Katrin's face was lit by the glow of her e-reader, but otherwise the room was dark and had been for an hour. Before that there had been a magic ball of light hovering up by the ceiling, but Katrin had let it fade away at some point. There wasn't a lot to see anyway; just a run-down motel room with decaying walls. We'd shoved the dresser up against the open window since it led into an endless hallway of faded yellow wallpaper that I didn't like the look of, and we'd pushed the bed up against the door so it couldn't open.

That seemed like it was probably enough to keep the various monsters of Nusos away, if they would have stumbled across us at all, but even if something did happen I suspected Katrin could blast most things to smithereens at this point. The biggest threat was actually the pins and needles all down my legs as I tried to shift them. "Ugh, legs fell asleep again, and it hurts."

Katrin didn't even look over. "Stop crossing them," she said, "and let them dangle down. We've been having this conversation every fifteen minutes. On that note, do you have any idea why it's taking so long?"

"Biltagiretzae is slow as balls unless it's aligned," I said, "and even slower if you're not on the prime plane. And slower if you haven't practiced, which I barely have at all, and... I don't know, it's a fickle bitch. I think I'm almost there, though if I'm honest I was also almost there twenty minutes ago. It's one of those planes where there's skill to it, it can slip out of your grasp if that makes sense."

Katrin made a sympathetic noise, and went back to browsing Wikipedia. She'd downloaded the whole thing - well, a text only version - and what had started as a quick check to make sure it looked okay had turned into her going down a rabbit hole a million links deep. I was also doing research, and thinking about how good it felt to have my mind in the memory palace without that strained feeling as if it was going to snap back to my body the second I got distracted.

Finally, the connection to Biltagiretzae opened and I started moving bags through. We'd collected a metric ton of shit on Earth, and it was time to tuck it away in case we had to make a hot exit. We'd kept some necessities, of course, but a lot of it would be better in storage. I was also pulling some things out, including our weapons and armor; hopefully if anyone saw us they'd think we were cosplayers or something, but I wasn't going to risk going into Coelestis without the proper gear.

Katrin powered down the e-reader and handed that to me as well, then started packing things as soon as they began appearing next to me, using some of the nice lightweight Earth backpacks we'd bought. She also had a checklist, because of course she did, and took a moment to remind me of the few things I'd forgotten before I closed the connection. I stood, stretched, put on my fancy armor jacket, and then we shouldered on the bags and moved the bed aside so we could leave.

Traveling in Nusos was safer if it was faster, and it was faster if everyone had a clear picture of where they were going and the imagination to think of how that could connect with where they currently were. That meant that one person could move very quickly, but a whole group could take a couple days to arrive at a destination. Katrin and I might as well have been one person, though, as we were both for sure thinking of the same place we'd carefully picked out to exit from - the lobby of a small office building with a very notable style.

"Okay," I said, "hotel hallway to a manager's office, office to an office hallway, then the lobby. Three steps, no problem."

It was ambitious and I knew it, but I also knew that positivity helped. When we opened the door it led to another hotel room, so I was already wrong, but we went through anyway and the next door did go to a hallway. I tried a few doors as we walked, and the the third one led to some sort of office area. It was a dead end, but we went through anyway and closed the door behind us; if we waited five or ten minutes it was likely to open to a different place.

I poked around on the desk and tried to turn the ancient computer on, but not surprisingly nothing happened. The paperwork was all nonsense, with even the sheets of paper that weren't fused into one impossible lump covered in random squiggles that for sure weren't any kind of actual writing. A nameplate at the edge of the desk was almost right, and said ROSMBRT SONJES MANANANGER on it. Good effort, Nusos.

When we opened the door again it was pretty close to the hallway we needed, with a sort of late-seventies style, so we headed down and started checking more doors. We came to an elevator and I hit the button just out of curiosity - much to my amazement, there was a garbled ding and the doors slid open.

