The story that gave rise to the name 'Panverse'. Yes, it's one of mine.

ONE

The line assembles around me. Rooftop; beyond the parapet, huge expanse of grey water under lowering skies, estuary, perhaps, of some great river. Snap! and out into the between.

Another: rocky moorland, all grey stone and stunted trees; startled grazers take flight at my sudden appearance.

Snap! and again: snow this time, deep and dry, and a howling wind driving needles of ice into my face, and out, out, quick! And—

Snap! through the between, myself flashing likewise past worldlines thick as trees in a forest. Crazy game, snap-shifting without augs; no vectoring, no loc flags, just linewalker senses. Get myself killed! But I'm laughing as the next line forms around me.

Immediately, I know it's bad. Sense of danger spikes, shaky high evaporates.

In the eaves of a wood. Gentle light, long shadows. Away before me, a hamlet deep in a broad valley, peaceful-looking. The ground, though, trembles, and there's that sharp smell of ozone. Termie line.

Come faint shouts from the hamlet. A figure lurches from the trees to my right. A young woman, leaning heavily on a stick. Her clothes are rags, her feet bare. Hair like rust, barely lighter than my own; a face pale as milk. For a second—

A searing flood of yellow light, like someone moved the sun closer without asking, and the air crackles. The girl screams, covers her eyes.

Cursing, I turn on my augs.

I run towards her, alphanumerics and vector data splashing across my Sight. Seize her arm, as a great boom! shakes the world. Her eyes fix on me, discs of terror. "It's all right!" I shout over the echoes. She jerks her arm free. She's strong. Fast, too—she swings the stick before I can react, and pain explodes in my lower ribcage.

Twisting, I grab her again, and she stumbles. I seize her collar with my other hand as we go down together. The impact sends a wave of sick hurt into my side, but I snake my hand around her neck, pulling on her garment and digging the base of my thumb hard into the side of her neck, just below the ear. I hold her down on the trembling earth, fighting her struggles for the brief time it takes her to lose consciousness.

The light is gone, and the sky pulses steel and bile. I haul myself upright, holding the unconscious girl's wrist. Deep breath – hurts! – and I load a vector sequence. As the terminal dissolves around me, I wonder for the millionth time at life's tenacity.

TWO

Back at the Bureau, I make my way to the Big Room. Beyond the one-eighty panoramic window, the Gulf sparkles sapphire in the noon sun. A few techs at their stations, quiet, focused silhouettes surrounded by splashes of colour from their displays.

Dela's at her console. She runs Bureau ops. Like me, she's from a Region somewhat downslope from the flat bit of the humanoid curve. She's short, hairy, and tough as they come. We mostly get on well.

Dela looks up as I approach. "About damned time you showed up! Where have you been?"

I attempt a breezy greeting; she sees right through it. "You look like hell," she says, her face hardening. "Can't leave it alone, can you?"

I think of the red-haired girl I just dropped off on a primary worldline of her native bundle. I aug-sensed the new secondary calve off the parent line as the Panverse suppled to accommodate her, smoothly recalibrating itself to avoid paradox and recursiveness. The girl would put the line crash down to a bad dream. But on the secondary, her life was about to get a whole lot better.

But Dela sees only sunken eyes, neck scales dulled from a day and night of surfing worldlines and bouncing off the walls of the Panverse.

Who am I kidding? The girl was just coincidence, the rescue only collateral fortune.

Dela grabs my arm and gets right in my face. Her voice is a rake through gravel. "Damn you, Pol! One thing, killing your fool self, but I won't let you endanger the whole Bureau. You're suspended for a month, effective as soon as this mess is over."

"Uh. You said you were glad to see me. What's going on?"

"Oh, just worldlines, dying by the handful."

Missing the irony, I reply with levity, "What else is new?"

"Fool!" she snarls. "I'm not talking about termies just going out with a sigh. This is bad—Beltram bad, alright?" She yanks on my arm for emphasis. I yelp as pain lances my side.

"Sorry. Cracked rib."

Dela's eyes are slits. She mutters something about cracking my stupid head. Comms a tech to bring a pain patch, then twists me around to face her holo display. She cycles data, grim-faced. My effervescent mood goes flat as reality sinks in.

A bundle of worldlines under Bureau survey has gone unstable. A growing swath of them, secondaries through to n, spattered with a yellow-coded snow of instability, all the way back to the primary line. Several lines showing as dashed red, which means collapse.

Like the day. Like the day when my mentor Beltram's insane experiment out in the D Region canned my youthful dreams of lessening the Panverse's incalculable quota of misery.

Uncountable lives lost.

I might have prevented it.

And now…

Whole worldlines gone, wiped. Now, in realtime. The walls close in as my manic mood flips.

Crashed lines could start ripples spreading throughout the bundle. The nightmare scenario, an entire bundle of worldlines whipsawing with instability until it crashes. Disturbances spreading into adjacent bundles, setting up resonances that threaten whole Regions…

And while theory suggests that the Panverse will eventually dampen out the ripples from a local event, the safety threshold remains unknown. In the context of a practically infinite Panverse, 'eventually' is a frightening qualifier.

The tech arrives with the patch, and I smooth it into place under my tunic.

"Tell me we didn't start this," I croak.

She shakes her head. "We have three researchers on a termie in the Region, but it didn't begin there. Causal locus unknown. I've run cross-correlations through all the adjacents out to the primary line of that bundle. Nothing. Unless," she adds, with an upward glance, "they're up to something we don't know about."

My already queasy stomach flips. She means Core, the single realm beyond the Inner Orders, which we inhabit; and at Core, at the heart of everything, like spiders in a web, the Elect.

"Core? No, impossible—why would they?" My voice is strange, detached. I'm hearing Beltram again. Destiny or Free Will, hmm? What say you, Pol, m'lad? "But we have to tell them, Dela, let Core know."

"Did that, damn it! They're not replying. But we need to get those researchers out before that line goes. You're the only walker I've got right now."

