were a geography student, so I still win this one: I was in marketing.

Naturally, I found myself a job at a sign shop. I knew a little bit of graphic design, enough to get annoyed by how poorly a lot of people do it, and I made some marked improvements in how things were run, at least in my opinion. I had kind of thought that was how my new life was going to be, that I’d given up my old life for this new one, and that was that. It wasn’t so bad a trade, even with all the ‘dreamers’ laying down on the streets. You got used to ignoring them.

That quiet period didn’t end up lasting all that long though.

My counterpart was out of place. I, however, was dressed like the natives, looked like the natives, which probably saved my life. He was a tall guy, someone who probably would have looked handsome if he wasn’t so damned angry. He had a pistol and was waving it around the place, which no one was really reacting to because they had no idea what a pistol was. He swept it through the marketplace, finger on the trigger. His whole getup screamed military to me, or wannabe military maybe, a tactical vest with all kinds of pouches, a buzz cut, camo pants that didn’t camouflage him at all in the colorful urban environment.

He was after me, I knew that in my bones, so I made my escape with the other people who seemed like they didn’t want to deal with a guy shouting in the marketplace.

I started sharpening my knife.

There weren’t that many places to stay at the oasis. I had a room with the sign-maker, an older woman who was missing her daughter, but there weren’t really much in the way of hotels, and the other guy — his name turned out to be Gunther — had to stay at one of them. He didn’t want to fit in, do the work of integration, that kind of thing, which I understand a lot more now. I figured it was only a matter of time before he found me, given how strange my appearance from over the horizon with the rolling suitcase had been, so I did my best to find him.

He shot the man I’d sold my suitcase to. When the police came to arrest him, he shot them too. I guess once he realized that no one was going to stop him, he decided he was going to start making demands. He turned the hotel into a fortress and waved the gun around like it was a magic wand, which it kind of was. He didn’t have to work, not when he was threatening to kill random people, and he kept asking for me, which eventually led to me being found by some of the locals.

I stabbed a guy in the neck. I guess he’d looked at me and thought that I would be easy to grab and subdue. The other one got that same knife deep in his guts, and took a longer time to die. The sign-maker’s spare room was stained with blood, which dripped down onto signs in the room below.

The sign-maker, this old lady, hugged me close. I guess she thought that I was traumatized, but really, I was feeling good — accomplished. I was high on adrenaline, shaking, but those guys had come for me, hoping that their new warlord would reward them, and I ended them.

The old lady liked that, I guess. Her daughter wasn’t dead, she had blissed out, decided that happiness was worth a loss of agency, and if I was an adoptive daughter, then I was one who was rising to challenges rather than saying I couldn’t take it and going into an endless dream. She liked it even more when I said that I was going to kill Gunther.

I guess I need to get into more biography stuff here. When I was fifteen, the world turned into a more dangerous place for me and my family. My dad bought a gun, then bought a gun for me, and helped train me how to use it at the same time he was learning on his own. He explained that it was my duty to protect myself, to shoot someone if they were going to shoot me. Mom didn’t like it, but she didn’t stop it, and I always thought he was in the right.

I’d always had a streak running through me, a feeling that some people needed to die. I’d get so angry sometimes, angry at people, at the world, stuff like that. Some horrible guy would die, and people would say ‘well, we should show some respect in death’, and nah, I never felt that. I kept it to myself most of the time, never said out loud ‘hell yeah, piss on his grave’, but I felt it, both with the living and the dead. The world I lived in, it was a peaceful one, overall, even if it wasn’t all that great a place to live some of the time. There wasn’t much killing, except sometimes by the police.

I guess I never understood why so many problems seemed like they could be solved with a single well-placed bullet, yet weren’t. I wasn’t the one stepping up, but it felt like someone should. There were public figures who were objectively terrible people, yet nothing ever happened to them, no justice, not from the law, nor from the public. Millions of people might hate a man, despise him down to their bones, and he’d walk freely through the city streets.

All of that is a long way of saying that when I needed to kill someone, I felt like it had been a long time coming.

The sign-maker had something she’d kept in reserve, a bottle of magical sand from a holy place in the desert. She insisted that I eat the sand, that it would give me power, and I downed what felt like a pound of the stuff but was really probably just three mouthfuls. I was getting the grit out of my teeth for the next few days, but the upshot was that I could make the ground beneath me bouncy. It wasn’t a great get, as powers went, but it comes in handy from time to time.

In the middle of the night, I bounced up to the fifth floor, the top of the hotel, past all the guards he had stationed around the place. There were no streetlights, since these people were using torches if anything, and I was silent as a whisper, bringing a knife to a gunfight.

