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these strange people in this utterly strange place. If she had somehow lost the ability to communicate with them—
    Kalen dove across the room to search the pile of shoes and papers where the dragon ring had landed. As soon as he found it, he hurried back to Daiyu, offering the black jade circlet to her with a single pleading word.
    “I don’t want it,” she said.
    Kalen slipped the ring on his finger and then spoke into it as if it held a concealed microphone. Then he held it up to his ear and his expression of exaggerated bewilderment cleared up. “Oh!” he exclaimed, followed by a few more happy words.
    The ring appeared to be a translator. Daiyu could certainly use some translating right about now. She slipped it back onto her finger, where she was annoyed to find it made her hand feel just right.
    “I’m not wearing this to tell you that I accept your invitation to travel to your world,” she said icily. “But if it lets me have a conversation with you—”
    “Yes, that is exactly what it does,” Ombri said, and Daiyu felt a rush of relief when she was able to understand him again. “We also have a pair of black jade earrings, if you would be more comfortable wearing them.”
    “I don’t want to wear your jewelry!” she exclaimed. “I just want to understand what’s happening, or I would take the ring off right now!”
    “For now, we will agree that the ring does not constitute any kind of offer or acceptance, and let it serve only its more practical purpose of interpreting speech,” Ombri said. “As long as you wear it, you will be able to understand any of the dialects in our iteration, and your speech will be comprehensible to any individual you encounter.”
    “Why do you keep saying that?” she demanded. “What’s an iteration?”
    Ombri gave her a sober smile. “That, Daiyu, is the very essence of existence. Let me tell you our story.”

FOUR
    “OUNCE MILLENIA AGO, the world was formed, and it was perfect,” Ombri said in his resonant voice. He and Daiyu had seated themselves across from each other at the table, while Kalen made tea in the tiny kitchen.
    “Letusnotconcernourselveswiththemyriadgodswhohad ahandinitscreation,”Ombriwenton.“But there were factions among the gods—those who believed they could have created a better model—and they produced their own worlds.And more factions arose, and more, and each designed their own version, always taking as their template the original pattern. Eventually, the gods reached a truce and no more worlds were called into being, but by then there were at least a dozen copies, all variants of the original model. We call them iterations. Some were designed by spiteful gods, some by playful gods, some by sober gods, and no two are exactly alike, although all of them bear a great resemblance to each other, as if they were siblings born to the same two parents.”
    Daiyu stared at Ombri. It was too bizarre to believe. “Is my world the original template?”
    He smiled. “Hardly. It was constructed by one of the gods who has a—shall we say—streak of whimsicality. Your iteration is one of the most unstable of them all. Though I have to admit it is one of the most intriguing as well.”
    Daiyu folded her hands and did not answer.
    “In the normal course of events,” Ombri continued, “people do not travel between worlds. There are a few of us—servants of the gods—who move freely between iterations, carrying messages or watching over the native peoples. Although we monitor and report on the evolution of each iteration, we do not interfere with the way history unfolds in any of these worlds. Most of the time.”
    Kalen brought over a tray holding a teapot, three cups, and a pile of what looked like scones. Daiyu realized that she was starving. Kalen sat on the bench beside Ombri, and they all took a moment to serve themselves. The sconelike bread was delicious. The hot tea was sweeter and more flavorful than the tea back home, but it