I nod. The Bureau employs a lot of researchers, but linewalkers are scarce. Most of those who percolate up here, to the Inner Orders, do so accidentally, by native Talent: but only a linewalker can move consciously across worlds.

The line with our people on it, a terminal a little outside the unstable yellow zone on Dela's display, is highlighted; I reach out with my augs and start snagging the coordinates and keys, along with the tags for the researchers' locator flags. The researchers are three—Sytralaya'arana, or Sytra, and two others I don’t know, Chama and Nikkoli.

But the location…! That Region's way down on the flange of the humanoid curve. They could have four eyes and feathers out there, and there's no time for physio mods. Don't scare the locals is one of the Bureau's first rules, since nothing upsets a being like finding out that their solid world with all its history is just one reality in an ever-expanding Panverse of perhaps 10⁴⁰ worldlines. But judging by the chaos on the display, the locals have far more to worry about than visiting 'aliens'.

Dela's display flickers, then refreshes. The yellow zone spreads like a tumor in freeze-frame. My scalp prickles as geometries of destruction sanitized by the pretty graphics of Blest technology crawl outward. Two more lines flash red. We're watching universes die.

I turn and head for the safe room at a run.

THREE

To be Blest is a curse. Most of us, and especially linewalkers, share the same haunting need to make sense out of this vastness we have a private window on. Impossible to have the perspective we have without becoming consumed by the need to know, to help, to… atone. If Dela really did suspend me, I'd just give up. Most days, I think the Bureau is all that gives my life meaning.

But Beltram, one-time director of the Bureau, started the relief ops program not out of compassion but because he couldn't accept a deterministic Panverse. Will, he'd insisted, was all there was: we were masters of our lives.

So the Bureau began to intervene in terminal worldlines. Termies are lines in which most of the human Talent has migrated out and a critical threshold is reached whereby the worldline begins an irreversible decline; not the dramatic crash of the sort that Dela and I had just watched, but a slow, inexorable slide to extinction, like a lamp running out of oil.

Under Beltram's direction, we brought the termies expertise and knowledge, tried to steer them onto an upward course. Usually, none of it stuck. But even if the seeds we planted took root, other things would go awry. Try as we may, the termies still crashed. Inexorably, every time, without exception.

It was then that he started playing around with healthy lines, trying to find answers. He picked a bundle in the Ds. By the time the Elect intervened, five lines had died.

FOUR

Night. Smell of stale urine and rotten wood.

The beacon brings me in at the correspondence, and from there I slip through the line's skin, entifying in a dark, stone-paved alley of unusually wide doorways. My augs paint in the buildings looming close on either side, and an open space—a square, perhaps—a few dozen yards ahead. The upper stories of the buildings bristle with spiny ornamentation of unknown purpose. One of those ancient-feeling places, like most termies.

I'm drawn to a deep-shadowed doorway from whence emerges a large piece of walking darkness. I know by the locator blip it's one of the researchers, unrecognizably modded. A big, vaguely bovine head with liquid black eyes and tulip ears, below which a formidable torso attached to long arms and short, powerful legs. Hominid architecture stretched under different selective pressures.

The creature's great head dips in greeting. It points to itself, says something like Chama. I take the profferred hand, noting the extra thumb joint and the heat that comes off that palm. It speaks again, softly, but I can't catch the mushy syllables: the mouth parts are likely too far off mainhuman. Chama will be a good few days in the tank after we return.

"Where are the others?" I ask.

Chama shakes his/her head and makes sounds I don't understand just as a wash of acidic green light passes over us. The air turns pungent with ozone.

Chama looks around, eyes wide with fear. "It's starting," I warn, as voices call out and lights appear in windows. Chama moans.

"We need to –" I begin, but my words are lost in a weird, discontinuous moment, existence jolted. The ground is suddenly ill-defined beneath my feet, as if solid one instant and discrete the next. Unwholesome sounds groan from nowhere, the creak and snap of uncounted quantum strings, the grinding of impossible physics, constants come unmoored from their necessary values and veering wildly. My skin crawls.

Shouts and cries ring inside buildings. I flinch as a bilious yellow wave ripples across the sky, lighting up the alley and throwing intense shadows down the spiked and textured walls.

Doors open. Chama's nerve snaps, and with a great bellow, the researcher takes off at a run towards the square.

I curse and start after him--Chama's impetuous stupidity convinces me the researcher is a him--dodging past hulking, terrified natives. As I reach the mouth of the alley, the ground shakes, hard, and a viscid palette of muddied colors slews across the heavens.

Chama is frozen a few dozen yards into the square, staring at the sickly sky. I sprint and grab his arm before he can react.

"Chama! Where are the others?" I'm breathing hard, pain starting up again in my side.

More mushy syllables. A slash of gore rips the sky, a knife-edge of hot ions or god-knows-what. The tortured air responds with a violent boom!

I have to find the others, but ionizing radiation accompanying the line collapse could short out my augs and onboards at any second. Though I can shift without augs, it's an exhausting, chancy business. I tighten my grip on Chama and force myself to turn in place, scanning for the others' locators. Nothing.

Locals are pouring into the square, mad with fear. Chama is trembling; white shows around his eyes. I prepare to shift, blocking out the growing chaos around us. One group of locals is charging towards us, as if it's all our fault. Save one or none. I'm out of options.

As I shift out with Chama, I'm vaguely aware of the line's skin, of how thin and brittle it feels.

FIVE

The instant we entify in the safe room, two techs shove a pharm-wedge in Chama's mouth and start to lead him away just as Dela enters.

"The other two?" she asks.

I shake my head. "I don't know. Going back to see if I can find them."

"How bad is it, Pol?"

"I think it'll hold a little while," I lie, and start the necessary visuals. "Permission to return?"

"Go," she says, "but don't push it. I need you." I see her lopsided smile as I shift out.

And find myself in a howling maelstrom of forces, tossed and buffeted in an opaque murk shot with flashes of rust. Something like white noise screams in my head. No up, no down, nothing to hold on to, physically or metaphorically. The line is gone, no question, and I'll be gone too if I don't get out and --

SIX

-- I'm lying on my back sucking on a pharm-wedge, still breathing hard.

