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out of existence.
But I was not about to dig her up.
    A flurry of wings announced the
arrival of a mantid, and not just any mantid. I recognized the
patches on his hind wings. I couldn’t see the rider from below, but
this was clearly Seraf, Urszula’s trusty war bug. Only recently did
I realize that his name was a mocking dig against the Seraphim who
persecuted souls who dared not chase the Horus in the
Deeps.
    Urszula leapt off Seraf’s back before
she had even landed in the gravel, charged into me, wrestled me
down and straddled me, pinning me down and holding an obsidian
blade to my throat.
    “ What the fuck?”
    She was grinning as she pricked me
with her knife. That girl had a funny way of showing
affection.
    “ And what are you doing
here? I thought you said you were never coming back. Why aren’t you
with your woman?”
    “ We … uh … kinda had a
hitch in our plans. Karla got deported. I went to jail.”
    “ You are a bad boy? They
jail you for murder? Because we kill the assassin? The
cartel?”
    “ No. It was for something I
did long before that.”
    “ You really are a bad
boy.”
    “ What about you?” I said.
“What are you doing here? I thought you liked being
alive.”
    “ I do … but I find my way
here still. The connection is too strong … the portal too weak to
resist my wants.”
    “ Did you miss your
friends?”
    “ Well … yes. And there are
new people I know from the Deeps. And you bring them here. I
thought … I would never see them again.”
    “ Well, can you … uh …
please get off of me?”
    A flight of nine mounted dragonflies
buzzed over us, heading for the plains.
    “ Jeez! What are they up to,
I wonder?”
    Urszula rolled off and sheathed her
blade. She sat cross-legged in the dirt, studying me.
    “ Just scouting. There is
some suspicious activity across the plains, down by the shore. They
are going to investigate.”
    “ What kind of … suspicious
activity?”
    “ Ships,” said Urszula.
“Yaqob is thinking … maybe the Frelsians now have a
navy.”
    “ Why would they need a
navy?”
    “ We don’t know. We are not
even sure it is Frelsians.”
    “ Who else would it
be?”
    She got up and helped me to my feet.
“We don’t know.” Her face went sour.
    “ What’s wrong?”
    “ You are leaving me
already. And I wanted you to fly with me to see the new
city.”
    “ New city?”
    But I was already tumbling. I had
awakened back in Coleman Medium. Some guy was singing at the top of
his lungs and someone else yelling even louder for him to shut up.
The noise echoed down the cell block.

    *****

Chapter 4:
Together
     
    I honored Karla’s request to make sure
I wasn’t followed by walking a route through downtown Rome so
circuitous and illogical that only a blood hound could have tracked
me to the Vatican. I wasn’t convinced that the threat she perceived
was real, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
    Who could be following her? Her wicked
father? Sergei’s avengers? Agents of the supernatural? All were
possibilities, but it was just as likely that her paranoia had no
basis in fact.
    All I knew was that I ached to see her
after all these months apart and this ache was a physical, tangible
thing. It was probably impossible for the real Karla to live up to
the version I maintained in my memory-scape, but I knew I would be
satisfied with her in any form.
    We had such a weird and tenuous
relationship. The actual number of hours we had spent together in
the living world probably totaled less than a week. Yet it felt
like we had spent years together. At least every minute together in
the Liminality was quality time, always intensely engaged, never
knowing who would fade first or when.
    So many things had contrived to keep
us apart, not the least of them, her death. I wondered sometimes if
she felt obligated to me only because I had managed to reincarnate
her. Did she love me as much as I loved her? Why was she always
running away?
    But now, I was striding full