Author's Note: As a crossover, this is one I just couldn't resist. George Orr has world-changing dreams! The security officer jumps timelines through dream levels! It was clearly meant to be. It was also a nice chance to write a female version of the security officer, which I have been sadly lax in doing; she's a lot of fun and I really must write her again - like - a lot.

Crossings in Mist

through dark glass

PEACE floated over him in clear, glassy capitals as he sank into the couch. PEACE. PEACE. Stars shone through the letters and they faded out, no longer distinguishable from the black sky behind them.

He looked down and saw that he was standing on a grey metal floor. The way it wasn't leaping and bucking reassured him, until he looked a little further and saw ember-red lava flowing around it. He was trapped on a peninsula in a small fiery sea; brown and grey stone walls without doors or windows curved around the lava, though when he craned his neck there was no roof, only the starry sky, and strange ridged statues prickling with spikes floating in the air above him.

The lava being so close ought to have killed him, he thought, but it hadn't. He couldn't even smell smoke, or sulfur, or ozone, whatever lava was supposed to smell like. He was dreaming, anyway, wasn't he, and the curiosity of dreams drew him closer to the floor's edge. He stretched his hand out over it and warm air breezed across his palm; like holding his hand above a toaster or a cooling oven. Or a hot spring, which attracted him. He could slip down and relax in the lava as if it were a hot bath, just for a moment, and see what it would be like -

But a gloved hand grabbed his shoulder and dragged him back, and someone said in a low, rough voice, "Hey, watch it. That shit still kills."

"Sorry," he said automatically, and he took another step away from the edge and turned around. "I thought, since it's only - well - oh."

Whoever had rescued him was the largest person he'd seen in any life: tall and broad-shouldered, shielded in heavy green armor, and they had no face, only a helmet with a golden visor. Then they reached up with both hands and pulled the helmet off, and he felt foolish, because there was a human face under it after all. A woman's face, tanned and round with a sharp hawk's-beak nose and dark eyes, although there was something strange about the left one that he couldn't place.

"You shouldn't be here," she said, frowning.

"I know." This was a dream, but not his. "I didn't mean to - I need to fix it, is all. The Aliens. I have to stop them. I think I - we - tried to before, but I did it wrong and now I have to fix it before it gets worse."

"Aliens?" The woman tucked the helmet under one arm and ran a hand over her short, slicked-back hair. "What kind you got? Pfhor, S'pht, Nar, Nebulons, Drinniol, Nakh, Vylae - probably not Vylae, they're not real into conquering..."

"I, I don't know. They're just Aliens. From Aldebaran," he said. He didn't know why he'd said that. No one knew where they had come from; he didn't know which star was Aldebaran, did it have planets, anything about it. They had come from his mind, hadn't they? Why had he said Aldebaran?

"Aldebaran, huh? That kind I don't know." The woman looked up at the lack of ceiling; one of the floating statues drifted lower and framed the back of her head, a colorless, thorny halo. "Tell you what, I'll come check it out and see if there's anything I can do. No promises, though."

"Oh," he said, "you don't have to - it was my mistake. My mind."

The woman rolled her shoulders in a shrug and suddenly had a gun in her hand, some kind of square, white pistol. "I haven't gone into a line for a while," she said, "and I never had a human jump into here. Might as well take a look." She raised the gun and aimed casually at the wall behind him, and he turned his head to see a panel there with a round switch embedded in it. The woman pulled and held the trigger as the gun vibrated; then she released it, and a blinding electric-blue bolt hit the switch.

A grinding sound rose from the lava, along with a new stretch of metal floor that led to a door he hadn't noticed. The metal wasn't melted or even steaming with the heat, and the woman strode out onto it, settling the helmet back over her head. "C'mon," she said. "This is the way we need to try first."

He stepped cautiously onto the pathway, but his feet didn't burn, and he followed the woman through the door.

