The Chain

The floor was flat.

Jake's feet hit smooth stone and his body braced for the drop. His knees bent, his weight shifted to the balls of his feet, everything ready for wind and open sky. None of it came. The air was still. The ground stayed where it was.

He opened his eyes.

Grey walls. Grey ceiling. Grey floor. A room, circular, maybe sixty meters across, lit from everywhere at once. No windows. No sun. No shadows. After two weeks of sky so big it made him dizzy, the ceiling twelve meters above him felt like a hand pressing down on his head.

"Huh," Jake said.

Vauren came through behind him. Jake heard the same adjustment — the brace, the settle, the pause.

"This is wrong," Vauren said.

"Yeah." Jake was already walking. His bare feet on the stone — warm, too smooth, the same temperature everywhere. He crossed to the nearest wall and put his palm flat against it. It didn't feel like stone. It felt like something pretending to be stone that had never actually met stone. "Smell the air."

Vauren breathed in. His face did something subtle.

"There's nothing," Jake said. "No smell at all. Two whole worlds of stuff and this place smells like absolutely nothing." He knocked on the wall. The sound died immediately. Didn't echo, didn't travel, just stopped. "That's not right either."

The portal behind them had already closed. The wall was seamless where it had been, smooth grey, like it had never opened. Jake tapped the spot where they'd come through. Nothing. He tapped harder. Same nothing.

"Sealed," Vauren said.

"Very sealed." Jake turned around. "So what's—"

Eight people sat against the far wall.

Jake hadn't noticed them because they weren't doing anything. Different species, different builds, scattered along the base of the wall with their packs arranged around them. A couple looked up. Most didn't. They had the energy of people in a waiting room who'd been told the doctor was coming four hours ago.

"Hey," Jake called across the room. "How long have you been here?"

The biggest one stood up. Tall, broad, dark-skinned, geometric markings on his forearms. He regarded Jake the way you regard a new patient in the waiting room. "Two days."

"Two days of what?"

"Sitting."

"I'm going to go talk to them," Jake said.

"Evidently," Vauren said.

Jake crossed the room barefoot and sat down next to the tall one without being invited. The man checked his feet. Then his face.

"Jake," Jake said. "That's Vauren. We just came through from link two. What's happening in here?"

"Roden." He sat back down, heavily, like standing had cost him something he didn't have much of. "And the honest answer is we have no idea. We came through, the room was empty, the portal ahead was dark." He pointed at the far wall. Jake turned — a portal frame, larger than the one they'd entered through, set into the wall. Carved lines around it. Dark. "We waited. Then he showed up."

"Who?"

"The—" Roden stopped. He had the face of a man trying to describe something he still hadn't processed. "You'll see. He comes and goes. Just — when he shows up, don't do anything stupid."

"I don't do stupid things," Jake said.

One of the others — small, grey-skinned, four-armed — made a sound that might have been a laugh.

"What?" Jake said.

"Nothing. You just walked across a sealed room to sit next to strangers barefoot. That's confidence or stupidity and I can't tell yet."

"Both, usually," Jake said. "What's your name?"

"Pol."

Eight people. The fast ones, the ones who'd been ahead of Jake the whole way — two days through the forest while Jake took three, out in front the entire climb up the platforms. Now they were sitting on the floor of a featureless room waiting for something they couldn't name, and they looked exactly the way that should make someone look.

"So this portal to link four," Jake said. "Has anyone—"

"Tried everything," Roden said. "Touched it, pushed it, put Vincu into it. Dark."

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"The carvings around it?"

"Decoration, we think. Or a language nobody reads."

Jake stood up. "I'm going to go look at it."

"We've looked at it."

"Sure, but I haven't."

He walked to the portal frame. The carvings were shallow, precise — spirals, angles, lines that might have meant something. He traced one with his finger. Ran his hand along the frame. Put his forehead against the stone and closed his eyes. The pull was there, faint, the same thing he'd felt at the end of the forest and at the top of the thirty-first platform. Link four, on the other side of this, waiting.

"It's there," he said to himself. "It's just closed."

He went back and sat next to Roden. Vauren had walked the perimeter, found nothing, returned. He was standing near Jake with his arms at his sides. Both arms. The left one still held close but mobile — the shoulder had healed through the climbing, the water working through the joint. Functional if not perfect.

"So we wait," Jake said.

"We wait," Roden said.

"For what?"

"For him."

The rabbit was sitting in the center of the room.

Jake would have sworn the room was empty ten seconds ago. He'd walked through the middle of it twice. His feet had been on that stone. There had been nothing there.

A rabbit. A humanoid rabbit, sitting cross-legged on the floor, with ears that rose almost a meter above its head. White fur, short at the face, longer at the throat. Eyes dark brown, almost black, large, open. It wore dark fabric that folded around its body and pooled on the stone. Its hands rested on its knees. The fingers were long, jointed wrong, completely still.

It was maybe a meter tall. The ears nearly doubled that.