He had the balcony open, mostly because they didn’t have much in the way of glass windows or screens. I came into his room with the cool breeze, moving slowly. The knife was a chef’s knife from my kitchen, the kind with patterns of banding from layered steel, because that’s the kind of thing you buy when you have a ‘good job’ and no time to cook. Gunther was asleep in his bed, and I crept over and slit his throat without so much as a pause for breath.

His throat exploded into mushrooms, orange ridged with black, and he woke up instantly, grasping at where the knife had slid through. He was choking for breath but very clearly not dying, so I stabbed him in the stomach a few times, which caused more mushrooms to sprout up there as he writhed around. I was in a panic, since the mushroom thing hadn’t even remotely been on my radar, and eventually I realized that I should go for his gun. I had no idea where it was, but after a moment to think, I decided it would be close by, stuck my hand under his bloody pillow, and felt my fingers touch metal.

Once I had the gun, I shot him in the head, which only caused more mushrooms to come out of him, spilling across the bed and onto the walls where bits of his brain had landed. He was moving though, and when I shot him a second time it didn’t seem any more successful than the first. My ears were ringing, and I thought he would come to his senses soon enough, so I grabbed the gun, the knife, and threw myself out the window, bouncing on the ground so the fall wouldn’t kill me. I was lucky that I didn’t cut myself with the knife though.

Look, we’ve got seven of these to go through, but this one was important, as I think first worlds probably all are for our kind. I was learning the ropes, adjusting to the new way of life, shocked by what was new and different. I’m pretty sure it was Gunther’s second world, maybe third, given how he was looking for me practically from the start. I didn’t know what the rules were, or even that there were rules, except that we were both clearly from somewhere else, even if I did fit in better.

Since the knife and gun hadn’t worked, I started planning other ways of killing him. There was a bit there where I worried that he was simply immortal, but the next time I saw him, he was looking worse for the wear, mushrooms visible as a ring around his neck and a huge one that had blossomed out of the back of his skull and gripped his head like a bucket hat. His speech was slightly slurred, and if they had shown him some undue deference once he’d demonstrated the gun, they were practically cowering once he became ol’ mushroom head.

We fought twice more, and I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but the first time was out in the desert, an encounter that I only barely bounced away from. I had been out there seeking a flower that could be used to attack with flame and acid, the kind of odd, low key magic that the world had in short supply. Gunther had followed me and was pissed, especially when I made fun of his mushroom head, and he hit me hard enough to break a rib. He got the better of me, mostly because I didn’t have the tools to kill him, but I escaped with the flower, and a few days later I was ready.

Once the flower was prepared, I only had one shot at it. I went invisible: I disguised myself as one of the dreamers, dirty and half-naked, pretending that I was in my bliss and blind to the world. I got him good, from close range, but I had underestimated the mushrooms, and ended up fighting him while he was on fire and melting to death. It was a battle of attrition, really, and I got burns all over my hands, pretty bad ones, but I held out until he was just a smear of flaming fungal colony on the ground. The portal opened, I went back for my stuff, said my goodbyes, and that was that.

The second world was the one I got the needle sword in. I don’t know if I was small there, or the house was big, but pretty much the entire adventure took place in one single house and the grounds around it. There were maybe a few hundred people my size and three that were sized for the house, towering people who could have squished me like a bug. The giants didn’t know we were there, at least at the start, and we tinyfolk lived by stealing their stuff in bits and pieces, as well as scavenging through their trash.

I ran into the other thresholder right away, a shy guy who’d come through a month before, Ming. He looked at me like I was a breath of fresh air, and I guess at first I felt the same. He showed me around the village, which was a highly vertical place in the walls of the kitchen, and helped make me a hut of my own from toothpicks and scraps of fabric. I had a button for a doorknob and bottle caps for bowls to eat out of. It was cutesy. I liked it.

Ming spent basically all his time with me, at least when he wasn’t going out with the other men and raiding for supplies. Raiding was men’s work, and the women stayed back, turning scraps of food into lovely meals and discarded rags into fashionable dresses, as well as taking care of the children. This was also cutesy, but it had an undercurrent to it. There were lots of children, huge families, the kids helping out sometimes with chores but also often running wild.

Ming talked to me about his homeworld, and I talked to him about mine. I didn’t mention the desert world at all, maybe because I wanted to keep it a secret, maybe because I didn’t know what was going on and didn’t want to say too much. It was easier to talk about the world I’d come from, the people there, the problems, my parents, things like that. He was good at listening, I’ll give him that, and the last world hadn’t had all that many people who wanted to talk.

He was into me, and I was on the fence about it. I hadn’t been hugely happy with the world that the first portal landed me in, and being a tiny little mouse in a big person’s house was a definite step up, but I was already thinking about what the next world might have in store for me. He was clingy, maybe because he saw us as kindred spirits. I tried to pump the brakes, but every day it seemed like he was a little more in love with me. He didn’t seem to want to talk about the portals, how we’d got there, or what it might mean.

