Thresholder

Maya felt like death, but the portals had saved her before. She hadn’t talked about that with Perry all that much, but it seemed to be one of the constants in the whole thing. It made sense, given what Michaelous had said about The Spell. People — thresholders — were pulled to a time and place that needed them, maybe plus or minus a few weeks, or months. She didn’t think they were time traveling, necessarily, just stuck in stasis or something, little popsicles that got squirted out when something came up. And if they were given a purpose by the portals, set to fight someone else, then that purpose couldn’t be served by someone who was injured.

Maybe the smart thing to do would have been to stick around the Great Arc for a bit, heal up there, then go through the portal all chipper and ready to go, but she’d burnt out her Solar Vessel and it would take at least a week to get better, not that she’d ever thought of it in those terms before this world.

Still, she was cautious, armored up and blade ready, hoping that there would be a nice place to rest her head rather than some baddies. She had come out high, on a belltower, and after a moment, satisfied herself that there was no one who could see her.

The architecture screamed Victorian, all steep sloped metal tiles on the roofs, elaborate trim and decorated cornices, columns and railings and wrought iron. Maya knew relatively little about architecture, and thought she should probably learn more, but she knew Victoriana, at least a little bit, because she’d had a boyfriend who had taken her on a tour of some of the “painted ladies” of San Francisco. He had called it ‘somewhat postmodernist’, in that it was an eclectic mix of revivals and reinterpretations of Gothic, Renaissance, and Classical styles, freely blended and slapped together like a rap album sampling beats from across musical history. He’d also said not to tell anyone that he’d called that postmodern, because they would make fun of him. As if she would.

Thoughts of Earth had been coming up a lot more frequently, but she suspected that would fade once Perry was a distant memory.

She hoped she wasn’t in Teaguewater. It sounded like a shithole.

This city was bright and clean though, lots of colors and plenty of white, and the air wasn’t some pea soup smog. There was a harbor with blue water and sprawling green fields outside the city, with plenty of birds in the sky that seemed to be harrying the fishing boats coming into the harbor. She lowered the armor, letting it scrunch up around her fist, then had it coat the needle until it looked like nothing more than a black walking stick. She was dressed in a peasant’s robe, and even from a distance she could tell she wouldn’t fit in with the people down there, though at least some of that would be because of her skin color: they were darker, much darker, uniformly so in a way that suggested they were all a single ethnicity.

The bell rang seven times, though from the sun it was the middle of the day, and Maya only got through the ringing because she encased her head in nanites. The bell tower was, unfortunately, going to be a terrible place to sleep, which was a shame, because she really would rather have waited until nightfall to go down among the masses. She had spotted some laundry drying in the sun and wind, and thought that it would be acceptable to steal enough to fit in, but that left her skin color, which from the looks of things, would draw attention to her.

Maya was really, really hoping that she was in a place where only another thresholder could stand against her. She liked those worlds, most of the time. It meant she wouldn’t just be squashed like a bug by the Powers that Be, and there might be a chance to have a real positive impact on the world.

A quick check to her tether showed that it was still holding strong, even if she’d been displaced from the Great Arc. That was good to know, though it remained to be seen whether she could do anything with it.

She abandoned the walking stick plan before she could put it into practice. For one thing, she didn’t know whether they even had walking sticks, and thought they would probably take it from her anyway. A quick look around let her know that no one ever went up the belltower, and there was a beam up high where she could place the needle, just to be extra safe. The nano stuff was more important, and stayed with her as a full-body swimsuit that they hopefully wouldn’t have cause to find.

She dropped to an alley, almost fumbling the bounce, then walked out into the street.

They stared at her pretty much immediately, which was no surprise. She didn’t speak the language, but her time on the Great Arc had been good for something. They were calling her ‘Calamat’, and though she had no idea what that meant, she wasn’t about to ask them.

She didn’t just feel like death, she looked like death, and it wasn’t long before some men arrived with a stretcher and carried her away. She didn’t fuss too much. The police weren’t far behind, but Maya took that as a good sign, if the local equivalent to an ambulance arrived a lot sooner than the police did. Either crime was low or they had their priorities straight, hopefully both. On the way, she saw men in suits and women in flouncy dresses, rigid gender norms that didn’t inspire a lot of faith in the place.