Jake stared at it. Then he grinned.

"That's a rabbit," he said.

"Yes," Roden said, and his voice had changed.

"A giant rabbit just appeared in the middle of the room."

"He does that. Listen to me—"

Jake was already walking toward it. Behind him he heard Roden say something else and Vauren say nothing, which meant Vauren was watching.

He stopped three meters away. The rabbit's ears tilted forward — both of them, together, smooth, like antennae finding a signal. The dark eyes tracked him. They'd been tracking him, he realized. Since before he turned around. Maybe since he arrived.

"Hi," Jake said. "I'm Jake."

The rabbit regarded him. The ears adjusted — a small rotation, precise, mechanical — and the eyes moved down to his bare feet and back up.

"The feet know before the mind does," the rabbit said. Its voice was light, clear, and it carried without effort across the silent room. "You walk the way water falls. Forward, always forward, because stopping was never part of the design."

Jake blinked. "I just took my shoes off because they broke."

The rabbit's ears tilted the other way. It said nothing for a moment. Then: "Every door opens because something broke first."

"Is that a riddle?"

"Is anything not?"

Jake studied the rabbit. The rabbit studied Jake. The ears were still, the eyes were enormous, the body hadn't moved once. It could have been a stuffed animal someone had made too real. Absurd. And the most deliberate thing in the room, and the room was made entirely of deliberate things.

Jake opened his mouth to ask another question. The rabbit unfolded one hand from its knee. The fingers extended — too long, too jointed, the fur thinning at the tips.

"Sit," it said.

Jake sat. He wasn't sure why. The rabbit's hand touched his chest.

His ribs moved. Inside his body, under the skin, the bones shifted — found positions they'd been wrong in since the fall on the platforms. A single bright wave of pain through his torso. Then nothing. The ache he'd been carrying since he hit that ledge, the catch in his breathing, the compensations he'd built so automatically he'd stopped noticing them — gone. He took a full breath. His lungs filled all the way.

The hand moved to his arm. The shoulder realigned with a low settling sound he felt in his teeth. The joint found its socket. He raised the arm. Full range. No pain.

"Oh," Jake said. He raised the arm again. Rotated the shoulder. Took another breath. "Oh, that's — thank you. That's incredible."

The rabbit didn't move. Its hand was still on Jake's arm. The dark eyes had gone still — a different kind of still from before, focused, the ears tilting forward by a degree. It was watching Jake the way it hadn't been watching him ten seconds ago.

Then it pulled its hand back. Folded it onto its knee.

"The water boy's shoulder. Send him."

Jake stood up. His body felt like it had been returned to him — the version from before the fall, the one that didn't lean, didn't compensate, didn't treat breathing as a negotiation. He jogged back across the room and the jog felt like flying.

"Vauren. Go. Let it touch your shoulder."

Vauren was studying the rabbit. The white fur. The ears. The stillness. His expression was doing something Jake had never seen on him — a kind of formal bafflement.

"That is a rabbit," Vauren said.

"I already said that. Go."

"It healed your ribs."

"And my arm. It's incredible. It just — puts everything back. Go."

Vauren's gaze went to Jake's arm, the way Jake was standing — straight, weight even. Then back to the rabbit. Something resolved in his face. He walked across the room with the posture he used for everything — formal, measured — and sat down across from the rabbit the way he'd sit across from a dignitary. The rabbit's ears tracked him.

Jake couldn't hear what was said. He saw the hand extend. Saw it touch Vauren's shoulder. Saw Vauren's body change — the left arm dropped from where he'd been guarding it, the shoulder rolled back, his spine straightened by a degree Jake hadn't known was wrong. Both arms at his sides. Balanced.

Vauren stood and raised his left arm above his head, studied his own hand, lowered it, raised it again.

He walked back with a different stride. Symmetric.

"Well?" Jake said.

Vauren made a fist with his left hand. Opened it. Made it again.

"The rabbit," he said carefully, "is adequate."

Jake laughed. It bounced off the grey walls and came back from everywhere, the first real sound this room had heard.

They sat against the wall. Jake next to Roden, Vauren beside Jake.

"So," Jake said. "Two days, a magic rabbit, a sealed portal. What do you think happens next?"

Roden rubbed his face with both hands. He looked tired. Two days of nothing in a room with no windows would do that. "He said something about a number. We think it's a hundred."

"A hundred people."

"A hundred travelers. The first hundred through from this year's opening. We think he's waiting for the rest."

The dead portal. The rabbit in the center of the room, still as sculpture. The eight people against the wall, the pair talking quietly, the three loners in their separate spaces, Pol with his four arms folded across his chest.

"Ninety more," he said.

"Ninety more."

Jake leaned his head back against the wall. His ribs didn't hurt. His arm didn't hurt. The floor was warm. The light was even, flat, sourceless. No shadows anywhere. He'd never been in a place without shadows before.

He closed his eyes. Listened for wind. There wasn't any.

He missed it.