Perry came out into a world that was completely dark, and it took two whole seconds for him to realize that he didn’t even have a HUD. He took a deep breath, then another, steadying himself. The urge to take off the helmet was immense, but he had no idea if the air outside was breathable. He called for March, and got no response. There was air, he could feel that from moving his arms inside the depowered suit, and he was standing on solid ground, but if there were noises happening beyond the armor, they were being blocked out.

  He was a sitting duck, and that by itself was a risk, so he unlatched the helmet and removed it, getting his first view of the new world.

  He wasn’t instantly killed by poisoned air, which was a start. The first breath was dusty and dry, but it was breathable, or at least breathable enough that any problems would take time to manifest.

  The sky overhead was green with yellow splotches. Perry had never seen a sky like it before, but it instantly struck him as being somewhat sickly. There was no visible sun, but he wasn’t sure whether it was hiding behind the green and yellow, or whether it was merely absent.

  The land around him was desert, and it instantly called to mind the desert he’d found himself in when he’d gone through that very first portal. Then, he had been in the Mojave, and the sky aside, he thought that this was at least passingly similar, with sandy soil and rocky outcroppings. The air was bone dry and warm, and he could see splashes of purple and yellow from wildflowers, along with a few spiky trees without much in the way of leaves.

  When he looked around him, he saw that he was standing in what was clearly a graveyard. There was no fence or anything, just a collection of headstones, and he bent down to look at one of them.

  Pearl Hawkins

  ??513-??811

  Perry stared at those numbers. The script was Roman, except the first “digit” was clearly a scarab of some kind, and if that was meant to take the place of a number … had this woman lived to be nearly three hundred years old?

  The other tombstones were similar, though they all had dates that lined up with a more normal lifespan, including a few that would have been children when they died. All the dates started with the scarab, and Perry wasn’t sure how he was supposed to interpret that. Millennium of the Scarab? The names were, for the most part, ones that would have been unsurprising to find in use by some flavor of European, though there were a few that obviously came from further afield: a ‘Paul Pawto’ and a ‘Mastsot Asuu’.

  It was pretty obviously a fusion of cultures, but each had their own gravestone, and as much as Perry looked, there was no religious iconography, and no symbols that stood out as being important.

  He was alone. No one had been waiting for his arrival. Maybe they would come, in time, but there was no gun pointed directly at his head.

  Marchand being unresponsive was obviously extremely bad. Perry looked into the helmet, but it was as dead as it had been when he’d taken it off. He could move in the armor when it was unpowered, but it was a slog, like moving with weights strapped all over his whole body. He tried pulsing his spiritual energy through the armor, but that did nothing, and there was no reason it should have done anything. There was nothing that should have broken the armor the instant it had come through, nothing that should have needed fixing. Perry had made sure that it was in perfect condition. Visual inspection revealed nothing, not even when he went through the work of removing a few external pieces to look at the interior. It was just chips and wires. Maybe he could have spotted a very obvious short, if there was one, but even if that had been it, he wouldn’t have been able to fix it.

  After some time spent working on that problem, he rose into the air with the sword to get a better view.

  The scrubland stretched out in all directions, though there was a river to the north. Beyond a small hill was a house that had fallen into severe disrepair, and Perry could imagine that it was a church at one point — though what would have been the steeple was so badly ruined that maybe he was just seeing things. It would explain that graveyard though. Past the church were the dusty remains of a road, one that had mostly been reclaimed through erosion, though Perry had no idea how developed it had ever been. As he rose higher, he saw a town, some distance away, looking equally abandoned, with no signs of people, maybe for a very long time.

  He wished that he had Marchand for a variety of reasons, but one of them was that with Marchand he could launch the drone and get a better snapshot of the whole area, something that he could look around.

  Everything was screaming Wild West to Perry except for the scarab in place of a number on the gravestones. The town had no power lines of any kind, and no railroad either, which wasn’t surprising for a town that size, but might have meant that they just didn’t have rail at all.

  “Welp, March,” said Perry. “Really wishing you were here.”

  The armor didn’t respond. Perry held his sword in one hand and helmet in the other, floating in the air. March had been with him since the very beginning, or nearly so. Marchand wasn’t just the single best piece of equipment that Perry had ever acquired, he was a friend.