My burned hands healed, especially with some salve from the women, but I wasn’t exactly going native.

These tiny people had built elevators into the walls, clever little counterbalanced lifts that nevertheless took a lot of effort to use, hand-over-hand. They were rickety and dangerous, but in that same sort of way, as though it was all some picturesque game, a childhood fancy. Because we were in the kitchen, the main elevator had been built with one particular purpose, which was to get up to the top of the refrigerator, an old, low-tech made of solid metals. The top of the fridge was where the lady of the house kept all kinds of supplies, and the tinyfolk stole from those stores, pinching bits of sugar, flour, and whatever else they needed when the scraps from the trash weren’t enough, or sometimes just for a treat. The fridge was also next to the upper cupboards, close enough that they could scurry over for something from a biscuit from a tin. There were lots of rules so as not to get caught, and so far, no one had been. If the giants had ever seen us, they thought we were mice.

Women weren’t allowed up to the top of the fridge, but Ming got them to make an exception for me. He was keen on it, but I was a little less so, maybe because it felt too much like a date, or like he was doing something for me that he expected to be repaid for.

The view from the top of the fridge wasn’t as breathtaking as I think he hoped it would be. Mostly, it just looked like a kitchen. The smallfolk treated the sight as something of reverence, a place to survey their lands, to look out on the splendor of the many machines, but I’d seen enough kitchens in my life.

Ming could sense that it wasn’t landing how he’d expected it would, but he plowed on. He confessed his feelings to me, explained that our coming here at the same time was kismet, that we belonged together, that he had never connected with anyone like he’d connected with me.

This sort of thing was awkward enough back home, but we lived next door to each other, the only outsiders in a tiny community — in both senses — and I knew that his feelings were likely to get hurt.

I tried to let him down gently, but not so gently that he wouldn’t be clear about what I was telling him. It’s a high-wire act, especially with a guy like that, and I was getting angry with him while it was happening. I had to go through all this awkward talking because of him. I was feeling like I had done something wrong, like I was at fault somehow, even though I knew it wasn’t me, it was him.

When I was done, it was like a flip had switched in him. Any trace of niceness was gone. He called me a bitch, a slut, and said that I didn’t deserve him. What I should have done was slit his throat right then and there, but I hadn’t brought my knife with me, and I was less accustomed to violence in those days anyway. I just stood there with this anger welling up in me, because he was yelling, teeth gritted, and I didn’t deserve it. I guess maybe I could have taken it, waited for him to calm down, and things would have gone differently, but then he said something in the course of his vitriolic monologue that stopped me in my tracks.

“Why is it always like this?” he asked. “Why is it always these women, these perfect women who stab me in the back? Every world I go to, every —”

“What the fuck did you just say?” I asked. “Every world?”

That sneaky bastard had kept his previous worlds from me. I’d thought that I was so clever, holding back on the off chance that something was fishy, and he’d been doing the same all along.

But as that was dawning on me, it was like a totally different switch flipped, like the room had gone from dark to pitch black. He advanced on me, and I didn’t have a weapon. I hadn’t learned to fight back then, and it was just a flurry of limbs, me trying to get him away.

Then he pushed me off the fridge.

I’ve gotta say, I appreciated that majesty of the height a lot more as I fell.

Then I hit the ground and bounced, dislocating my shoulder in the process but otherwise unharmed. I hadn’t told him that I had that power, so one point to me, I guess. I had never done a bounce from that high before, and once I got over the adrenaline rush and fought through the pain, I was pretty damned pissed off.

I fell in with the Rat Riders of the Glasshouse after that, a different tribe of tiny people who had colonized the small greenhouse that was at the back of the house, as well as the garden and yard beyond that. Before that, I hadn’t even known that there was more than one tribe, though partly that’s because the Silver Spoons of the Chill Tower wanted me to stay in and darn socks. War between the tinyfolk was, to their way of thinking, the work of men, and dear old Ming had apparently proven himself to be a sterling soldier.

I say ‘war’ but it was really more of a feud. There were five tribes living in the house altogether, more like five villages within a single valley, and these two hated each other. The rats were a point of contention, and while I hadn’t been a fan of rats going in, they grew on me over time. You might be picturing an army of three-inch tall men riding a horde of rats, but there were only two rats, and the rat-riders were an esteemed bunch, princes and princesses, of a sort. Each wore a cloak made from a rat pelt, one that let them tuck in close and blend into the rat’s fur when they rode.