The far side of the threshold was dark, with no light but buzzing threads of flickering grey that twisted along stony walls. He thought of lightning bolts and spider webs as he hurried to keep up with the woman's long strides and brisk pace. She seemed to know where she was going, somehow, in the dim maze of hallways; they jumped over a thin channel of lava once, and squeezed through a narrow hall, and found a yellow elevator they rode up to a room too large for the grey threads to illuminate, which was when he realized she was speaking - had been speaking for some time, soft and low, her voice blending in with the hum of the lights.

"- couldn't get out of the theater, and she was embarrassing me, you know? Talking over the movie all the time and masticulating the gum even louder. I had to cut the antique gum off the floor so I could move my feet and she still wouldn't shut up, and if I didn't hurry the suits were going to shut her up for me. And she was still my girl, it's not their business, right, even if I had the knife. Now, the movie was getting noisy again -"

"Oh, er," he said, as they passed through the room, "what movie was it?"

"Huh?" she said, glancing back at him.

"The movie, do you remember what it was?"

"What movie?"

"The one that you - never mind." Maybe she hadn't realized she was talking aloud, or that he could hear her. "I thought you were talking to me."

"Didn't say a word, buddy."

The web of lights coalesced into a knot ahead of them, and they entered a tunnel with a low, curved ceiling that split into two. The woman paused, then turned down the left-hand path, and her words drifted back to him again, only somehow it seemed that they were coming from the lights instead.

"- had to get out of there, but now the knife was stuck, and after all that trouble I had I didn't want to leave it behind. I was already used to the way the wax on the handle softened so it fit smoothly in my hand, like a stray cat's back arching into the curve of the galactic arm..."

The rambling was all like that; he couldn't make any sense of it, but that was how conversation was in his dreams anyway, nonsense or impossible to remember. Funny that he was noticing it, though. He tried to tune it out.

At the end of the tunnel there was a door, a switch beside it, and a computer screen set into the wall opposite the switch. The woman ignored the switch and went to the screen; she reached towards a panel at its side, but first she said, "I'm gonna need to see the bad way first to get my bearings, so it could be rough. Just hang in there, I know what I'm doing - and so do you, I bet."

"How will I know you?" he asked. "When we're awake. I don't even know your name..."

"You'll figure it out," she said, touching the panel, and a wave of static washed over them both.

He itched all over, his skin crawling and prickling. He tried to scratch the static residue out of himself, but his arms wouldn't move very well, and George Orr woke up.

His injuries woke with him: the glassy pain in his mouth from the broken tooth, the bruising on his face, the raw ache in his leg. He was covered in dust and tiny pieces of the ceiling, and a few small parts of the Augmentor, too. Dr. Haber was stretched out on the floor next to the Augmentor and under it; the building had shaken - was still shaking - so badly that the machine had come loose and crushed him, even as he had tried to protect it.

But protect it from what? Orr pushed himself off the couch to crouch stiffly next to Dr. Haber's body and looked around.

In the twisted window-frame stood an Alien, huge and round in heavy armor, with one appendage raised and pointed at him. He stared at it dumbly, unable to hide or run, and a flat voice issued from a joint in its armor: "Please cease destruction of self and others," it said. "We are peaceful nonaggressive species. Please cease destruction of self before damage is irreparable."

"I can't," Orr said. "I don't know - I don't know how. Did you do this?" He gestured at the office, the broken Augmentor, the broken Dr. Haber.

The Alien considered the question, then repeated, "Please cease destruction of self. Small flying vehicles continue destruction despite broadcast of peaceful intent. Volcanoes emit fire." The appendage whirred as the Alien moved it to point at the Augmentor, then back at George. "Are you individual-person capable of iahklu'."

Capable of murder, Orr thought, as he closed Dr. Haber's eyes. He'd done it again; he hadn't meant to, any more than with Aunt Ethel, but he'd still done it, killed Dr. Haber. And just when Haber had begun to be more honest with him... Whatever his dream had been this time, it couldn't have been very effective, to leave the world like this.