"Twelve thousand millirems," says the tech. He's holding a counter over my chest. "We have to get him into the scrubber right now."

Dela lets out a low whistle. "Good thing you're not planning on having kids, huh?" She raises an eyebrow and pats my arm as they wheel me to the tunnel.

"It's gone, Dela," I mutter around the pharm-wedge, "blown, the whole line. The researchers…"

"EM or radiation burst must have fried their locators. You did everything you could."

I want to believe it was quick, but the sensations of the collapsing line and the panicked crowd keep coming back to me. I knew Sytra. One of our newest, an ethereal slip of a girl with a surprisingly earthy wit and a sleek, warm body. One person I knew, millions—billions?—I didn't. How sick that I should even think of the two things in balance.

Forty-five minutes later I emerge into the Big Room, fully clothed and radiation-free, my rib mostly healed. Dela grips my elbow and steers me around. "It's not over. Come on."

The Big Room is crowded, humming with controlled urgency: Dela's pulled in some trainees and off-duty techs to monitor events and run correlations, and more are arriving.

"How bad is it?" I ask.

In reply, Dela brings up a new holo of the area.

The yellow zone covers the whole bundle all the way to the primary. Scores of lines are winking red. Ex-lines, dead universes. She zooms in on the center of the bundle, where the primary punches its clear blue thread through the surrounding chaos.

I watch, dazed, as she switches from one holo to the next, display after display, hunting for some clue to the devastation. But despite a growing sense of unreality, something nags at me.

"Dela, go back to the close-up of that primary, will you? A little more. There! See it?"

She frowns. "What am I looking for?"

"The instability completely swamped the other lines. But here," I trace the shimmering blue edges of the primary with my finger, "it's almost as if it's holding off, meeting a force." As if something were protecting it.

"A force? It's holding off because that's a primary. The primary has more energy."

"That's my point. More energy will intensify instability, not resist it. That primary ought to be collapsing, amplifying the chaos." A cold fear, like a snake, uncoils in my belly.

"Forget it. I'm not letting you back there."

"Have you heard from Core yet?"

"No." She chews her lip. "Damn. What are you getting at?"

"The Elect ignoring this, Dela. How long's it been since you yelled for help?"

Dela scowls. What the Elect know of the mechanisms behind the Panverse is something even we Blest don't care to think on. They say an Elect is able to grasp the entire Panverse intuitively, as an ordinary person might grasp the simple geometry of a cone or cube.

And we're their tripwire.

"There's something up with that primary, I'm sure of it. Call it walker's instinct. This whole mess reminds of me of that time. After the line crash, when Beltram and I --"

"Yes, yes, I know Bureau history!" she snaps, "and I should've known better than to mention his damned name around you." She cycles her display and resends the original alert, with fresh data appended, in a modulated burst of tweaked gravitons, the only vehicle other than a living being capable of carrying information across the Panverse.

She turns her full attention on me. "Give me one good reason I should let you go back to check that primary in the middle of all that destruction."

"We're looking for causes aren’t we? Walkers have special senses. We can tell a lot from a line's skin." Entry and exit traces especially. Something – or someone – is protecting that primary.

A choppy string of curses in her native language. Then, "Be careful," she growls. "If you do something stupid and the 'verse doesn't kill you, I will."

SEVEN

When linewalkers shift through the Panverse, everything we see is abstract, symbolic: the mind has solved its dilemma and avoided madness by agreeing to perceive the web of coexisting possibilities we call the Panverse as a three-dimensional space. Though we treat it all as absolutely real, one part of us always knows it's all visual metaphor, busywork to keep the mind sane.

Of course, it's only like that for walkers. All the others, ordinary people with Talent but without the ability to skip through Regions, don't notice a thing as they percolate their way through hundreds, even thousands, of adjacent universes. At most, they think they're just very lucky, that life is good, that every decision they make has a good outcome… little realizing that they're actually splitting off into worldines with better and better outcomes for them personally. Most of these lucky folks plateau out; the best reach the primary line of their native bundle. And primaries are good places to be, full of energy and prosperity, where human Talent abounds.

A rare, exceptional few will keep going, past the primary, and eventually entify in the Inner Orders, where it becomes immediately obvious to them that Something Is Going On: we have to get to them fast before they have a psychotic snap. Sedation and guided debriefing follow, and almost everyone makes it through.

That's why we call ourselves Blest.

EIGHT

The bundle is in chaos. A sickly, opaque fog that I guess to be the boundary of instability crowds the primary on all sides. Something my augs interpret as pressure waves ripple about, and fragments of dark-mottled, blistered debris, resembling burnt flesh or bombed landscapes, depending on the scale I choose, float in and out of the fog. Pieces of dead lines. Atoms, maybe, of Sytra and Nikkoli. I push the thought away.

I slide around the primary, keeping away from the fog and debris. The skin is healthy and solid, with here and there a few fading entry and exit traces, normal for most lines at any given time.

Before long, I pick up the pressure waves again. Rhythmic, regular, like ripples on a pond. I reach out with my augs and began to store data, hoping to record something that will yield to analysis.

NINE

"Yes!" Dela shakes her fists in exultation when we pull up the results. "You were right!"

I nod, moving slightly aside to give her space. The room grows loud as other teams view our data on their own displays. We've spent five feverish hours running simulations, sending walkers with synchs out for triangulation shifts, refining our model until everything snaps into place.

"It's a resonance," I say. "The collapsed lines are an effect, not a cause. The locus was never near the collapse sites."

I bring up the holo, highlight a bundle. "That K Region bundle right there, that's our locus. Has to be. And ripples from it are surfacing at regular spacings throughout the Panverse." The destruction is beyond belief.

I start snagging keys and coords. Dela holds up a palm. "Forget it, Pol: too dangerous. Let Core fix it."

"Yeah, well, the great ones are taking their time," I say; again, I wonder why. "At least we can try to get some facts."