Maya had thought that she’d get a hospital bed, some medical assistance that she would grudgingly allow, and an enormous heap of questions. She got the first two, which included a shot to the arm she was leery of, but the policeman stayed outside her room, looking in every now and then but nothing more. The shot made her feel better, almost immediately, but the Solar Vessel was like a black hole sucking up energy from all over her body, trying to recharge or repair itself. Her other extra vessel, the Darkling Vessel, was pumping out energy, but it would take some time for it all to sort itself out, and in the meantime, the only thing for it was to rest.

She fell asleep without meaning to, maybe because of the shot. When she woke up, a man in a finely tailored suit was sitting in a chair beside her bed, writing quickly in his notebook.

“Hey,” she said, playing up how dogshit she felt. She had no idea how long she’d been out, but most of the pain from where she’d been punched in the gut had faded away.

The man got up from his chair and gave her a deep bow. “It is an honor to meet you, Calamat,” he said in a deep, gravely voice. Rather than having a tie, he had gold chains hanging around his neck of various designs.

Maya pulled off her covers and swung her feet to the side. A quick test of her feet on the floor showed that she could move, just not very fast, which would mean making a run for it would be difficult.

“I don’t know what you’re on about,” said Maya.

“You’re suffering some … confusion, Calamat?” asked the man.

“Yeah,” said Maya. “I took a beating. The doctors might have mentioned it.”

The man nodded slowly. “I have heard of such things, with your kind. Far-off battles.”

“Tell me what you know,” said Maya.

“Everything?” asked the man.

“Everything,” Maya nodded.

She had enough of sitting up, and laid back down, head against the pillow. A quick movement of her needle at a distance confirmed that it was still there. That was another of the benefits of being second sphere: she could sense her marked objects, and didn’t need to rely on sight alone. Her Solar Vessel was refilling nicely, but still sucking down energy from every other part of her. She thought with another day or two, she would be fine, but she was still sluggish and off-balance, not in fighting shape.

“I am Alehandro Tennyson, Calamat,” he said, giving a shorter bow than before. “And you are … Calamat.”

There was no question in his voice, only insistence. “Meaning?” asked Maya.

“A person from elsewhere,” he said. He walked over to his briefcase and opened it, taking from it a thin book with large pages. The title translated as ‘Catalog of the Calamat and Their Natures’. “They appear, chosen by history, in times of need. We in Salajino have been in need for a very long time, and have eagerly awaited your appearance.” The book was carefully, reverently opened to a page which showed a portrait. It was done in color, pretty clearly by hand, and the woman pictured was … not Maya.

The hair was right, more or less, but everything else was just a bit off. Her skin wasn’t that light, and her curls weren’t that curly, and she’d never worn her hair like that in her life. The nose was a little too broad, the mouth too small, and there were a hundred other things she might have pointed to, but the drawing was simple, with clean lines and limited details.

Maya laid the ribbon back in place, then began flipping through the pages as carefully as she could. The book was old and clearly precious, like an illuminated manuscript that had been filled in by monks. Each set of pages had a different person, drawn in the same minimal style, and after a dozen of those pages, Maya went back to the one that showed her.

“Kalia,” she said, reading the name written below the picture. She looked up at Alehandro.

“We have your things,” he said, moving once again to the briefcase.

Maya’s eyes flicked again to the pages of the book. It was a relatively brief biography, only a page and a half, but it had a section describing her abilities. She was, supposedly, a superior swordsman and speedster, Zoro meets the Flash, though maybe not quite so fast. Kalia was described as scrupulous in her dealings and unflinchingly fair, and there was a section in there which outlined her style of governing, oddly enough. Supposedly she favored an insular economic footing and aggressive trade restrictions, along with a focus on skills and training for her people.

Alehandro returned from his briefcase with a crown. It was unadorned, a simple metal circlet, but still finely made, with small details that gave it a feeling of having been the work of a master craftsman. He handed it to her, reverently, then returned to the briefcase and pulled forth a dagger whose blade was made of glass. She took that too, and placed it on her bed, very aware of the sharpness of the blade. The crown, she held in her hands.