"Huh. Okay, that's... tempting."

Katrin disagreed. "Even if it's safe, which I seriously doubt, there's a good chance it doesn't go anywhere. The best case scenario is it taking us to another hallway like the one we're in, and the worst case scenario is us getting trapped inside until the floor gives way and drops us down a bottomless shaft. No thank you."

Killjoy. Still, it wasn't worth arguing with her about. Someday, if we lived past the end of the world, I'd wander the planes doing stupid risky shit. For now, we turned and kept walking. The next section of hallway had a monster in it, something very fast and angry. I wasn't sure of much more than that, because when it was still thirty feet away lightning tore through it, blasting chunks all over the hallway. We paused only a moment to make sure more weren't coming, and then continued.

It took two more doors, but we popped out into the lobby as intended and found the shuttle parked there waiting for us. Piece of cake. "Okay," I said, "it was a little longer than I hoped for but still pretty smooth, so I think if we want to stop by some other countries before officially being done with Earth we could do that."

Katrin's brow furrowed. "You still think we won't be able to come back here for some reason once we get to the prime plane?"

"Yeah. It's probably nothing, or... well, maybe it's just that we'll have a lot of other responsibilities. But it feels very final, somehow. Anyway, I know Matlyn wanted to get samples of a few specific plants we couldn't find here, and there are some tourist things I wouldn't mind doing if I'm not going to be returning. It's worth thinking about. Although... knowing you, I'm guessing you already have."

She shrugged. "I may have made a list and started gathering visual references. You're not wrong about us having other responsibilities, though, so if we do it we'll want to set a schedule. I also looked into exchanging our money for different currencies, and some translation options since none of us speak anything but English."

We talked about it more when we got to the motel, and everyone seemed on board other than Emma, who was still freaking out over what had happened in Nusos and didn't ever want to go back. She was also freaking out about the idea that an evil wizard had tampered with her memories, and wasn't sure when it would be safe to go home again. To be fair, none of us were much help with that.

The hope was that if we stole all his shit - including any mana batteries he had - we would have leverage for making him agree to a very restrictive oath; he clearly had the means to make oaths, and had entered into them before. There were three big problems with that, however. The first was that we knew he'd weaseled his way out of oaths in the past, since it was pretty clear Bill had thought he'd shut down Coelestis - maybe twice - and it was still at least partially up and running. The second was that we weren't sure we could make that happen regardless, since he could refuse to entertain the idea or it could turn out he'd been doing the oaths with a spell that didn't make the process transparent enough to make us feel safe.

The third problem was simply that I didn't want to make a deal with Greg, I wanted to kill him. Fuck that guy.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot. We'd written up our demands, and planned on leaving them behind along with a prepaid phone we'd bought. We would give him a day or two to think about it, and then call and see what his counter-offer entailed. I didn't think there was any chance he'd take our initial oath, it was downright brutal. 'Never use magic or deliberately bring harm to anyone for the rest of your life' seemed fair, all things considered, but when I thought about someone making me give up any kind of magic? No way he'd agree.

"Tony," I said, "if you're willing to help you can maybe stake out Bill's place, let us know if you see Greg leaving. Though he can clearly teleport, assuming that was him in New York."

Tony looked like I'd just told him he was ugly and had no friends. "I... thought I was coming along with you guys? I mean, listen... I know this isn't my story. I gave the - the planar lodestone thing - I gave that back. No questions asked. But I was assuming that with a whole vault of magic items... you know, there would be one that nobody would miss. Plus, I have to see the Heart of Brinkmar."

Huh. That... wasn't what I'd been expecting him to say. "Uh... some of the magic items are probably super dangerous, and most won't work because there's no mana on Earth. But... yeah, fuck it, if we see one that doesn't have a fate attached to it and it seems like you could use it... who the hell am I to tell someone they can't steal a magic item from an evil wizard? Shit, I wouldn't have even asked. As far as the Heart of Brinkmar... I guess that means you read the book?"