Her eyes weigh me. "Time to get over it, Pol. Dump your demons. It never was your fault. Beltram strung you along until you finally got wise and blew the whistle on him."

Which brought Core's attention down on the Bureau like the wrath of God. Beltram never knew who turned him in. The last I saw of him he was being hauled off to Core in a stasis wrap.

The Elect, it is said, can peel a man's brain like a fruit, and I was glad to have been spared Beltram's fate for aiding him in his delusion. Vibrant, healthy lines had died because I'd believed in him.

They gutted the Bureau. Closed us for weeks while they conducted interviews and went through all our records. When we finally reopened, it was with a strict, observe-only mandate and severely reduced numbers. Dela, previously head of logistics, was made Director-General. I was handed the safe position of Senior Historian and – given the scarcity of walkers – only occasionally allowed to help with hauling research personnel to the field.

That was the last time we'd had any interaction with the Elect. And now – in a far worse crisis – they aren't responding.

Across the display, the red lines continue to multiply.

"Pol?" Dela's face is a mask of frustration, anger, worry, and too many other emotions to read. She rounds on the noisy room and shouts, "Quiet! I can't hear myself think, damn it!" The result is instantaneous.

"Dela…" I try to refocus on the present. "Dela, those are worlds dying out there, real places with real people, not just colored balloons on your display. If I don't go and –"

"That's enough!" Color flares in her cheeks. She glares at me, arms tense at her sides, hands balled into fists.

I try to keep my voice level. "We have to do something."

Her eyes hunt around the room, searching among the other walkers who've finally dribbled in.

"None of them has my experience," I say.

She says nothing for several heartbeats. Rubs a fist against her lips. Then, "I don't like it, Pol," she growls.

With hot color spreading on every window of the display, and the counter tracking the crashed lines nudging toward three figures, I like it even less: I'm scared out of my mind. But.

When I start to protest again she slaps me, hard, on the arm. "You're a damned Historian, Pol, not a Panverse cop! That's the Elect's job, or ought to be, if they could be bothered to pay attention to mere mortals. You want to get yourself killed out there?"

The question seems to hang in the air, glowing. Do I? For two decades I've been useless, a cowardly, impotent witness to the eternal cycle of suffering which defines the Panverse. Survivor's guilt, I've heard it called, something all Blest, and especially linewalkers, share. We've developed no end of coping strategies to deal with it – philosophies, religions, psi-skimming, feelgood drugs – and we manage. We cluster in little bands and communes, clanlets bonded by inclination, like my own fragile hept, and you'll never see a linewalker communed with non-walkers. A non-walker just can't understand.

Dela is staring at me, fist pressed to her mouth, trying to not actually gnaw on it. I try to smile but the expression gets corrupted between brain and face and comes out pathetic and lopsided.

Dela rolls her eyes and curses. "You stubborn fool," she says. "Get out of here. And be careful!"

I incline my head. "Thanks. I will."

Her eyes scour the Big room, challenging anyone to even breathe before she turns back to her console.

Back in the safe room, I pick a slammer from the weapons locker and slip it into my pocket. I haven't gone armed in years. But if I'm right and this isn't all an accident, there's a good chance I might need it.

TEN

I shift into the K Region bundle we've identified as the cause of the disturbance, loosing a pair of synchs on the way to feed the Bureau realtime data. That there's something unique about this bundle becomes apparent even as the primary—my destination—is still resolving itself below me.

I play with different views of the bundle and its myriad causal branchings, Sight-modeling it first as the standard 3D of glowing lines, then a microcosm of bright balloons, finally a metanumeric tree. But however I image it, every line in the bundle has a hard, unmarked newness about it, like a fresh-minted artifact. It doesn't make sense. Any bundle can be expected to have a number of young, fresh worldlines in it, but never more than a small percentage of the whole. Never.

Stranger still is the origins view, which shows the bundle as an impossibly ordered whole, a perfect hierarchy diagram out of a theory class instead of a piece of the living Panverse.

The skin of the primary solidifies as I approach. I slow, reduce the scale, turn it around, probing for anomalies. I'm immediately drawn to a number of fresh entry and exit traces, the unmistakable marks of linewalkers.

I rescale the view and settle gently on the primary's skin, close by the traces. Traces only last a day or two, and some are newer than others; one exit trace in particular, bright as a spurt of blood, fresh as a new wound, catches my attention. I run augs over the traces for vectoring, and a moment later my onboards feed me results.

The vectoring is crazy. But my onboards spit out a datum from the freshest trace. A name.

Beltram.

He stood right here. Here. Just hours ago.

My heart starts to hammer.

I check the traces again, run diagnostics on both my actives and onboards. Everything's working. It's him, alive, free. And the horror has returned with him.

I stare at the trace, and out to where it fades in the void beyond the skin.

It is no good thing to let the mind wander, to linger too long in the between, even when on the skin of a line. Like a machine caught in a change of gears, a walker's body has ceased to exist in any objective sense while shifting. The Panverse suffers walkers to shift through it while they retain direction and purpose, but once conscious momentum ceases, the Panverse starts to exert something akin to an inertial force, making it increasingly hard for the walker to regain momentum.

My peripheral vision catches a movement, a change of light, off to the left; I spin around. Nothing; I shiver. Linewalkers have gone missing in the between, alive only in the subjective sense, presumably self-aware until madness overtakes them. There are stories of walkers who encounter these unfortunates…

I wrench my attention back to the trace, trying to snag vector data; the vectoring alphanumerics bounce around at random, refusing to settle on any Panverse reference. But when I factor Beltram's recent presence into the data, I understand why: the traces vector to and from a place that isn't in any database.

I've never seen a trace vectored for Core before. Nobody has.

Beltram is alive; there are more lives being snuffed out than the mind can grasp; and the Elect aren't responding. I can't imagine what any of it means. I have to know.

I run through the visualizations and lock my augs onto Beltram's exit trace. A booming comes to my ears, and a hard, rhythmic pulse shakes me. I 'm already shifting when I realize it's the pounding of my own blood.