Dr. Haber's portable radio was still intact somehow and broadcasting the news. "- and Commander Begay has led an elite strike team into the city to hunt the Aliens on foot," it announced. Commander Begay. He didn't know who that -

- hero of the defense line, only survivor of the Moonbase's scientific team and its security detail, more medals than some generals but she'd refused promotion away from the action -

The Alien was still regarding him in some way without a face. Orr didn't want to deal with it anymore, peaceful intent or not. He picked up the radio and stood and limped out to the hallway to find Heather - God, what if the bombing had gotten her, too?

More dust and debris and broken metal littered the hallway. He began to pick his way through it when the door next to him burst open and another armored figure strode through with a huge gun in its hand. He froze, and its helmet turned his way - human, they were human, he knew that heavy armor. Had seen them before in the news, receiving commendations with awkward humility and ordering pilots into ships.

Commander Allison Begay lowered her gun and raised the visor of her helmet to look at him. Her face was familiar as well, tanned and round with a sharp hawk's-beak nose and dark eyes, and she frowned at him the same way she frowned at bickering politicians. "The hell are you doing here?" she demanded. "Civilians are supposed to be getting the fuck out of the city. The brass want to bomb the place."

"- council and the president are considering nuclear measures at the invasion site," proclaimed the tinny voice of the radio.

"I had to see my doctor," Orr said, uncomfortably aware of his sleep-weakened voice, the feeble excuse. "I'm sorry. I didn't hear about an evacuation."

"Goddamn, you need an official announcement to figure out not to walk right into a war zone next to an active volcano? Mary wept." Commander Begay pulled her visor back down and gestured with her gun. "C'mon. I'll see you out."

He blinked and glanced down the hall, towards the stairs to the basement. "Wait, there's someone else - I have to find her, she's probably in -"

"Buddy, I already cleared the rest of this building," she said, and her rough voice had softened. "There's nobody else here alive for evac."

Oh, he'd really done it this time, Haber and Heather both. He set the radio down carefully and sat down himself beside it and began to cry. Look what dreams had wrought. The floor shuddered under him, and Commander Begay took him by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet with an unexpected gentleness. "We need to get moving," she said. "You can grieve once we're out of - shit!" Her grip tightened, and she yanked him behind her and whipped her gun up. "Stay back!"

The Alien had followed him out of Haber's office. Its arm was still raised and pointed at them both, and the commander was going to shoot it, and he'd be responsible for that, too... "No, don't," Orr said, not quite having the nerve to try to move her arm or take her gun, "please don't - they're not hostile, it's all been a mistake."

"You sure about that?" The gun didn't waver.

"Agree," the Alien said in its monotone voice. "We have no weapons. Fear is unfounded. Please cease destruction of self and others." Its arm moved slightly, and the commander's grip on her gun tightened. "You are wave of iahj'jaro. Do you show a path of iahklu'."

The barrel of the gun dipped slightly. "No idea what you're talking about," Commander Begay said.

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," said the Alien. "Circumstances are cyclical. We continue to attempt contact with persons in small flying vehicles. Please cease destruction."

It rotated and stepped with a slow grace back into Dr. Haber's office; Commander Begay lowered her gun and said, "That guy kinda reminds me of someone. Someone really goddamn irritating." She turned around and gestured towards the end of the hallway. "All right, time to go before this place falls down on our heads."

Orr limped along, herded by her broad hand on his back and muttered encouragement, Keep moving, yeah, that's good, keep going, almost there, you can make it. He didn't want to make it. He wanted to lie down and sleep without dreams or waking.

"C'mon, we're almost out," Commander Begay said, "I know it's bad, but just a little more, it's gonna get better..."

As they passed across the threshold to the stairs at the end of the hall Orr's skin prickled with a sudden static charge, and the building jumped again around and under and over them with a shattering roar. His wounded leg folded under him as the air clouded up, and he closed his eyes against grit and smoke and crackling electricity.

He opened them at the sound of his name in Dr. Haber's voice. "Don't sit up, the Augmentor hookup's still on you," forceful and confident as ever. "What did you dream?"