Maya looked at them. She could feel them through her fingertips, their aura pressing against her own. The aura that had come with her marked telekinesis was paper thin at the best of times, but all the energy was still flowing into the Solar Vessel. With a slight internal change, she diverted some of that flow outward and toward the crown. It glimmered in her hands, then lit up, which caused a gasp from Alehandro.

“I’m not her,” said Maya. She set the crown down in her lap and looked at Alehandro. “I’m something different, not a Calamat.” She looked down at the book. “I could wear this crown, use this dagger, gain their powers, but I’m not your chosen one, and the elsewhere I come from isn’t your history.” There was a list of dates in the book, times when Kalia had apparently appeared in different countries to lead them. Either she was immortal, or could regenerate, or some other thing, because she’d ruled a lot of different places for a very long time. “I can help your people, as much as I’m able, but —”

“Our country has been without a Calamat for thirty long years,” said Alehandro. “The implements, they respond to your touch. You are Calamat, the Calamat of this country, of Salajino.”

“And if you don’t have a Calamat, what happens?” asked Maya. She looked down at the book. “They’re governors, warriors, leaders, one part military, one part president, something like that?”

“Yes, Calamat,” Alehandro nodded. “And if you are not Calamat, then we have no one to represent us on the world stage, only the Widder’s Council.” He shifted his position. “There are determinations we cannot make on our own, that we are not allowed to make. There is no voice for us on the world stage. With every passing year, other countries nip at our borders, and it seems only a matter of time before there is an outright war with no one to serve as our champion. There is some hope that a Calamat would appear, but —”

“But you’ve been without one for a long time, and it’s very possible that no one shows,” said Maya.

“Yes,” nodded Alehandro.

“And you would take a battered amnesiac Calamat in a heartbeat, because it would offer you protection,” said Maya. “Someone to speak for your people is better than no one to speak for your people.”

“Yes, Calamat,” said Alehandro.

Maya picked the crown back up, and channeled more of her aura into it. It provided speed, the book had said, and she could feel it coursing through her with a store of energy of its own. It worked on the same systems as the previous world, or maybe something about going through the portal had integrated it somehow.

“Even after what I’ve said to you, you would accept me as Calamat?” asked Maya. She stared into his eyes. “I would be supreme ruler? This is something your people would accept?”

“Yes,” he nodded.

“That’s fucked up,” said Maya.

“It’s … ?” he stared at her.

“You have special chosen people coming in and they can just do whatever they want?” asked Maya. “I mean, I guess I get it as, like, vaguely similar to monarchy or something, but it’s stupid, don’t people realize that it’s stupid?”

“You said you were from elsewhere, as is so readily apparent,” said Alehandro. “You claim to be hearing, for the first time, how things are done in this country, in all countries. And your reaction is that it’s … stupid?”

“Eh,” said Maya. “Maybe I’m overstating things here. It seems stupid. At best, it seems like a system set up by the Calamat to preserve their own power, but I don’t understand how a tiny minority of people can control countries.”

“It is not that way in other worlds?” asked Alehandro. “The few do not control the many?”

“Alright, fair point,” said Maya. “And I’m well-acquainted with the idea of personal power translating into control of the masses, but it seems like you’d get some pretty terrible rulers.” She looked at him. “This crown, this dagger, where did they come from?”

“A vault, Calamat, the Stalwart Vault,” he replied. “Your name and description were given to the Consistory shortly after your arrival here, and I was tasked with bringing the implements to you.”

“My name?” asked Maya. She looked at the book. “That name?”

“Yes, Calamat,” said Alehandro.

She peered into his eyes for a moment. “You want me to take the mantle anyway. You want to perpetuate a fraud on your people, because you think that’s the only way to save the nation.”

“No, Calamat,” said Alehandro, though his eyes said ‘yes’. “You are our champion, I know it to be true, you respond to the implements. We have need of you.”

“And who are you?” asked Maya.

“I am the Calamat’s advisor,” said Alehandro. “It’s an esteemed position. I will be responsible for making your will into reality.”

“Huh,” said Maya. “Seems like more than I would expect from an advisor.”