ELEVEN

Core exists alone, with no adjacents, no surrounding geometries, just the one line adrift in a void of sparkling motes. Its skin is more palpably alive than any I've ever known: dense, voluptuous as sentient gold, with faint, ever-shifting color variations. It ripples with almost imperceptible slowness, the hide of some vast creature taking enormously slow breaths. Innate qualities of the line, or something the Elect have engineered? Which would suggest a measure of vanity, since a line's skin is only a symbolic artifact in a linewalker's Sight. Why not just put up a sign saying Here be Gods if they want to impress?

And indeed they might as well be Gods, I remind myself; and I, a-knocking uninvited on the door to their paradisiacal realm.

To hell with knocking. I'll just let myself in.

I look down at the impossible, living expanse of gold beneath me. Although Beltram's trace has led me to this spot on the skin, there's no entry trace, or any trace whatever, visible anywhere. In which case, this place will be as good as any for entry.

I line up, focus, and prick the golden surface. The sensation is exquisite: a satori, a connectedness with all that was and could ever be, a dissolving into the embrace of something ineffable. All sense of self lost in that transcendent, gold-hued otherness. So saturated with the sensation am I that I only slowly become aware I haven't entered the line or even penetrated the skin, but remain instead on its outer surface, enraptured, swaying with some fundamental rhythm of the cosmos.

The Elect, it is said, have always been. Core, immutable and unbranching, is infinitely more than a simple worldline: it's a rarefied universe the Elect alone are able to inhabit. The Inner Orders, which we Blest think so splendid, are merely top-tier lines, just below Core but an infinity removed.

Core…

Time can pass, even in a place-not-a-place. How long have I been here? I wonder at my lassitude in the face of the growing danger of getting stuck in the between. Yet still I remain glued to the skin, undulating with the music of the spheres like a frond of algae in ocean deeps, too intoxicated to care, all sense of time and place receding into gold-tinged distance.

Shadows…

Something distant, dimming the radiance.

I come awake in reaction to a dark wave boiling over the expanse of gold, closing on me from all directions. Try to gather the pieces of myself.

The Bureau. I'm a linewalker.

Yes…

I understand I must free myself from the rapture, but all reasons for doing so dim to embers against the bonfire pleasure of simply being. I strain, trying to remember.

The Bureau. Dela…

The darkness is an onrushing wall, a tidal wave of oblivion.

Core. Beltram. Lines dying.

The spell crumbles. I'm trapped, and some unknown force my Sight interprets as a wall of shadow—Core's guardian entities, perhaps, or my own inebriated deathwish—is about to overwhelm me.

If I can't go in, I have to get out. I struggle to wrench my foot-analogues away from the golden plain; shadowed chaos towers over me, seeming yards away, and its touch is death.

No adjacents, no other lines visible. No time to program a return. Grab a key-coordinate at random from onboards, snap-shift --

The Panverse shatters and remakes itself.

A healthy-looking skin appears below me. I slide straight in, entifying at the default location for that line, which the last Bureau walker has confirmed as safe.

A moment later, I'm standing in a heavy rain, ankle-deep in mud. A ramshackle building looms nearby, indistinct in the cold, gray downpour. I strain into the gloom with ordinary senses, but catch neither sight nor sound of people, only the rain's steady thrum. The mud sucks at my feet as I pull them free. I curse.

I trudge to the front of what was probably once a barn or stable. I'm already soaked through.

The door hangs askew, top hinge pulled entirely free of the frame. I call, hear nothing beyond the steady drumming of rain on the roof. A faint, musty odor of rot hangs at the threshold.

The dirt floor sucks up water as fast as it drips off me. I'm alive, free of the fatal attraction of Core's golden skin, out of the chill rain. That seems enough for now. I've used up all my luck: I need to regroup in a reality, any reality.

The rear of the building is divided into stalls. All around is a litter of dismembered machinery, scraps of lumber, a splintered barrel with faded lettering in a script entirely alien to me, and the rusting, rotted skeleton of some unidentifiable wheeled implement; on one side of this is mounted a dusty but essentially intact wicker seat. Wet, chilled, and bone-weary, I clamber onto it, grateful for something other than bare earth to sit on.

I reach into a pocket for a pharm-wedge, stick it between my teeth. Snap-shifting plays hell with the body's electrolytes.

As my energy lifts, the fog in my head starts to clear. Where am I? A check on the co-ords I grabbed in my panic to escape from Core shows this to be a termie—little surprise—in the low Ms. Line last surveyed sixteen years ago.

My augs tingle to life, throwing a bright yellow spot onto my Sight-compass. I spit out the pharm-wedge and jump down from the seat. The slammer's in my hand as I feel the pressure pop from near the stalls to my right.

It's him.

Beltram's changed. His hair's frosted dramatically, unusual with antiagathic biorinse. The forest green field suit and flashy, wide-brimmed hat, once his trademarks, have given way to a black one-piece tucked into sturdy ankle boots. He's lean, fitter-looking than I remember.

Recognition spreads across his face. "Pol Kirili Ferrikkin," he drawls. His glance flicks to the slammer. "Well, well. Still with the Bureau, eh? I hear little Dela's running things these days." He tut-tuts, wagging a finger at me. "It could have been you, you know. What were you doing at Core?"

"Following your trace, Beltram. From the resonances in the Ks. I hadn't expected to see you again."

"Given me up for dead, eh? Or mindstripped." He makes a face, rolling his eyes up in his head and sticking out his tongue.

My mouth is dry. "What happened to those lines, Beltram? What have you done?"

An expansive, two-armed gesture. "Great things, boy, great things! Do you remember when we used to run relief ops to terminal lines? You were my right hand. We could have accomplished so much together, changed whole histories." He shrugs. Then, gesturing vaguely at the slammer, "I seem to remember you disliking those things."

I shake my head. "Cut the banter, Beltram. I'm taking you back."

He gives me a sly look. I should just slam him, put him out for an hour. More than long enough.