"But -" But he hadn't dreamed. The commander and the Alien and closing Haber's dead eyes had been - had been... His mind stuttered over those facts, caught itself on a handful of others, fresh new memories without noise at the edges. "The - an Alien was here. In here. In the office. It came out of one of those hopping ships, I guess. You and it were talking." Had they talked? Both reality and dream floated in a confusion of images at the tip of his tongue.

"But that's not a dream! That happened!" Dr. Haber bristled with irritation. "Goddamn, we'll have to do this over again -"

"No."

The word surprised him almost as much as it did Haber, but the new world was solidifying around him and he solidifying within it, and he said, "No, not this time. Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber." Whether he knew how he'd found his way there or not.

Haber stared at him. The building vibrated softly under Orr's feet as he sat up and swept off the itching electrodes. "Listen," he said, "couldn't you call someone? Washington, or, or someone closer?"

"What for?"

"Well, they'd listen to you, wouldn't they? A famous scientist, here in the middle of it all. And you talked to one, you know that it's only been a misunderstanding. The Aliens aren't attacking or invading - they didn't realize until they landed that we rely on verbal communication. It's all been a mistake. If you could tell somebody who can get the President's ear, and call the military off. We're only hurting ourselves with the bombing, the Aliens haven't been hurt with their armor and they're not hurting the soldiers. If you know someone who could stop it -" A name came to him. "- someone like Commander Begay? They'll listen to her. Or the HEW Minister, I suppose. Give it a try, Dr. Haber."

Dr. Haber held his stare a moment longer, then went to his desk to pick up the phone while Orr looked for his jacket - no, he had given it to Heather, hadn't he. He wanted it now; cold air kept washing into the office from the empty window.

"Why didn't you just get rid of the Aliens?" Dr. Haber asked, the phone at his ear.

"I don't choose." He had no choices, only the next path that opened before him, only one path. "Don't you see that yet? I follow."

"You follow my hypnotic suggestions, yes, but never fully, never directly and simply -"

"I didn't mean those," Orr said, but the phone had spoken and taken Haber's attention away from him, and he got up quietly and slipped out to find Heather.

She was there in the basement, hanging on to the big electrical switch and scowling at it with the same grim expression as her big mask ring; but she smiled when she saw him come in. "Well! Did you take care of the Aliens?" she said.

"Sort of. I don't know. It should be a little better now."

He was listing sideways, because of his leg and the weight he had moved in his dreams, and she caught his arm to support him. "Come on, then," she said, "let's get out of here, if the big doctor doesn't need you for anything else. Christ, it's cold! I want something hot to eat this time. And maybe a couple more drinks."

He was too relieved at finding her alive to argue, and too tired not to let her help him back up the stairs, and so they walked out of the Institute into the spring chill leaning on each other, Orr's jacket draped over them both.

under the veil of dreams

When he saw the woman again, many sessions later, his eyes stung. She stood on the platform with shallow waves of lava lapping at the metal below her feet, vibrant and solid and not grey, steady as a harbor lighthouse shining the way to safety from the shore.

He began to greet her, and she lunged at him and shoved him down, shouting, "Look out!" as little rings of flame fwipped over their heads. She raised a sleek steel gun and fired a rattle of bullets at something on another platform above them, and there was a soft little alien cry before the rings stopped.

She helped him back up and said, "Sorry about that. Those guys still get in sometimes, I don't know how. Probably messing with shit they don't understand - I'd leave them alone if they didn't keep coming after me."

On the other platform huddled a forlorn heap of dark grey cloth; he swallowed and looked away to focus on her. She was frowning at him, and he wondered vaguely why she wasn't wearing her helmet this time. "What are you doing back here?" she asked. "I thought we figured out those aliens of yours. They seem like a nice bunch. Cryptic as hell, though."

"It's not them," he said, glancing down. "They're fine, they fit. It's the doctor. I can't get away from him, and he keeps pushing, trying to make things go the way he wants, to change things..." Even now, when he had come here of his own will, he could feel that push like a river flooding out of its banks to sweep him in one direction or another, but never towards the way that it would fit.