“Yes, Calamat,” he nodded. “The position was established by the previous Calamat, and covers a wide range of duties.”

“And if I happened to not be the Calamat, you’d be pretty powerless, right?” asked Maya.

“It isn’t only that,” said Alehandro. “It’s the fate of this country. The Consistory makes the rules that all nations must abide by, and without a Calamat, our power is limited. We are penned in by the laws of the past, by the decisions the previous Calamat made. There is need for change.”

“Alright,” said Maya. “Ask me if I’m the Calamat.”

“You would be a Calamat, not the Calamat,” said Alehandro. “But you accept that this is what you are?”

“Yes,” said Maya, easily enough. “But as my first official act, maybe it’s better for you not to tell anyone about my, ah, confusion.” She looked at the book. “Kalia. That’s my name.”

“This hospital is no place for you,” said Alehandro. “We will need to move you as swiftly as possible to somewhere more secure, both from attack and from prying eyes. I will assemble guards to help move you to Mangro House. Can you walk? It would be better if you could be seen moving on your own. The guards will offer you their protection.”

Maya got up from the bed. Some of the stiffness and soreness was gone, but she was still low on energy. She stretched herself out and moved around, making sure she wasn’t going to collapse in an undignified heap, then went to the bed and grabbed the crown, placing it gently among her curls. She drew on the energy, and felt better for it, then turned and opened the window.

In only a moment, her needle flew through the air and slipped in through the cracked window. She drew it and stared at the edge for a moment, then picked the glass dagger up from the bed, feeling its energy too. The needle was in her right hand, while the dagger was in her left, and she could imagine fighting with both of them.

She turned to Alehandro and let the nanites spread across her skin.