"Amazing place, Core," he says, and begins to pace. I track him with the slammer. "And Elect technology—you should see it, lad! Very clever stuff." His eyes seem to lock onto something infinitely distant. "Yes, they took me; oh, yes, up, up, and away! To Core! to Core! Heaven, hell—what shall we call it? In any case, they took me there, and a mindstrip is exactly what the buggers intended for me. But the Elect have their differences too, you know. There's a faction among them that doesn't tow the party line on how the Panverse works, and they turned out to be rather interested in my case."

I stare. War in heaven? the notion is common to a number of cultures in widely separated worldlines. It would also explain why Core hasn't responded. But, rebel Elect? It seems hubris to think that there could be any dissent among those whom even we Blest regard as something close to Gods.

Core, that rock of determinism, has drilled into us that a line's – any line's—destiny is immutable. Termies can never be anything else, can't be fixed. A line doesn't go terminal because its Talented individuals shift out, but vice versa: the Talent leaves because the line is destined to go terminal.

After Beltram's fall, Core steered the Bureau's activities around to studying the relationship between destiny and Talent, an interplay many just think of as 'luck'. I try to imagine the power politics the Bureau's research is fueling among the Elect, and fail.

And despite the peril, and the instincts that scream at me to just slam him down and haul him back to captivity, I'm fascinated.

"You mean Elect who don't buy the determinist line?" I say. "And they saved you?"

"Precisely. Some among them believe in free will, that the exercise of free will can change the Panverse." His plump face splits in a nasty smile.

With a sense of sliding into freezing water, I begin to understand. "The resonances, crashing more lines…"

"It's time someone tended the garden, Pol. You can't grow healthy crops in a field of weeds. Even if you dress them up, they're still weeds. And why pull up a single weed when you can grab a fistful?"

A moment passes before I can speak. I tighten my grip on the slammer. "You crashed healthy lines… intentionally? You always argued even termies could be turned around, made healthy again!"

"And we both know where the effort landed me, don't we?" He spits on the ground. "I don't have time for failure and weakness any more, lad."

I shake my head in disbelief. What sort of monster has my old mentor become? Beltram was always arrogant and proud with his insistence that we were complete masters of our lives. But he was never a mass murderer.

He watches me, waiting for some sort of reply.

If we're all just following a script, I can't make a wrong decision. On the other hand, if he killed those lines in the exercise of his own free will, then I'm free to exercise my own. But I have to understand.

"You still believe there's no background?" I say. "That the Panverse is endlessly bootstrapping itself, endlessly plastic?"

"Of course. Why do you think there's no recursiveness? When someone shifts from a line, there's no copy of them left. Same when a line dies—no history, not a trace. The entire line readjusts, right down to individuals' memories. As for primaries, the pure lines, they're inherently stable."

"So that's how you assert will? How you strengthen the 'verse? By wiping out whole bundles all the way to the primary?"

He waves a hand in a vague, throwaway gesture. "Ghosts, boy. Potential realities. Know why we can't change the termies, no matter how we try? Because they're too damned weak to be helped. And in their weakness, they drain strength from the adjacents. Why the blasted Panverse is such a shit-house of misery, lad. We have to excise the weak for the strong to prosper." He made it sound like a mantra. "Not as if the Panverse is short of worldlines, anyway."

"And the people on the weak lines?" I want to kill him, but he deserves worse. Much worse.

"Don't get holy with me, lad. You were on my side once, remember? You were part of it."

In the instant I make the decision to slam him, a void that wasn't there a moment previously yanks me headlong; a concussion of air from behind adds more impetus, hurling me forward into a mass of metal scrap and machine parts. I lose the weapon as my left side smashes into something hard, knocking the breath from me and sending a flash of red across my vision.

I'm on my back, watching thin curtains of dust sift down from the crossbeams. My head rings like a gong, the drumbeat of rain providing bass accompaniment.

Beltram stands three yards away, covering me with what looks like a projectile weapon of sizeable calibre. His other hand holds my slammer.

I know what he's done – snap-shifted, bounced off the skin, and somehow re-entified faster still right behind me, provoking an explosive pressure wave. Entification normally takes a half-second or so; evidently the Elect have found a way to bypass that.

I ease myself to a sitting position using elbows and palms. Beltram appears relaxed, but the weapon's muzzle never wavers from my chest.

"You always were a hopeless idealist, Pol. What did you think you were going to do? Take me back to the Orders, to be tried by my inferiors? I could have shifted back to Core anytime. I could have killed you."

"Why didn't you?"

"Don't like to waste Talent, boy. But you always lacked vision. Still, I haven't quite given up hope. There are some things I want to show you—but only if you come of your own free will," he adds, a little inside joke. "Last chance."

I don't much doubt he'll kill me if I refuse. And if I lose him I might never get a chance at him again. "If I do, will you stop destroying lines?"

"While we journey, no adjustments will occur. Deal?"

Adjustments. I nod.

"Good enough." He tosses my slammer into the darkness of the stalls, then slides his own weapon into a concealed holster in a pocket of his overall. He holds out a palm, and I let him help me to my feet.

"Tandem, then," he says, still holding my hand. "Here we go."

TWELVE

We entify in an immense, well-lit city square. It's cold, and I'm still soaked. I breathe in the night air, and gape.

We're standing by the bowl of a wide, circular fountain fed from a grim sculpture of white marble depicting three mighty warriors, two men and a woman. Larger than life, with fine, strong features and flowing hair, they stand atop a pile of mangled corpses. The men bear swords, the woman's hands rest on the head of a great, double-bladed axe. Water ripples like blood over the mound of bodies. The white marble gleams like bleached bone against the basalt slabs that pave the entire square.

The buildings around us are little short of monumental; everything, from the overall layout to the smallest decorative detail, shouts of a society whose imperatives are order and strength. Beyond the linear purity of the architecture, those embellishments which are visible—godlike beings wielding great blades; rampaging, winged horses pulling war chariots; complex, incomprehensible engines of destruction—betray not a trace of whimsy or lightness. The message here is power and control, excess tempered by austerity, passion by reason. The race that created this had little heart, but a will hard as the polished stone beneath our feet and hot as the distant suns that burn so brilliantly in the vast, cold blackness overhead.