"The doctor, huh." The woman sighed. "I don't think I can help you with that."

"But I lost her, and I can't - I can't get away on my own. He keeps making me dream and dream... You helped me before, didn't you?"

"That was different. You say it's aliens I don't know, I have to check it out. The doctor is a human problem. I try not to mess with those." She walked past him, towards another of the computer screens set into a stony wall at the back of the roofless chamber.

Scorned and miserable, he followed her, crying out, "Aren't you human?"

"Yeah, it's complicated."

She sat down beneath the computer screen and leaned back against the wall, then motioned for him to join her. He hesitated, the impatient river's pull still tugging at his feet, and the woman said, "You don't have to worry about time here. It's not a thing. Sit down already."

He sat. A pleasant warmth seeped into his shoulders from the wall as it hummed.

"Look, I'm gonna be honest with you," the woman said. "Part of the reason I went into your line was to see if - well, there's this friend of mine I lost track of a while ago, and I was kind of hoping I'd run into him again. Doesn't seem like he's going to show up in your lines, and like I said, this doctor or whatever, he's a human problem. I shouldn't have gone in the first time, probably, but hey -" She shrugged, and her mouth went crooked in a half-smile. "- what can I say? I miss the jerk sometimes. And I got a couple of soft spots left in me when someone needs a hand."

"I'm sorry. About your friend," he said.

"It's okay." Her gaze drifted up to the stars. Behind her, the screen's display shifted in slow but constant motion: green and white symbols melting into each other before swirling apart, only to reform into something new. "There's always the closure, eventually. Anyway. You said you lost someone on this path?"

He rubbed sweat from his face; had the room been this warm before? "It's not the same path. I keep having to find new ones, all the time, because he wants to find the best one for himself and everybody else, but now I've lost her, and I don't think - I don't know whether they're really a better way or not, half the time, and it's not necessary, all these changes. It's not how it works, it's not how things are, but he can't let it be. You understand, right?"

"I think so. You do it a little differently from me, but I know how it goes." She chuckled without humor. "Can't always get what you want, but you find the path you need - whether you like how it goes or not."

"And now," he said, "now he wants to do it himself, but he's not connected..." His hands moved through the air, trying to shape with gestures the sense of someone without roots. "If he does it, everything's going to break loose, and I'm afraid that - afraid of -" He let his hands fall to the floor; dandelions sprouted between his fingers, nodding in an unfelt breeze, and he closed his eyes against their radioactive brightness.

"Wait. Show me that again. That path, there. If there's a way you're avoiding because it always ends badly, I need to -"

"I can't! Not that way. Never -" Fallout sickness curled in his guts, in his head, and the dandelions bobbed and swayed with an ill wind against his knuckles. "If I go that way, I can't - I can't bring it back right. Not again. Even once was - I can't do it again."

"Okay, okay, calm down." Her hands rested heavy on his shoulders, and his eyes opened to see her crouched in front of him and leaning forward. "No going that way, I got it. So. Not just aliens and doctors you got a problem with, then."

"No, I suppose not." He looked away from the dandelions that kept pulling his gaze down to cracked concrete and up into her dark eyes. He -

- was gone, without weight or form, floating in a blackness pricked through with the brilliance of stars, and it rose and fell and rose and fell and rose around him in swells like the eternal rolling of the sea, and out of the swells flowed a web of lines or a multi-dimensional grid or overlapping ripples wrapping around him. In a panic he tried to flail his arms and free himself, but he only pulled the lines tighter around his lack of shape and they exploded in his vision like suns, like grenades, like a billion universes unfolding out of the void -

The woman blinked, and he was back in the room with the grey walls and metal floor. "So, yeah," she said, as he gasped for air in great shivery breaths, "you see how it is. I got a lot to take care of, and I figured I could leave your lines to you."

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Buddy, is that really what you want to worry about right now?"

He bit his tongue against a reply, but the question still burned in his mind as she stood up, stretched, then helped him to his feet. "Come on," she said, sighing, "I'll help you look for who you lost, at least. Shouldn't be too hard, as long as she doesn't mind getting found."