“I don’t think the guards will be necessary,” she said with a smile.

~~~~

A week at Mangro House was more than enough to get her back to her old self, and also plenty of time to learn all she needed to know about this world.

The Calamat really did control everything. There were about two hundred on record, but only fifty or so in the world at any given time, each of them the leader of a nation. They were more than human, but a lot of their power came from their implements, which only responded to them. Rather than having wars, they fought in duels, which were used to resolve a lot of stuff that really should have been solved through international law or something like it. The Consistory was controlled by the Calamat but not made up of them, sort of a shadowy council of mere mortals, but they had their own motives, some of which seemed to be holding their position as leeches hanging off the teats of the titans.

She learned about Salajino as well, which didn’t really seem to be what Alehandro wanted from her. He had his own ideas about how the country would be run, as did the Widder’s Council, but if he had thought she would just sit by and funnel wealth down her gullet — as Calamat so often did — he was sorely mistaken.

“I’m the supreme ruler,” she said to him on one occasion. “That means my word is law. If I want to open up jobs to women, if I want them in our universities, if I want them to have equal pay for equal work and to establish orphanages and early childhood education — whatever it is I want, they’re supposed to fucking listen to me, right?”

“You cannot reach into the mind of every policeman,” said Alehandro. “You cannot magic funds from the aether. We will try, but every Calamat must learn that the people have a will of their own, and if —”

“Let’s start with the small shit,” said Maya. “The easy shit. If women want to get an education, to be a whatever-the-fuck they want to be, they should be allowed to. You told me that was signed into law, and then today I saw in the paper that the dean of admissions wasn’t budging, and I’m about this close,” she held up her fingers, which had no daylight between them, “to simply going down to that fucking university and just,” she balled her hand into a fist. “Look, I know the Calamat deal with things through violence, but I was really hoping not to have to do that.”

“The dean of admissions has leeway, Calamat,” said Alehandro. “It is possible for me to remove his leeway, but deciding who is and who isn’t admitted to the university is one of his primary duties, and if I may say, occurs at a level beyond what a Calamat would typically dictate.”

“I can fire him, right?” asked Maya. “I mean, I could go there and murder him, so I’ve got to be able to fire him, don’t I?”

“Yes, Calamat,” said Alehandro. “But to do that without having a replacement lined up would be unwise, and any replacement might have the same problem.”

“Fucking Christ,” said Maya. “Get it done. Find someone sympathetic, or better, find someone to find someone so you don’t have so much on your plate.”

“Very well, Calamat,” said Alehandro with a bow.

He kind of annoyed her. Being deferential was one thing, but even when he thought she was being a dumbass, he didn’t actually say anything, just followed orders as he’d been told. Maya didn’t particularly like people who blindly followed orders.

Really, politics just weren’t her forte. She was trying to be a benevolent ruler, one that embodied the virtues of altruism, empathy, and compassion, but that was hard when she kept slamming up against the total fucking morons who seemed intent on putting their necks on the line to oppose her. The dumbass prick who served as dean of admissions at the largest university in Salajino was but one example, and she was sure that if she sat down to speak with him, he would say some dumbass shit about either tradition or the intellectual qualities of women or something else.

It was crazy to her that it was completely legal for her to kill her subjects. She wasn’t above the law, the law just bent so far in her favor that it was flat-out ridiculous.

The other half of the job was being the commander-in-chief, except none of the countries had standing armies, they had the Calamat instead. In this, Maya excelled.

The super-speed from the crown wasn’t always-on, it had to be planned ahead of time. A spurt planned two minutes out would give a few seconds of ten percent boost, but if she was willing to plan things out a week in advance, she could get as much as a minute at speeds so fast she was barely able to be seen. It capped out at around a month of lead time, but Maya almost never tried to plan that far ahead, since it seemed all her enemies knew about her power.

They had their little fights, usually to the blood or to the yield rather than to the death. It wasn’t proper manners to kill another Calamat outright, and more importantly, would invite others to cut loose against her. Because of her power, all the scheduled, structured fights were endlessly rescheduled at the last moment in order to weaken her, but that was a matter for her diplomats and advisors to figure out. Mostly it came down to certain compromises, a match rescheduled so that she would have a certain fraction of her power.

Still, she won her first fifteen matches. A few had been close, but most of them weren’t. She had quite a lot of tricks to pull out of her bag, weapons and defenses and maneuvers that the real Kalia had never had. None of this was strictly illegal, but it was frowned upon, so she tried to keep it to a minimum. It made there be more challenges than there otherwise would have been, as people tried to take her down a peg.

“I don’t get it,” said Maya. “This one is over turnip exports?”

“Imports, Calamat,” said Alehandro with a sigh as he looked her over. She had tried to keep the fancy outfits to a minimum, especially when she was told the price tag the government would be forking over, but he thought there was enormous importance in appearance, and she didn’t necessarily think that he was wrong.

“Why am I supposed to care about this?” asked Maya.

“It represents approximately twelve million dollars in trade,” said Alehandro. He didn’t actually say ‘dollars’, but the second sphere translation could deal with currency, even if it was a sloppy conversion that might have given her the wrong ideas.