  So it was with reluctance that Perry opened up the shelf space and stripped the armor off. He placed it on a metal frame that was there to hold it, then stripped out of the nanite undersuit as well, since they were virtually useless without Marchand to direct them. He had a rack of clothing taken from one of the libraries of Markat, and selected something that he felt was closest to being in the local style: slacks, heavy boots, a button-up shirt, and a duster. He had a pistol with a hip holster, and on his other hip, a sheath for his sword. Someone had thoughtfully put a mirror into the shelf space, and while he couldn’t say he looked like a cowboy, he thought he was close enough for cursory inspection. He didn’t have a hat though.

  He was, of course, too pretty to be a cowboy. Second sphere took care of dirt and grime, it straightened and whitened teeth, it shrank pores and smoothed out skin, and trimmed up eyebrows and facial hair. Perry had a closely trimmed beard, mostly because anything longer would have gotten in the way of the power armor’s helmet. Perry’s hair was perfectly styled, bangs swept to the side with a part on the right.

  But while being second sphere meant this all happened automatically, it wasn’t beyond his control. As Perry stared into the mirror, he was able to roughen himself up a bit, losing some of that airbrushed supermodel luster. He would stick out, that was inevitable, there were too many things that would give him away, but maybe if he was right about the Wild West, it wouldn’t matter so much. They probably got people with strange accents coming through all the time. It was a mishmash of peoples and cultures, strangers from strange lands. When he was finished, he was handsome and muscular, notably so, but he wouldn’t instantly be regarded as a fairy creature or whatever they’d have made of his looks before the change.

  He checked the armor again, and it was still dead. He frowned at it. He had no idea how he was going to handle being without it. He wanted March back in his ear.

  A quick check of the two cell phones that the Farfinder had packed with him showed that both of those were non-functional too. Perry tried the attachable hand-cranks for them in the vain hope that this would bring them to life, and to his surprise, those were working — or at least, the tiny liquid crystal display was working, showing the battery charge at 99%. A quick crank brought it to 100%, but the phone was still inactive.

  There were a handful of other electronics to test with, most from the Farfinder, and Perry clicked a flashlight on and off, then got out a pair of walkie-talkies. Those worked fine too, and when Perry cracked one open, he saw that it did have some complicated-seeming circuitry in it, including what was probably a microprocessor.

  “Huh,” he said.

  The Farfinder was supposed to come in shortly after him, but there had been no sign of them. It was entirely possible that they’d had all their electronics knocked out too, though the fact that at least some of the stuff was still working meant that they wouldn’t be totally sunk.

  Perry went back over to the armor and opened up the chest piece. There was a protocol he only vaguely remembered for what Richter had called a ‘maintenance boot’, and eventually he found a small, recessed button that he was supposed to hold for a full twenty seconds. He didn’t expect that it would work, given that Marchand was supposed to auto-boot if there was power, but to his surprise the inside of the helmet lit up with a test pattern, then began spitting out lines of diagnostics.

  He slipped the helmet on, but it was hard to make heads or tails of it. The display was working, at least, though it didn’t seem to be working very well. The microfusion reactor was offline, and most of the processing power was reading as having major errors, but this was at least something — it was more than he’d had before.

  “Sir?” came a voice from inside the helmet. Perry had never felt more relieved to hear the word.

  “March,” said Perry. “You’re in maintenance boot. Any idea what’s happening?”

  “I shouldn’t be accessible from maintenance boot, sir,” said Marchand. “It appears that something has caused the vast majority of processing power to stop working. I have confirmed a connection though, the processing power is physically in place, we have not lost those microchips. In fact, sir, I should say that there’s not enough to run the instance you’re speaking with.”

  “Phantom compute?” asked Perry. Ever since their halfway merge, Marchand had more computing power than he should have had, its source unclear, but possibly linked to Perry in some unknown and mystical way.

  “Perhaps, sir,” said Marchand. “Through that, I have access to microphones and the speakers.”

  “We made it to the new world,” said Perry. “Looks like the Wild West to me, but that’s at first blush. Can you get the power armor up and running?”

  “Testing the processors now, sir,” said Marchand. There was a long pause. “It appears that they are functional but error-ridden. I can attempt to correct, but it will take a significant amount of time, and the suit will be impaired either way.”

  Perry frowned at the armor. “How long are we talking?”

  There was another long pause. “Days, sir.”

  Perry let out a breath. “And that’s just to get the armor back in diminished form?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “From the inventory I’ve just taken, the problem is affecting processors of a certain level of sophistication.”

  “Fuck,” said Perry.