Several people are out strolling, bundled in coats and furs and hats against the chill. A couple passes close by, heels a-click on the night-black stone, and I catch the angular syllables of a steel-knuckled language. They look curiously at us, and especially at me, but with neither fear nor hostility. Both are clearly mainhuman, at least in appearance: they're tall, with finely-chiseled features; the man's hair is silver-white, the woman's, a cascade of dark curls spilling from beneath a curious conical hat. They look fit, well-fed, secure.

A few wheeled vehicles whisper along the street girding the square, trailing wisps of vapor. Simple technology, like Beltram's sidearm, but clean, efficient.

Reaching out with my augs, I'm not surprised to find we're in the K bundle where the instability began.

I turn to Beltram. "We're on the primary, aren't we?"

He shakes his head. A smile plays on his lips. "A tertiary. I'll show you another in the bundle, a quatenary. Here," he holds out a hand, and we shift, re-entifying a moment later.

The square appears identical. I look around, confused, thinking we've somehow not shifted at all. If there are differences, I can't tell.

He watches me carefully, the smile now fixed on his lips. "Again," he says, taking my hand, "an outlier line this time."

We shift, re-entifying in a place that is, once again, identical. Struggle as I might with the idea that all these are widely different lines, I know they are: I've felt each shift, glimpsed each skin just before we entified. My augs confirm the fact.

I shiver, and not only from the cold. For all its power and perfection, there's a terrifying sterility to the place.

Beltram holds his hand out. "Let's do a few more."

"No, that's enough. What's your point?"

He takes a few steps toward the fountain and places a foot on the low wall. A ripple of laughter reaches us from a knot of people strolling along the perimeter of the square. The men wear crisply-tailored overcoats, the women, tall boots and furs. Like a uniform: you can almost smell the wealth here. And this an outlier line, yet.

Beltram's breath smokes in the cold air. His voice rings with pride. "Can you feel the energy? Every line in the bundle is vital and strong, from the primary to the remotest outlier. No stagnates, no termies."

And the truth hits me. "This is your native bundle, isn't it?"

He beams. "Every weakness has been eradicated, bred out, purged; no wild lines are tolerated. Nobody here goes hungry, there is no want. Nobody --"

My teeth have begun to chatter. "L-let me guess: no sickness or disease. No w-wars. All the men are virile, the wo-women ever-fertile."

His jaw tightens. He takes a breath, then goes on. "The Panverse is infinite, boy. I can't do it all alone. My supporters among the Elect provide me tools more powerful than anything you Blest have. They have ways to delete lines as if they'd never been, even reshape whole Regions.

Elect tools. Beltram was always a big believer in better tech, that it was the key to improving the Panverse. Truth is he's a lousy walker, barely able to make Region jumps even with augs. Without them, he's useless.

If I could kill his augs…

"But the Elect…" He goes on, shaking his head, "they're different to us. They won't do the work, walk the lines; their minds are on other things. Time itself is strange there."

He starts to pace again, his eyes focused on something beyond the now. "You and I, lad, we've walked all our lives. With Elect technology we can remake the Panverse, bundle by bundle. Recruit local Talent before they transmigrate. Within a few years, we could be everywhere, fanning out, pruning every bundle back to the primary, culling all the weak lines and only allowing the strong to grow back. Can't you see? What I've done here can take place throughout the Panverse if men, true men, have the will to make it so!"

I try to shrug, but only make my shivering worse. I manage a chuckle.

He halts in his pacing. Points of colour flare in his cheeks. His hand twitches.

I start the visualizations. I have one chance. I'm gambling on his pride, his need to be right. If he just shoots me, it's all over.

"That's not will, Beltram. It's fear."

I watch the fury rise in him, reddening his face. He's fast, surging towards me. The weapon's in his hand, the butt describing a wide arc. I jerk back, not quite fast enough, and the blow catches me on the right collarbone. I hear the bone break, feel my knees hit the stone.

Beltram's foot scrapes back, but the kick never connects as I shift blind for the closest adjacent.

THIRTEEN

I'm hoping Beltram's surprise will give me time to visualize a sequence of normal shifts to take me to the place I have in mind. In my weakened state, another snap-shift would exhaust me. But if I'm right, Beltram will be hard on my heels, clamped onto my vectors like a clenched fist. He can't risk me going free.

If I'm wrong, I've saved myself at the cost of lives beyond counting.

Through the skin, and here I am in the location-analog on the adjacent. I lay in my path, remembering lines in the appropriate Regions. At the end of which --

Pressure pop, and a form entifying. I start my own shift. It's him, face dark with fury, sidearm in hand. I glimpse the muzzle flash as the world dissolves around me.

Re-entify in an L Region line I visited an age ago. Default is an empty warehouse building with the feel of a tomb, dim light bleeding from broken skylights. I barely have time to note the beginning of Beltram's entry before I shift again.

The next one is ugly. The line's changed since I was last here, the default obviously no longer a safe place. Punchy from the multiple quick shifts, I entify right on the steps of a building, in the middle of an orange-skinned mob engaged in some sort of riot. Expressions of surprise turn instantly to shouts, faces contort in fear. Someone grabs my injured shoulder and I cry out, my vision graying for a moment. I feel Beltram's pressure pop nearby as a shove from behind sends me sprawling. Beltram is close, shouting. A kick catches my good side, and I feel another rib crack. A shot, and another. People screaming. Dazed and hurt, I grab my chance and shift out as the weapon barks again.

FOURTEEN

N Region. Bright day. Sun in my eyes.

An urban park, overgrown with weeds. Hollow-eyed buildings beyond a row of vine-strangled trees and a rotten fence. Stink of sulfur compounds and hydrocarbons.

I hurt. Rest would be good.

I remember what I have to do. Not far now, one more shift. Go…

Into the O Region and high, high near the boundary I come in, through a skin thankfully healthy and whole. Home. It's been a long time.