He laughed. "Are you kidding? Magic is real, and these shadowy assholes are trying to get rid of any copies of a fantasy novel? Of course I read it. I read the whole trilogy, but it seems like it has to be something about the third book that's important. Coelestis actually bought the publisher and shut down production - supposedly printing had already started and they destroyed all the existing copies. The only book that publisher put out before getting stripped for parts was some programming book."

Oh. "Let me guess, XCog+?" That had to have been to get the Clockmaker's imprinted spirit on Quebristun to include Earth in its enhancement of High Imperial and suppression of other magic languages.

"Yeah! Anyway, since the Heart of Brinkmar is mostly in the third book and at the end it says Jake Ross took it with him to Earth I feel like that has to be one of the things in the vault, and they wanted the book gone so nobody would come looking for it."

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Yeah, I'd had the same thought. "You said mostly. Is it mentioned anywhere in the first two? My memories of the books got all fucked up, and I haven't had a chance to re-read them yet."

Tony looked thoughtful. "Well, I'm assuming that it's a reference to the power, not the object. It's in the first book - it's what the Sundered Throne taps into - but it wasn't contained in anything at that point, unless maybe it was in the throne. I think it was just sort of... a force, you know? And so the thing at the end, that's a device that has trapped the power inside of it. And whoever breaks it open gets all that power, enough to do whatever they want."

Yeah. I remembered that part, at least. All the power of the ancients is contained within, the book had said, and if Thanatos had destroyed it he could have seized that power and remade the world in his image. "Well, we can keep an eye out for it. We might need it, back on the other side, and I don't want to leave it here regardless. But we for sure shouldn't just take a hammer to it, even I'm not that irresponsible."

I especially didn't trust that the books were remotely accurate, given the way they'd ended with everyone happy.

When the time came, Emma and older Zoey stayed behind - along with a stack of gold just in case they had to go on the run or something. The rest of us headed out, ready to execute the most incredible heist Earth had ever seen. What could be worth more than a vault full of magic items on a world without magic? The previous time, as a fairly inexperienced sixteen-year-old, I'd done a pretty impressive job getting in; there had been some embarrassing shortcomings in Greg's security, but I'd still been the one to notice and plan for them. I'd found the security code, cased the place to find the gap in camera coverage, figured out how to identify which unit led to the vault. I was still pretty proud of it.

By now, Greg had surely improved his security. New codes, better cameras, stronger locks. It wouldn't matter, because my cunning plan accounted for all of it.

We approached the self-storage place from the one side with no visible cameras, that being the side with no windows or doors. "Time for phase one," I said, and Katrin sighed. Because she was a killjoy. She put her hand on the wall, muttered as her eyes glowed, and the sounds of traffic vanished as her silence dome covered us. A moment later, the wall exploded inwards - blasting some random person's boxes of old clothes into oblivion.

"Phase one complete," I said, and walked through the hole.

"Is there a phase two?" Errod asked, using his sword to slice the ruined metal gate away and let us into the interior hallway.

"Uh... arguably phase two would be Katrin checking for wards when we get to the actual vault."

Katrin sighed as she followed. "So what you're saying, unless I'm mistaken, is that I'm the one doing all the work?"

"Obviously. I'm the mastermind, I came up with the devious plan. I don't do hard labor."

"I'd hardly call it labor," she replied, "and I also wouldn't call 'hey let's just blow a hole in the wall' a devious plan."

I wasn't appreciated by my minions. It was, in fact, a devious plan; it was unexpected, avoided the security measures, and meant we'd be in and out really quickly. Tony had also done some work, popping in the day before to ask about rates and confirming that the interior cameras weren't the same as the exterior ones. I'd figured as much, since Zoey had said the exterior cameras were being live-monitored by a security company. Greg wouldn't want anyone else watching the inside of the building, so those feeds would be going somewhere else - and probably not monitored all day every day.