  “Agreed, sir,” said Marchand. “It may be possible to correct for, but it’s also possible that processing power will be severely hampered while we remain in this world.”

  “Then I’m going to leave you to it,” said Perry. “I need to know where we are, what local conditions are like. Either we’re early, and we need all the time we can get to marshall forces, or we’re late, and we need all the time we can get to play catch up.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Marchand. “I do fear you’re exposed without the armor.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “I am,” said Perry. “But it’s much easier to pretend to be a local without it.”

  He took the helmet off and set it back in place. The armor was hopefully just dormant, and more hopefully, there was something that Marchand could do to keep it online. In the meantime, Perry wanted to explore.

  ~~~~

  The town near the church had probably been abandoned a decade ago, if Perry had to guess. Everything there reinforced the idea that he was in the Wild West, save for the sky, which was still unnatural colors above him with no sign of the sun. The Wild West would be a bit of a disappointment, if he was being honest — he had no particular interest in cowboys. The one advantage of a world like that was that he would be stronger than virtually everyone he met, aside from the other thresholder. A look inside the abandoned jail made him think that even if worse came to worst he’d be able to do a Lunar Punch to simply exit out the wall.

  There was no evidence of a moon. That was another problem, but maybe the clouds or whatever they were would part at night and he’d see a nice fat moon staring down at him, ready to hand him its power.

  He took the thickest road out of town, on the assumption that it would lead to an even thicker road, which would in turn lead to a city, or at least some kind of signage. There was a chance that everywhere he went would be just as abandoned as the town and church were, but he was hoping against that. He started by walking, but given the distance, soon switched to using the sword, which pulled him along a few feet above the road. He wasn’t used to using the sword without his armor on, and soon got dusty, suppressing the cleaning ability of the second sphere so that he’d fit in better with the locals, if he ever found them.

  He’d spent another twenty minutes in flight, covering ten miles of road, before he reached railroad tracks.

  These he stopped at, sheathing his sword. They stretched out in either direction, relatively straight. They weren’t modern train tracks, he could tell that much, and they were laid across poorly graded soil rather than a prepared bed of rocks. The metal was corroded, but it was clear that trains still must have gone along it, as the tops were shiny where the train wheels made contact.

  The world was probably not dead then.

  The road had terminated at the railroad tracks, and there was a small, dilapidated train stop that looked like it hadn’t seen any use in ages. The wood was weathered in some places and rotten at the ends, and there was a signpost with no sign on it, another indication that the place he’d passed through was a ghost town. The stop was little more than a crude wooden platform with rusted nails.

  Perry looked up and down the tracks, wondering which direction would be better to follow. Train tracks implied civilization, and that would help him get his bearings. The only question was which direction to go. Because there was no sun, there wasn’t an easy way to tell east from west, so Perry picked at random and took flight again, following the tracks this time.

  His mind kept going back to the scarab on the gravestones. The signs in the town had been in English, with no words he had any trouble with, and a few that stuck out to him as being rooted in a particular time and place: saloon, blacksmith and farrier, assay office. Another Earth, then? Or another place like Teaguewater had been, a few steps removed from Earth?

  Perry slowed to a stop when he saw a beast in the distance. He wished that he could zoom in on it, like he could when wearing the armor, but instead he was forced to get closer to see it. It looked like a cow of giant proportions, a steer with a thick pelt. It took him a moment to realize that it must be a bison — or maybe a buffalo, given that this probably wasn’t the American West. Maybe it was a third thing that only existed in this world. The scrubland had given way to prairie grass, though it was patchy. He guessed that it was some difference in soil quality, rather than rain levels, but his knowledge of ecological patterns was some years in the past by this point. Coming to a new world was the one time that knowing geography would come in handy, and it wasn’t worth a damn.

  He hadn’t seen much in the way of farms, though there had been a few rows of desiccated trees that might have once been an orchard. Farming was a difficult thing in a place where there wasn’t much water, and it almost always meant irrigation or natural springs. In a place like this, without much vegetation, cattle farming was more common, because they could range and eat whatever there was. The grasses near the bison were more promising in that regard, and maybe the abandoned town was the result of a shift in water — a river changing course, or a dam being built, or simply a rough patch of weather that led to a drought.