She turned around and pressed a metal square next to the computer screen, and a part of the wall slid up; behind it lay only shadows. She gestured, and he followed her into the whispering dark.

They'd gone up to George's cabin for something like a honeymoon. Not much to look at - tiny and hardly any furniture, only an oil lamp for light and an old Franklin stove for heat - but Heather had loved it immediately; it was just the kind of place George would have. Simple, though it wasn't quiet, with the creek roaring in the back at all hours. It was September and already cold up there in the mountains just about any time that wasn't high noon, so they kept the fire built up in the stove. "We're going to smell like woodsmoke for days," she said to George while they were cooking breakfast on the second morning. She didn't mind it. It was a good homey sort of smell, a good way to start their marriage.

George was lucky to get that cabin; she'd told him so on the drive there, but he had just shaken his head. He didn't believe in luck much. Well, she didn't mind that, either, or she wouldn't have married him, would she?

They hadn't brought anything fancy for food, so she was putting together a few sandwiches for them to take on a hike and turned around to ask George to pass her some of that awful mustard she liked despite herself, but he wasn't there. She knew he'd been there just a moment ago, filling up a couple of bottles with water, but she couldn't see him anywhere in the cabin. She called his name - maybe he'd gone outside for a minute - but he didn't answer. Where the hell was he? The cabin was a single room, it didn't have anywhere for him to hide.

Someone knocked on the door. Heather's throat closed up - they were on vacation, dammit, no one ought to be coming all the way up here to bother them - but she answered it anyway.

"Got a delivery for the Orrs," said the mailwoman, who was wearing armor for some reason. "Can you sign for it?"

Of course she could, she was an Orr now, and Heather took the clipboard from the mailwoman's brown hands with her grey ones and scribbled her signature across it. She started to return it, then realized that out of habit she had scrawled Lelache, not Orr, but the mailwoman had already taken the clipboard back and handed her the package. It was bulky and wrapped in cheap brown paper, but easy and light to hold. "Look, I don't want this," Heather said, nearly shouting over the noise from the creek, "but I can't find my husband. He's supposed to be right here helping me with the sandwiches and he's not. Could you help me look for him?"

"Yeah, sure," the mailwoman said, and they went around the back of the cabin together.

But it wasn't the creek with its endless choral shouting behind the cabin any more. It was the sea, bold and blue in the sunlight, beating against a white sandy shore. Heather took a deep breath and choked on it; the air was too hot and filled with the stinging of salt. "George!" she tried to call, but forcing breath through her throat took the effort of Hercules, and the crashing of waves buried her thin cry.

"He's out there," the mailwoman said, pointing. "See?"

Heather squinted for George's form in the water. Shit. This wasn't how things were supposed to go, she knew it. They should be making sandwiches and laughing together, just the two of them, getting ready to go walk in the woods... The waves kept clawing further and further up the sand, almost to her feet. She still couldn't see George out there - too much foam and glare from the sun, who could see anything?

The package in her hands started to vibrate softly. An old familiar tune drifted up from it, clear even through the waves' pounding beat:

I get by with a little help from my friends

With a little help from my -

She awoke in the twilight with her husband asleep on the floor across from her, and the old record spiraling out that silly song in a loop.

Much later that night, as they were falling asleep again - in bed, this time, instead of on the floor - she said, "You know, I had the funniest dream earlier."

"What kind?"

"Well. Nothing special like the ones you have!" She yawned. "It was about our honeymoon, only we went to the beach instead of your cabin - I think? I don't really remember it. But there was an ocean, and some strange woman with a delivery for us, and I was looking for you..."

"I think I dreamed something like that, too," said George. "The ocean, anyway, and a bit about the cabin. What a funny coincidence. Was it that strange a dream, though?"

"I don't know, I guess it was just odd for me. I don't usually dream about real places I've been. Maybe it was the pot that did it."

"Well," George said, echoing her tone, "I'm glad you did this time."