Down in the basement, we reached unit twenty-two. "Nothing in threadsight," I said, "what's the mana like?"

Katrin crouched down, letting her hands hover in front of her. "There's something here, wards are on the other side."

"The whole thing?" Errod asked.

She shook her head, and indicated the bottom edge. Since they were roll-up metal doors, it was likely that opening it would break some connection. Errod made a few slices with the Sword of Density, and the whole center of the gate flopped into the unit. Man, it was fucking easy to break into places if you didn't feel the need to be subtle about it. We wrestled the cut-out bit into the hallway so it wasn't in the way, and then I walked in to the unit.

"Okay, here we go. The secret door is right there."

Katrin stopped and stared. "I can't see the runes directly, but the mana is... very complicated here. There must be runes all through the back wall, probably more than one layer. I don't know how to get through this without setting something off, and we certainly can't use brute force."

Hmm. Before, I'd just crammed something into a little crack and the door had opened. Bill had said "the way in still works", so I shoved a lockpick into the little slot and wiggled it around. Nothing happened. Hmm. Getting back up, I walked to the display of decorative spoons. Could it need a spoon, specifically? I grabbed one and tried again, but still didn't have any luck. There was something I was missing.

Everyone else was silent, probably noticing the look on my face as I stared at the spoons. Which one had I used before? I could go check the memory, but I didn't just want the answer; I wanted to know why. Finally, after almost two long minutes of staring, something clicked. "Fun fact," I said, "Bill once told me there were still people in Ohio that flinch when they hear the name Jennifer Young. This heist is for you, grandma Jen."

I slid the handle of the Ohio spoon in, and with a click the door swung open.

Bill had to have set this up ages ago, just in case. Greg hadn't known, still didn't know, that there was a backdoor in his wards. He'd added extra security on, but his foundations were cracked. We all walked down the ramp into the vault, and for a moment we were all speechless as we read cards and carefully looked at magic items. "Katrin," I said, "take these markers. Start vetting items, draw a green line on any that should be safe to bag up, and red on any that we shouldn't touch yet. Skip the ones with those green metal loops, I've got threadsight on and every single one of those has a fate thread that's tied to the loop and then goes off that way. All of them in the same direction."

Tony started browsing, and Zoey headed towards the back to check the computer. Sadly, when she got there it had been upgraded. "This is just a terminal," she said, "and it needs an authenticator app to even attempt to log in. I'm not going to get anything off of this."

I suspected Greg wouldn't trust the cloud, but it was possible he'd set up something with an offsite server that he owned. Maybe back in New York. I wasn't really tech savvy, but the details didn't matter right now. We'd take everything that wasn't nailed down, and go from there. As I was talking to Zoey, I heard a crash from the far side of the room and we all froze. I had a knife in my hand before I knew it, and I could see Errod had his sword up, but none of us were breathing.

Finally, a voice rose from behind the furthest shelf. "Sorry," Tony said, "I won't touch anything else. Sorry."

We all let out a breath, and put weapons away. I went over to see what he'd done, but as I got closer I was distracted by my threadsight - there was some sort of jar on a shelf near Tony, and based on the glow coming from it there was a spirit inside. I got a closer look, and could see that while the spirit in question took up the whole jar and therefore didn't have any identifying features, there was also someone's Dumine in there. A small cardboard box sat on the shelf behind it, and when I pulled the box down and opened it I found a few random personal effect that looked like they were from Fantasyland. Most didn't mean anything to me, but then I came across Cyne's notebook. Ah. Did that mean... was Cyne's ghost crammed into this jar? I pocketed the jar and journal, just in case.