“We grow that many turnips?” asked Maya.

“We do, Calamat,” said Alehandro.

“Fine,” said Maya. “Just so you know, I’m going to kill this guy.”

“The fight is to the yield, Calamat,” said Alehandro.

“He’s got children working in his mines,” said Maya. “You know, I’m not trying that much here, just to bring these fuckers up to a 1950s level of social consciousness. I sent him a very nice letter, I thought — or you sent him the letter, or had someone send him the letter — and asked very politely that he pull those children out of the mines and send them to school. I tried to explain it, you know? Or you tried to explain it.”

“If he dies, Calamat, the laws will not change,” said Alehandro. “A nation without its Calamat is meant to be frozen in time, awaiting someone to come and take the reins.”

“Then I’ll remove his arm, how about that, would that complicate things or stop him from getting the kids out of the mines?” she asked.

“And how would you do that, Calamat, how would you remove his arm before he can yield?” asked Alehandro.

“Oh, I’ll think of something,” said Maya.

The match was three days later, and she walked out of it with blood around her mouth.

“I … was not aware you could turn into a wolf,” said Alehandro.

“I think when you get to know people, you’ll find they’re full of surprises,” said Maya. “One of the surprises I’m full of is a wolf.”

“Was it wise to reveal that to the world?” asked Alehandro.

“I guess we’ll see,” said Maya. She turned to him. “Let it be known that I can do that whenever I damned well please. I know you’ve been meddling with the free press, but let our people know that I’m even more terrifying when I toss the weapons and implements to the side. And the other Calamat, let them know too. I’m done fucking around. You don’t need to be that explicit about it, ‘Maya was fucking around before, she’s stopped doing that now and will absolutely wreck you’ might be the language these chucklefucks understand.”

“Yes, Calamat,” said Alehandro.

She got more challenges, of course, many of them for petty matters of international diplomacy that would normally have been a ‘room where it happens’ matter of dealmaking. They wanted to test her though, to probe her for weakness, so she was called away to the arenas more than she would have liked.

In Salajino, re-education was well underway, hampered by the fact that she couldn’t write the tracts herself, and that she needed to review what everyone else was reading, as well as understand it. She had never been a political firebrand back on Earth, not the kind of person to get locked into “the discourse” on Tumblr or Twitter, even if it felt impossible not to learn about whatever the topic du jour was. She wouldn’t have been able to say what the difference between third and fourth wave feminism was. Mostly, the things she wanted seemed pretty obvious to her, but that wasn’t enough for the people who worked for her, nor the people she was supposed to be governing. She could set the law, but that wouldn’t make people follow it.

It took her way too long to figure out that people were being double-faced about having a Calamat as their ruler. Salajino was a special case, because for whatever reason it had been without a Calamat for ages, but she was pretty sure it was the same all over the world. When people wanted to blame someone, it was the Calamat. It was like people working some shitty job who would say ‘oh, sorry, it’s my boss who’s all mean about things’. But when the people wanted to get their way, they would bend or break the rules that had been put in place. Gray markets abounded and firmly written laws went ignored, and if the Calamat really wanted something to be done, she would have to make an effort to go out into the world herself.

By the time three months had passed, Maya had built up her own militant faction — or rather, a militant faction had been built up by other people without all that much involvement from her. There were, in any society, always voices of discontent and reform, and certain of those voices had their platforms elevated and amplified enormously, their screeds that had been on pamphlets seen by dozens now read by millions in the newspapers controlled by the kingdom.

And like any militant faction of counter-cultural ideologues, there were huge egos and vicious infighting.

It was all pretty exhausting. The fights with the other Calamat were at least mostly straightforward, but as her winning streak got longer and longer, the Consistory started to take note, and the first accusations started coming out that something was wrong with her. People started digging into the historical records and reading up on Kalia, really reading up on her, finding long-lost accounts, some of which were almost certainly fabricated. Some of this was used to argue that Maya was a poor, untrustworthy leader, and some was used to argue that she was a fake Calamat — but the implements responded to her, and that was seen as incontrovertible proof. If you questioned the proof of the implements, then you needed to question everything, and that was something neither the Consistory nor the other Calamat could handle.

Three months was about as long as it was supposed to take for another thresholder to show up, and Maya started getting antsy. She had made herself known, and if the other thresholder came in, it felt like it would be obvious to them who she was. The number of Calamat was in the fifties, but there was only one of them who was the focus of the Consistory’s ire, one who was engaging in serious reforms of her country, and one who had a few extra inexplicable powers.

Another month passed, and there was still no sign of the other thresholder.

She wondered, briefly, whether she was being punished. She’d played the part of revolutionary and outcast more than a few times, and in this world, she’d had a crown literally thrust into her hands, told to run a country with ‘absolute’ authority. It seemed like one of those monkey’s paw deals, except she’d never actually wished she could run a country, because she knew better.