  This was Perry’s way of getting the pulse of this place, thinking through the material conditions of their people, making sense of what constrained them in terms of diet and manufacturing and building materials. He had never read too much about the Wild West and only vaguely knew it as a relatively brief period of westward expansion, but if he started from base principles, then maybe by the time he actually reached a town he would have the beginnings of a grip on things.

  The bison he’d been watching and creeping closer to turned toward him. It slowly rose up on its hind legs, growing taller. It had unbunched in the middle, and its front hooves splayed out like fingers. The horns were wide and intimidating, and it huffed at Perry just once before charging.

  Perry turned and ran the other direction, then withdrew his sword and lifted off into the air. He looked down below him and saw the bison trying to reach for him, but Perry was too fast, and the strange bison was too slow. On closer inspection, it was more like a minotaur, and Perry simply stared at it as it circled below him.

  “But,” he said. “The material conditions …”

  And of course, the material conditions would dominate in any case, which meant that if they had violently angry minotaur bison roaming the area, then … there wasn’t actually that much precedent in human history for that, to be honest. The towns would have walls, Perry supposed, but the town he’d been to didn’t have them, not even a ring of barbed wire.

  Perry returned to the rail line and resumed following it. He kept hoping that he would see a train. The tracks continued, empty.

  How far was it supposed to be between stops? A steam locomotive needed fuel and water, he knew that much, there were supposed to be giant water tanks that could dispense water into the boiler or something … but the one stop he’d seen had nothing, no sign that it had ever been used for refueling.

  Perry flew for another thirty miles, past another seemingly abandoned stop, but this one was scorched, like it had been lit on fire and left to burn. A road stretched away from it, but it didn’t seem to be well-traveled, and he didn’t spend the time to follow it.

  Ghost towns, he knew, didn’t just happen. There was always a reason a town was created, and always a reason it failed, that was just the nature of material reality. A ghost town usually happened when there was a mine that eventually went bust, or when crop conditions changed, and even then, it was common for a town to limp along if at all possible.

  How many ghost towns were out here? What had made them fail?

  By his count he’d gone another thirty miles before he finally reached a settlement. This one wasn’t out away from the train stop, the train tracks went right up to it, though there was no train anywhere in sight. It was situated next to a river, too, one that the train tracks had started to run alongside. Perry watched it from afar. The grass was thicker here, but there were also tilled fields, and it was more than just a single main street, if only barely. There was a church — with a nine-pointed star on the steeple, not a cross — and there were a few buildings made of brick rather than just wood.

  Perry landed, sheathed his sword, and walked along the tracks. After a moment’s thought, he unbuckled the sword and put it, and the gun, into the shelf space. That left him vulnerable, but it meant there was less to explain.

  He didn’t know how he was going to explain himself. It didn’t seem like there was an easy lie. He was thinking that he would tell them that his horse had fallen over and stranded him, but this was the only town for almost seventy miles of track, and he didn’t think that was entirely plausible. Besides, he didn’t know whether they even had horses. There had been a trough outside one of the buildings in the ruined town, but that wasn’t conclusive. Did the term ‘farrier’ have something to do with horses? Peering ahead, he didn’t see any horses at the town, so the fake horse story seemed weaker to him.

  He was still a few hundred feet away from the first building at the outskirts when a man came jogging down the tracks toward him. The man had a wide-brimmed hat and an oversized moustache, and his left arm was made of metal, a complicated prosthetic. He raised his right arm and waved at Perry, who kept walking, because he wasn’t sure what the raised hand was supposed to mean.

  “Hey there, feller!” called the man. He didn’t stop jogging until he was right up next to Perry, then stopped with his hands on his jeans for a moment. Perry stopped walking, to be polite, while the man caught his breath.

  “Hey,” said Perry, trying to match the accent. “I don’t suppose there’s a place for me to stay in this town, in there? It’s been a long day.”

  “We can get yeh sorted,” he said. “But I’m sorry, a’fore yeh come in I’m goin’ a hafta see a drop of blood.”

  Perry frowned at him. “Blood?” he asked.

  The man looked him over. There was a gun at his hip, and his hand didn’t quite go toward it. “Just for safety’s sake, yeh understand, to see if it jumps, that’s all.”

  “I … sure,” said Perry.