I realized there were other boxes, and started pulling them down. The first had nothing of interest, but in the second one... there was Matlyn's backpack. Inside, stacks of seed packets and multiple notebooks full of plant facts. I grabbed the whole box and took it to her, since there was a chance the other Matlyn had found some samples this one had missed. She, meanwhile, had located some canisters with living things in stasis. The weasel-thing and the lizard monster didn't interest her, but there was also a strange plant that she was very excited about. Finding the things left behind by another version of her dying dampened her enthusiasm somewhat, but she still tried to explain why I should be super excited about this thing.

I excused myself and started examining the green metal loops, but I couldn't tell if it was safe to unscrew them the shelves. I went to find Katrin so she could try to see if there was active mana flow, but she was staring at something on a shelf next to her. What now? She heard me approaching and looked at me with a mildly anxious expression, then pointed to where a thin silver cord was coiled. I'd last seen it as it wrapped around Grunkle's neck and burrowed in. Huh. "So... does this mean Grunkle is dead?"

"Who is Grunkle?" Tony asked, coming around the corner behind me.

There was a lot to unpack there. "Uh... the short version is... he was a con artist body snatcher."

Tony chuckled nervously, probably not thrilled at the idea of body snatchers. I'd have to be sure not to tell him about Tindelus. "Sounds like someone that's better dead than alive."

I shrugged. "Yeah, I guess. I mean, I'm not going to lose any sleep over him."

Katrin shook her head. "I expect he is dead, just because we haven't seen him on a shelf here so far and he can't survive out there on his own, but what this cord indicates is that the Behemoth is dead."

Well, pop the fucking Champagne! It felt a little strange for him to just be gone without it involving a fight, but given how those fights had gone for me I wasn't sad to have missed it. One less enemy for me to worry about. "That's some great news. Honestly, I was tempted to yank Grunkle out of his forehead just to let that thing rip his head off. I also didn't love the idea of him running around Earth, even though he wouldn't have been able to Hulk out. Side note, I think I found Cyne's ghost in a jar."

Tony raised an eyebrow. "Okay, and who is Cyne?"

Katrin took that one. "He was someone that we hired to help us navigate the planes, when we were going to look for - did Callie tell you about the lost Duminere?"

Tony nodded. "Okay. And he came here? Or was already here, like there's two Zoeys?"

"The second one," Katrin said, "so the other Cyne, the one that was hired by us rather than the other version of Zoey and Matlyn, should presumably still be safe in our world."

Katrin checked the green metal loops and confirmed they were safe to remove, so I started popping them free and dumping them in a bag. As I did so, I collected all the fate-bound items as well. I used gloves, and put them directly into a bag; while it was uncommon for fate threads to randomly switch targets, I didn't want to get snagged by one. Better to leave these attached to... Bill? Probably?

The shelves were quickly clearing out - there wasn't all that much, really, and most of it seemed safe to handle. I stopped dead, staring at something I recognized. A strange ivory orb. "Holy shit, we have a way of making binding oaths! This is what Sentortzi uses! That means this plan is looking like it's actually possible."

Errod was holding a whole pile of swords, because of course he was. "That's great news," he said, "I think we're done with that side of the room, and other than the shelf you're at right now this side just has dangerous items. Katrin is moving those one at a time and individually wrapping them up."

I pointed to a sword hilt that was missing its blade. "What's the deal with that thing?"

Errod shook his head. "It's... not a sword, not really. It forms a blade of pure destructive energy, but the way you would fight with something like that... you'd have to treat it as a whole different weapon. You also would need to make sure you don't hit yourself with it."

"Other than accidentally hitting yourself with it, is it dangerous?"

He shrugged. "A note on the card said 'made to destroy magic items, do not allow blade to come into contact with alchemical metals, results can be catastrophic' so I think that's the main concern."

I took it. "Okay. It's very tempting just to destroy everything that we don't want, but I don't love the idea of it being catastrophic. If we want to avoid it touching magic items, we could always just leave it on Earth... and I did promise Tony something..."

Errod shook his head, clearly not approving of that something being a weapon. But what American boy could live without his very own light saber?

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