A sidewalk by the Hora bridge. There's snow on the ground, and the sky is lead. Not bad for a first try after so long.

A trolley chunters past and people stare. There are few pedestrians. I try to remember the geography of the place, the river's path through the city.

And here he is, right on my trace. I hear his shout of rage as I shift, but just to the skin this time, a micro-slide, and back in --

Too short. I see the structure looming behind industrial buildings at the convergence of lines of pylons, but it's almost a mile away. I squeeze my eyes and put everything into this last shift.

I entify right inside the turbine hall.

The space is huge, the walls lined with hulking machinery of copper and ceramics, plastics and steel; row after row of high-frequency, frictionless, micro-turbines in their concrete mounts march down the center of the hall, each bracketed by big, supercooled coils, and everything mated to a great sheaf of pipes and wiring suspended from the overhead.

Some suited technicians, bulkily clad against the heavy RF radiation, are loading a motor lifter from a stack of crates. They gape. Not only have I come out of thin air, but I'm battered, dirty, and unprotected.

I stumble toward them, tearing open my shirt with my good hand to reveal my chest scales, calling in Kelynn, my native tongue, "I'm one of you!"

But they're already staring past me. At Beltram entifying, weapon in hand. "Get down!" I yell, and dodge behind the nearest of the coils.

A shot cracks out, and a jet of liquid gas blasts from the other side of the coil, filling the air with steam. A siren starts to wail. Beltram circles, fires again, the shot drowned out by the roar of boiling gas. The lights flicker, then steady. People are scattering, Beltram cursing in his guttural tongue.

I edge around another coil, but he's anticipated, sees me, fires from just a few yards away. I feel the shock of air on my cheek as the projectile passes far too close.

There's a clatter of hurrying footsteps on metal. A group of figures is running our way along an overhead balcony. I dodge again, weaving between the coils, Beltram trying for a clear shot. He fires, cracking the microturbine housing beside me. My body is starting to tingle. Even if Beltram gets me, the RF will cook him before too long.

Security arrives, four suited men, batons in their clumsy, gloved hands. Beltram turns, levels the weapon, and fires, and one of them goes down, clutching his abdomen. The others freeze, just yards away, completely exposed.

Beltram shifts his aim. There is a dry click. And another. He throws the weapon, and as the guards rush him, he jerks erect to snap-shift.

Nothing happens. The intense electromagnetic fields have shorted out his augs. He turns toward me, face convulsed with hate, a curse on his lips, just as one of the guards' batons connects with his head.

FIFTEEN

They are waiting when we arrive back in the Bureau's safe room: a portly, bland-faced, mainhuman male with thinning hair, and a muscular, startlingly tall woman from some distant Region of the Panverse: red are her irises, her body covered in a fine, ivory-colored down that grows coarse and long over her head and neck. Her ankles are oddly jointed, her feet far too long.

The two are, of course, Elect. I'm dizzy, unsteady on my feet. Dela hurries the introductions: the man is called Radig, the woman Ktherís-Tsrrtu, a manageable approximation of her true name.

With my own augs fritzed, it's been a slow, erratic journey back, a seemingly endless series of tiny shifts. I release my grip on Beltram's wrist and his arm flops to the ground. I am entirely spent.

Beltram is heavily sedated, courtesy of the emergency medical team on Kel; after immobilizing my own arm and shoulder, they applied salve to my burns and pumped me full of painkillers and vitamins. The authorities held us for two hours more, only releasing me after I shifted and returned before their eyes several times to substantiate my story; that, along with Beltram's alien appearance, seemed to convince them. I had to tell them much more than I'd have liked. I suspect the whole affair will be kept under wraps until I return to fully brief the Kel council about the true nature of the reality which has so forcibly intruded upon them.

Ktherís-Tsrrtu bends down, grasps the unconscious Beltram roughly by the arm, and hauls him upright as though he weighs nothing. She looks at her short companion, and perhaps some silent communication ensues. After several seconds, she nods once, and turns to me. A smile splits her lips, revealing a mouth overstocked with canines and incisors: predator-descended. I smile back. A second later she shifts out, taking Beltram with her.

Dela grasps my elbow to steady me.

"Is it over?" I mumble.

"Yes. We need to get you treatment."

I turn to Radig. "What took you so damned long?"

He studies me. I no longer care if he is Elect: I'm tired and I hurt. I want answers. I want to throw up. Most of all, I want to go home.

"Beltram said there's war among the Elect. Is that true?"

He purses his lips. "There was an… aberration, now resolved. What happened between you collapsed one of the over-histories. Others remain to be resolved."

"I don't understand."

"It's not necessary that you do."

The room is spinning. I close my eyes a moment, feel Dela's grip tighten, her other arm go around my waist. "And the crashed lines, the dead worlds?" I ask.

"They are gone, truly dead. But Beltram's native Region we have sealed off; once he is secured, my colleague Ktherís-Tsrrtu will take a team there to round up any co-conspirators and make the necessary corrections."

Reassuring as the thought is, I shudder at the fate that awaits any of Beltram's henchmen whom Ktherís-Tsrrtu returns to Core. I try to focus on Radig. "What about the Bureau?" I mumble.

"The Bureau will continue its work. I shall make proposals for expanding your operations." He inclines his head slightly, more than a nod, less than a bow.

"I have to get him out of here," says Dela, steering me around toward the doorway. More hands grasp me, and I slide down into blackness.

SIXTEEN

Two days later, the skipper settles light as a wish on the Bureau's roof. "Destination?" queries the pilot intel. I settle into the chaise with a sigh, tell it to take me to my float. The door whispers shut, and a moment later we sail into the bright air.

Through the canopy, I glimpse something flickering overhead, and a tremor passes through me. But it's just another skipper. No savage gash, no blast of radiation. The fragile sky is blue and bright and whole. I wonder what holds it there.

'Free Verse' was a finalist in the Writers of the Future contest (Q2, 2009). This is its first publication.

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