They were wild people. Every day seemed to end with a party, and they welcomed me with open arms, especially once I started telling them about the worlds I had been to. They liked how I dunked on the tinyfolk from the kitchen. I got drunk off my ass with one of the rat-riders, a girl who had to have been half my age, and after hearing how things had shaken out with Ming, she immediately started training me. It’s thanks to her that I’m halfway decent with a sword, but I didn’t get the needle until later, after the greenhouse burned down.

I guess I don’t know for certain that it was Ming, but the list of possible culprits is quite short. We woke up to the fire and fled to the garden, grabbing what we could, making sure that the kids were with us. One of the two rats died in the process, trying to evacuate people. We regrouped beneath the leaves of a pumpkin and watched this enormous wall of flames, trying not to get choked out by the smoke. Luckily we were low to the ground. All the wooden tables and shelves had gone up in flames, but thankfully, the fire didn’t spread to the rest of the house.

I went all around the house with my friend after that, often on the back of her rat. We were seeking answers and vengeance, though not necessarily in that order. We trekked up to the second floor, where the bedrooms were, and spoke with the simple people who lived beneath the bed, half-starved because of how rarely the owners of the house had a midnight snack. We went all the way into the attic, where there was a group of tinyfolk who flew on the backs of crows and mostly didn’t bother with the house at all, except as a nice, dry place to make their home. And we went into the craft room, where I got the needle sword.

The magic there was subtle, blink and you’d miss it, and they barely understood it. A craftswitch blessed the sword, telling me that it would be a faithful companion, striking true, and it didn’t really feel any different after that, except that every fight I was in went better for me. It was really easy to be ‘on’ when I fought with the sword, keyed up and with my head in the battle, and it wasn’t until way later that I actually got any confirmation that I wasn’t just imagining it.

Through this whole time, Ming had been sending me letters. Sometimes they had some of his simpering sweetness, but more often they were unhinged, ruminations on men and women and their place in the world, with one beneath the other, you’ll never guess which. He really seemed to think that I was a slut and a prude, and he didn’t make much effort to square that circle.

When we finally faced each other again, I had tightly woven armor and my needle in hand, along with my rat-rider friend backing me up. Ming had a dozen guys with him, men I’d known from my time in the kitchen, and they all looked a little bit harder than they’d been before, like they’d seen some stuff in the interim.

The rat tore through them, and I tried my best to make with the stabbing. Ming had a weapon of his own, a staff, which was a repurposed toothpick. The ends had been sharpened, and he was trying to poke some holes in me, which I thought was rather rude. I was still feeling ‘on’, but my hits weren’t landing, and I was losing stamina faster than him. I watched my rat-rider friend fall, her blood staining the rat’s face, and knew that I needed to end things if I wanted to save her.

“Why are we fighting?” I asked Ming, letting my guard down, as though the question had only just occurred to me, as though the whole conflict was just something that had happened to us somehow, outside our control.

“You hate me,” he said, but I could tell that he was falling for it.

“I never hated you,” I said. I kind of hated myself for saying that, but you play the hand you’ve got. “I was just afraid of what it would mean to get close to someone.”

This went on for a bit. I won’t vomit it all up for you, but I said a bunch of things that he really wanted to hear, forgave him for everything he’d done, explained that I was the one to blame, said, in better words, that I was a prude and I was a slut, but I turned it around on him, making this seem like a good thing. I was a prude: I had never felt the touch of a man, and kept myself chaste. I was a slut: I had urges that had always felt dangerous to me, especially around a man like Ming, who I felt so close with, so fast.

He lapped it up, and it didn’t seem to matter that I’d told him plenty about my life back home that went directly against what I was saying. The thing about living in a fantasy of your own mind is that you become really easy to manipulate. I was in marketing, remember, spent a good decade of my life writing copy and developing strategies for different demographics, and sometimes a pathetic pitch that appeals squarely to the most obvious base impulses works. Sometimes you come up with a strategy that feels too basic, too on the money, and that’s the one that lands. You tell people what they want to hear, and sometimes that’s enough.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” I said. “We can reset it to what it was, call off this feud, talk to each other, see where that leads us.”

When he put down his sword, I bounced off the ground, closed the distance, and stabbed him in the heart.

The portal opened up almost right away, but my friend had been captured, so I ran straight into another fight. I’d ridden the rat a few times, and once I was up on his back he more or less listened to my commands. I got him to attack some guys, sinking teeth and claws into them, they mostly ran away, and I helped my friend to her feet. She was bloodied but fine, and seemed a little in awe of me. I pointed out the portal, and when she saw it there, it was pretty clear she hadn’t believed me before.

Before I could stop her, she went through.

I followed after, but when I got to the next world, I didn’t see so much as a single one of her hairs. I don’t know what happened to her, but she didn’t end up in the same place as me, and soon enough, I had other things to worry about.