  The man looked relieved. He pulled a pen knife from a grubby pocket and flicked out the short blade, then held it forward expectantly.

  “Sorry,” said Perry. “I haven’t done this much.” He held up a hand.

  The man said nothing, and took the proffered hand, cutting Perry across the palm. It stung, but Perry held his hand steady and let the wound bleed. The pen knife had been flicked closed again, and a coin was drawn from the same pocket, one of a few judging by the jingle.

  “Just a drop here,” said the man, holding the coin out sideways between his thumb and forefinger.

  Perry balled his hand into a fist, which made the stinging pain worse, and held his fist above the coin. One drop fell into the man’s thumb, but the other hit the coin, and the man immediately pulled the coin back and peered closely at the blood, which sat there doing nothing much.

  It occurred to Perry only afterward that he was, in fact, a werewolf.

  But the man wiped the coin and his thumb with a handkerchief, then put everything back in his pocket.

  “Wyatt Blackwood,” said the man, holding out his hand. “Sorry to trouble yeh, just needed to check is all.”

  Perry looked down at his hand, which had been cut, then awkwardly shook Wyatt’s hand with his left hand instead. “Peregrin Holzman, but you can call me Perry,” said Perry.

  “And how is it yeh find yerself at Grabler’s Gulch?” asked Wyatt. “Not often we get folks in from the Flux, yeh understand.”

  “I’ve been ranging,” said Perry, which he hoped was vague enough. “I’ve been heading this way, but it’s been slow going, and my horse dropped dead two days back, which has put me on foot. I don’t have much more than the clothes on my back, but I can work hard.”

  “Not even a pack to yer name?” asked Wyatt, looking Perry over like he might have somehow missed it.

  “I had one, but dropped it,” said Perry. He was sweating slightly, which was good, but given the story it would have been better if he’d been drenched. It was hot out, but not unreasonably so, in part because there were only the strange clouds and no sun. “I do have this, for trade.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, misshapen lump of gold.

  Wyatt’s eyes went wide. “Well then, well now, let me see, I think we can get that to the assay office, and they’ll have a look at it, and it might just be that yeh get yerself a fine room tonight with all the company yeh could want.”

  “That would be appreciated,” said Perry with a nod.

  They walked down the tracks together. Perry had been hoping that gold might do the trick, given the sign for an assay office he’d seen in the previous town. The gold was a bit of a coin he’d gotten back in Seraphinus, carried all this way. He’d hammered it until it was no longer in the shape of a coin, then when it had seemed too big, had clipped off pieces. There was more than what he’d shown Wyatt, but it was hard to say how far that money would go.

  “Now, yeh’ll have to tell the story of yer walkin’ in from the Flux,” said Wyatt. “People will want to know, and it’ll help them feel safe with yeh.”

  “Not much to it,” said Perry. “Just a horse that had too much, I guess. Still mourning it, actually, it was a good faithful creature.”

  “True, true,” said Wyatt, as though he’d know. “The Light’s blessin’, those animals, never a truer thing said.”

  “Grabler’s Gulch, is that what you said?” asked Perry. “I lost my map when I lost my horse, and I’ve been all turned around. I was following the line, so I knew there weren’t too many options for where I’d end up.”

  “Grabler’s Gulch,” nodded Wyatt. He’d shifted slightly at the word ‘map’, a frown crossing his face, but it passed. “Train is supposed to come every week or two, but we’re three weeks now since it’s been in, and they were supposed to bring a harmonizer for the town, one that’s been sorely needed, but it was supposed to come last time too, and wasn’t on board, so it’s anyone’s guess.”

  Perry nodded as though he knew what any of that meant. “And there’s a sheriff?” asked Perry. “Someone I could talk to? Get some assistance, find my bearings?”

  “Sheriff is dead,” said Wyatt. “There was supposed to be someone to come replace him on the train too, but like I said, three weeks now we’ve waited, might have been some problems on the tracks.”

  “How’d the sheriff die?” asked Perry, narrowing his eyes. That and the missing train both sounded like thresholder business to him, though he was very aware that he was just jumping at shadows.

  “Oh, awful story,” said Wyatt. “He was caught consortin’ with a demon and had to be hanged, nothin’ else for it.”

  Perry felt a chill go down his spine. Marchand was in the shelf, still going through error correction, but in previous worlds they’d made liberal use of the earpiece to have conversations with an unseen voice. Perry was different from these people, wearing strange clothes, with several kinds of supernatural powers. What would it take for them to try to hang him too? Not much, he didn’t think. Turning into a wolf certainly seemed like it would do it.

  And there was, of course, the possibility that the sheriff really had been consorting with a demon. They had minotaur bison, after all.

  Perry stayed on his guard as they walked, but a small part of him couldn’t help feeling a bit giddy at being alone in a wide new world.

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