"Me, too! And I don't even know why." She kissed his nose and burrowed into the sheets, yawning again. "Let's go back up there, after you're done with Haber tomorrow. It's the weekend anyway, who cares. It'll be an early anniversary."

"I'd like that," he said softly. "Sure, let's go back. When it's all done."

The disturbance was small, compared to the rifts she had handled before, but it ran deep. She spread her hand (will) over the crack (doubt) in the wall (waves) and saw it splintering across multiple lines.

Is [?action] required?

Yeah. Maybe. She'd already touched these lines, and whatever was at work, it was no primal, devouring force of chaos. Just some doctor who didn't know what he was doing and couldn't take five damn minutes to ask someone who did. Or didn't think anyone else was worth listening to. She might have met a couple of those types (Strauss) (Tfear) before.

[?Action] is necessary.

Eh. Maybe not. There was still that guy, the one who didn't need a chip in the head to dream. He could probably handle the nightmares of a single idiot. How badly could one human fuck up the paths of a single planet, anyway?

The crack chewed at her fingers and writhed, seeking freedom.

Lost ones anew are lost.

"Fine, fine," she said aloud - sometimes she spoke to hear the sound of her own voice, to remember she still had one. "I'm not going in all the way, though. Just for a little back-up if he needs it."

Compromise [?peace] is [?acceptable].

Good enough. She closed her fist over the crack and slipped through into the crest of the wave.

Waves. Her mistake. Twenty tides at least, pulling and pushing each other and dragging in others, foam and sand (souls and bedrock) flying in gritty fountains, continents grinding themselves to nothing as they crashed against their duplicates. Sinking deeper into the (water) world she tasted salted honey, touched scalding ice, ran across rivers that yowled like angry cats and spat green glass at her. Okay, yeah. Maybe some action was necessary. Where the hell was that guy again? The life-thread that she'd made for herself before so she could look around the line in person was lost in the raging currents, and she didn't want to pick it up again anyway, not yet. Just find him, and wherever he was, there the chaos-heart would be also. Coast, rain, sunset, aliens, woods, cabin, creek, city, towers, more rain, ferry, river, the foundations that didn't change except when some fucking dumbass tried to twist the world into a way it couldn't go -

There, yeah. Poor bastard was walking right into the void to try and turn it off. Struggling to do it, with the negation eating its way out from the non-center, but walking headfirst into it anyway. Well, she still wasn't going to dredge that lost thread up and enter the knotted mess the lines had become, but she knew what he could use.

As the wrong stars rang off-key and mud flowed beside lava in the high halls of the mountain and the splintered bones of a dead world jutted through the surface cohesion of the wave (reality), she spoke; and her voice was both law and action, written in the bonds of subatomic particles and moving along the inevitable arc of space-time(-dream).

Hey, she said. Hang in there. You know the way.

And George Orr did.

a clearer path

Heather Andrews, formerly Lelache, beginning to consider Orr, wasn't expecting a new client. She wasn't supposed to handle that kind of thing, just the filing and appointments and such, but sometimes one of the seniors would shove someone off on her, because they were too busy or because they'd forgotten they knew a different Heather, one who was a barred lawyer instead of a legal secretary. Maybe she'd just sit the damn bar one of these days and settle the matter. A pay raise never hurt.

"It's not a big deal," said the giant woman sitting on the other side of her desk, wearing faded jeans and a dark green button-down shirt. "I just wanted to talk to someone, find out if I had a case or not."

"Well. You'll have to tell me about the problem first!" A sudden sense of déjà vu swept over her - hadn't she said something similar before, to someone else - and with it uncertainty. How had this woman gotten into her office again? Who was she? Had she introduced herself at all, or had she just been there one moment, as she hadn't been there a moment earlier? Why did she look so familiar?

The woman didn't notice Heather's burst of nerves. "It's a military thing," she said, in her slow, rough voice. "Not court martial material or anything, but if you don't take those, that's okay. I can try somewhere else."