After she hit the five month mark, she started getting worried. The spell wasn’t originally intended to span the multiverse, Michaelous didn’t think. So if the whole thresholding thing was part of a bug in the spell, maybe it had other bugs and never found a partner for someone, which would mean that a portal would never open up.

She didn’t want to be stuck in this world.

The only upside was that she got more powerful with every day that passed. It wasn’t just her vessels and meridians, it was mastery of the venting technique to get more nanites, which meant she had enough for two full bracers and two leg bracers, whatever those were called. Greaves, maybe. When fully deployed, the armor was much thicker, capable of taking harder hits. She had almost full control over the wolf, and could shift into it at will, even if shifting out was a little bit harder. And because the vessels and meridians were hooked into her other powers, she was boosting everything, all at once, from the Solar Vessel to the Darkling Vessel. She could mark seven separate objects for telekinesis, and do it faster than before, sending them zipping through the air if she so chose, which was good, because it meant delivering nanites, which could then be used to bind.

When she’d been there half a year, she was mostly settled in. People were accepting the new regime and the reforms, if grudgingly, and Alehandro was unexpectedly onboard with it, helping her to build up the like-minded personnel. There were a lot of women, for obvious reasons, some of them very bright, most of whom had been ‘secretaries’ of one sort or another. There were a lot of people who loved her, even if there was a more sizable contingent that hated her for what they saw as a progressive agenda.

It was all going to collapse when she left, she was increasingly certain of that. It was all the more obviously what was going to happen because eventually she’d be replaced by a Calamat, a real one, someone pulled from the history of this world with their own ideas of how to run the country, and all that would be left would be what? A generation of literate women? Some infrastructure improvements? Thousands of kids who were getting educated in the schools rather than working in sweatshops? When she put it like that, maybe it was worth all the effort, even if it was probably going to crumble and decay overnight.

An entire year came and went. The other thresholder was long overdue. She had lost exactly three of her structured matches with the other Calamat, all for one bullshit reason or another, and other than that, had the winningest record of any Calamat in recorded history. They had stopped scheduling matches with her, instead resorting to talking with her about international issues, and more than once, they’d simply put their foot down and dared her to come into their country and try to force them.

They’d stopped doing that after the second time she’d gone into someone’s country and shown what she would do once she was beyond the prescribed borders of the Consistory’s arenas.

There was an anniversary celebration, which was meant to be a small thing, but because she hadn’t been paying close enough attention, ballooned out of control, with a crowd of thousands, hundreds of barrels of wine, dance halls and roast pigs and an entire field of flowers emptied to make up the arrangements that lined the streets. She decided to indulge it and treat it like an exercise in marketing. Her dress was made of nanites, pure black, which she thought probably read as evil, but that was apparently something that people liked about her — her winning record and viciousness in the arena scored highly in polls. (She had started polling the public early on, something that the other Calamat were now doing too.)

A parade through the streets of the capital ended with a speech on the balcony of the palace, and it was there she was attacked.

He came down from the sky like a comet, and her thick shell of nanites saved her. She was on her feet in a moment, blades summoned to her hand, and she dodged back from a hammer blow that destroyed the rest of the balcony she’d been standing on. She landed like a cat, on all fours, and flipped backward from another hammer blow, then bent sideways to dodge a brilliant green laser that blew up one of the row houses behind her. It was then that she finally got a good look at him, and saw that he was modded, metal woven into one arm and his left eye glowing red.

“Wait!” she shouted before he could advance on her again.

He hesitated, most likely because there was some space between the two of them and his surprise attack had pretty clearly failed.

“You’re a thresholder?” she asked.

“A what?” he asked.

“A world hopper,” she said. “Someone who travels between realities.”

He was angry, snarling, hammer pulsing with power. “I am,” he said. “You have come to this place, this paradise, and defiled it.” He pointed the hammer at her. “You have stolen the implements of a god and claimed a title which does not belong to you. Now, you will die.”

And then they fought, a wide-ranging battle that took them across the capital. It was the first fight in a long time that Maya had been able to cut loose, to try out techniques she’d been developing, tricks she’d been working towards. The death toll was in the hundreds as they crashed through buildings, the crowds that had come in from all over the country to see the celebration turning into a panicked mob bearing witness to the kind of fight that had never been.

Her counterpart had a lot of power and a poor ability to control it, which exacerbated the damage and the casualties. She took hits on three occasions and walked away with severe burns and a broken body, but not before she’d driven her glass dagger straight into his glowing eye. He’d howled and then run away, and she gave chase only until he started killing people with explosions fired behind him as he ran.

Then, she helped tend to the wounded as best she could, rescuing people trapped beneath rubble and on a few occasions, using her nanites as makeshift tourniquets or plugs.

It was all pretty horrible, but at the back of her mind, there were a few thoughts.

The first thought was that this thresholder, whoever he’d been, was the worst kind of asshole, a personification of everything she’d been fighting over the past year.

But the second thought was that this was exactly the sort of thing she was meant to be doing.