"No! We handle military cases all the time," Heather said. Actually she wasn't sure if she had ever assisted on one herself, but she didn't like to turn away a veteran. "What's the matter? Pension issues?" There'd been a lot of those after the Break; military records, like everything else, had become about as reliable as snake oil.

"Yeah, kind of."

"Then why don't we start with your full name and rank?" Stupid little trick, trying to find out a name she should have gotten already.

"Allison - two Ls - Delgado Begay. Commander."

Oh, Christ. She didn't bother writing that on her notepad, but said, "Sorry. I should have recognized you - you were all over the news, once." It was the damn Break again, you couldn't ever be sure what had happened or who'd done something.

"No problem. I kinda like it better when people don't know me. Unless it's the pension office."

"I hear you on that. Hard to believe they'd try to give a big hero like you the run-around, though!"

"That's the military for you." Begay shrugged impassively. "You want a handshake and a pat on the back, that's one thing, you start talking about back pay, that's something else."

"Well, I'm pretty sure we can help you," Heather said. "Can you tell me who you've already talked to?"

Begay hesitated, then gave her a few names, and after a little more prying, the names of some friends who'd been having trouble with the system, too. Heather took it all down to pass on to Rutti and said, "All right, we'll make some inquiries and see what kind of case we can put together. How should I get in touch with you? Phone, mail..."

"I don't have a phone right now," Begay said. "And it's not urgent for me. Just call my buddies, they'll pass it along - they need the help more than me." She listed a couple of phone numbers to join the names on the pad; when Heather looked up she had already risen from the chair and turned to leave, but then she paused, looking back. "Hey," she said. "You happen to know a guy named George Orr?"

Heather's instinctive sympathy for vets hardened into suspicion. "Why do you ask? How do you know him?"

Begay shrugged again, but this time with a crooked smile. "Must be destiny," she said. "No pressure, but next time you see him, could you tell him I said good job? Thanks."

She was out the door before Heather could put together another question. Shit. What kind of thing was that to walk out on? Getting asked to pass on a mealy-mouthed cliché like good job - what the hell! Maybe she wouldn't, just out of spite. Who wanted to get weird messages from strange women out of nowhere, anyway? She glared down at her notes. She'd forgotten to write down the important bit, hadn't she, the name of the client who was actually going to file, and she picked her pen up to add it.

She paused. Wait. What had she been going to write down again? The last few minutes had gone fuzzy. She had been talking to a potential client, hadn't she? Or had it all been an idle daydream about another life, wishful thinking about catching a real case for once in a space between bouts of filing. Goddamn, her mind was going, and she didn't know what to blame it on. Maybe she had been working too hard, George said so sometimes; then again, his boss was an Alien, it kept whatever the hell hours it wanted. She'd just organize these notes on the vets that she'd pulled up for Rutti first, and then go rest her eyes or something...

Outside, the air was warm and heavy with damp between showers. The sidewalks had filled briefly with people dashing from one place to the next while the rain was on its break, and out of the crowd the occasional bulk of an Alien loomed. One was stopped in front of the doors to the Pendleton Building; grumbling workers and shoppers parted around it in reluctant ripples until a tall woman in a green shirt came out to join it, and the two drifted east towards the river.

The woman squinted up at the patchy clouds, and the first drops of the next rain spattered against her forehead and nose. "Okay, maybe 'good job' was overselling it a little," she said. "Whatever. It'll hold, looks like."

"Dreamer, dream no more," said the Alien.

"Dreamer, dream again! Is that how it goes? I guess it works." More raindrops splashed onto her shirt and hair, and one caught on her stubby eyelashes before she blinked it away. "Well, I'd better get out of this and back to work," she told the Alien. "What about you?"

"At presently occurring time, self-group is sufficient," the Alien said. "Do not hesitate to summon auxiliary forces if required in future following."

"Thanks. And hey, same for you - I'll keep an eye out."

A moment later the thickening clouds broke open. Rain rattled against the Alien's armor; the empty pavement beside it darkened as the water sank in, and steam rose around it, all-encompassing as the depths of the sea.