“On your left!” Petros called, shouldering through the main road that led through Anjelica and toward the Fort’s main gate.

  He’d meant to leave the farm an hour ago. Then one Golem flagged a harvester as a “large bipedal crow,” and he and Eamon’s new Sigil lattice needed one last tweak. The fix was elegant; any worker bearing the etched token read as “friend” to the mobile scarecrows, but elegant wasn’t fast. By the time the Golems stopped shadowing pickers like anxious dogs, the morning had slipped its leash.

  Abby’s request still rang in his head: If you can catch Jack at the portal, go with him. Keep him to the letter. Petros had laughed then, because keeping Jack to any letter was like bottling wind, but he’d agreed. Of course, he had.

  He sprinted past the gate guard, who managed a half-salute, half-scold, cut across the cool stone hall, and burst into Fort Anjelica’s portal chamber just in time to watch the gateway thin to a sheet of blue glass and sigh out of existence.

  “Stars,” Petros breathed, hands braced on his knees.

  The portal keeper lifted a brow, unruffled. “Missed the window by fifteen heartbeats. Cooldown’s an hour. Unless you’re on fire, bleeding, or bringing a demon through, I can’t cycle the Key off-schedule.”

  Petros straightened, gulped a calmer breath, and tried a smile. “Define ‘on fire.’”

  The keeper’s mouth twitched. “Not metaphorical.”

  Petros dragged a hand through his hair and crossed to the threshold where the last of the ozone curl still clung to the air. The massive anchor sigils in the floor hummed their tidy, indifferent hum. Even as Council, even with carte blanche to travel, rules were rules: manifests filed, passes stamped, windows respected. The system kept people safe. It kept chaos from eating schedules alive. He believed in it. He just didn’t like it right now.

  He fished his Journal out, flicked it open with a practiced thumb. The page answered with a faint warm pulse, as if sympathetic. He pictured Jack’s grin anyway, the one that said Don’t worry, I’ll behave and always meant I’ll try until trying gets boring.

  “Hour,” Petros repeated to himself, more to make it real than because he’d forgotten.

  The keeper shrugged, not unkind. “You can wait inside if you like. Or send word to Pendle to hold you a slot next bell.”

  Petros exhaled, the last of the sprint shaking out of his calves. “Right. Then put me on the next manifest,” he said, already reaching for his Journal. “I’ll file with Quartermaster and send notice to Pendle to expect me on schedule.”

  The keeper nodded. “Third bell this afternoon. You’re cleared to ride that window.”

  Petros hesitated a heartbeat, did the math, and let the hope go. Even if he forced an emergency cycle, which he wouldn’t, Jack would be half a province ahead by the time the portal cooled. No catching a man who could cross forests like a storm front.

  He stepped back from the frame and let the chamber’s quiet fold around his frustration. Close to his own breakthrough or not, he didn’t have Jack’s wind-fed legs or Asil’s bottomless stamina. Not yet. He’d get there. For now, he’d keep the plan: meet Jack in Pendle in two days, like they said.

  He logged his passage, scratched a quick message for the Pendle steward to hold him a bunk, and rested his palms on the stone rail, gaze fixed on the empty air where a door would soon be again.

  “Try not to bungle a simple message drop, Jack,” he muttered, only a little bitter, mostly fond. Then to the keeper, “Never mind, I will just stick to my travel to Pendle in a couple of days.”

  He walked out of the chamber not wanting to face Abby’s scolding.

  Petros had just started plotting how to avoid his sister for the next forty-eight hours when a voice cut across the courtyard.

  “You had one job!”

  Abby didn’t so much cross the space as erase it, one heartbeat she was fifty feet away, the next she was nose-to-nose, arms folded, eyes doing their best impression of a disciplinary committee.

  Petros actually glanced left, then right, like the stones might open a secret exit. “Oh, hi, sis. Didn’t see you there.”

  “Are you trying to get away from me?” Abby asked, flat as a cleaver.

  He deployed his most disarming grin. “I can catch the next portal.”

  “You know very well you’ll never catch up to that man.” Some of the heat bled from her voice; she chose triage over lecture. “Let’s just pray Jack doesn’t muck this up.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Jack is a lot more responsible now.”

  “Not helping,” Abby said, already turning. She pivoted on a heel and strode off, the set of her shoulders daring any crisis to try something today.

  “It’ll be fine,” Petros told the air, which believed him exactly as much as he did.

  He sighed, rolled the last of the sprint out of his calves, and headed back toward the fields. Abby had already taken him off the teaching rota two days early; Eamon would handle first lessons. That left Petros free to watch the new Golems at work, tweak the sigil-tokens, and pretend, only a little, that he hadn’t just lost a bet with inevitability.

  Petros dragged a folding chair and a narrow writing table out of his extra-dimensional satchel, both pieces popping into full shape with the soft shuff the bag always made when it gave up something larger than common sense. Jack had demonstrated the trick a dozen times: if you could lift it, you could stash it, food held in stasis, tools, tents, half a lumberyard if you had the grip and the gall. Picture the thing, want the thing, and your hand closed on it like you’d never let go.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  It had taken practice, but Petros had learned the rhythm. Now he could reach past ink and chalk and pull a tripod brazier or a bundle of ladder rungs without looking. The definition of “anything you can lift” had crept wider with each level, too; bodies changed when Myriad rewrote the margins.

  Jack, naturally, abused the privilege. He was a cheerful magpie, sweeping up anything not nailed down, and, on a few memorable occasions, things that were. Twice, Asil had made him dump the bag and sort it, a mortifying exercise that filled a training yard with salvage like a merchant’s fever dream. Petros still didn’t understand how Jack had ever hit the satchel’s capacity; his own was half empty on its most ambitious day. Then again, half of Anjelica had been built with “junk” Jack hauled home from the eastern lands.

  The new Golems were doing their work now, gleaming eyes panning, ward-scripts reading fields the way a beekeeper read hives. Someone in a fresh-cut sigil token walked within three paces; the constructs tagged them as friend and turned their attention back to crows and locusts. With the farm quiet, Petros’ mind did what minds do when there’s nothing left but waiting: it wandered.

  He could feel his breakthrough press against him from the inside, a tide wanting shore. He’d put it off, buried in runes and lecture notes and the thousand small fires a growing city set each day. But he could hear the warning in his own bones now: force the change and you risk the core; guide it, and it becomes a door. Going out with Jack made sense. Jack had stood beside him since the worst day became the first day. He wasn’t like a brother. He was.

  That thought slid, as it always did, to his actual brother. Mike had walked into the “beta test” office in Arizona and stepped out into Aerothane, then been thrown two hundred years backward with Veronica, Abby’s best friend. Veronica had grown into a sorceress of terrifying grace; she’d shielded herself and Mike through the Great Disconnect, and the cost of that miracle had slammed them into the Shadow Realm like a door. If Petros had devoted himself to portal crystals with a scholar’s hunger, it was also with a brother’s stubbornness. Get Mike and Veronica back. Then, if the world allowed it, figure out a way to wedge a gate between Aerothane and Earth.

  A small head butted his shin, a firm little thunk that jerked him out of abstraction. Petros dropped a hand without looking. A goat kid, one of Old Mara’s new stock, leaned into the scratch, eyes half-lidded, tail doing the lazy pendulum of a creature convinced life would keep being kind for at least the next minute.

  “Fine, you win,” Petros murmured, rubbing the knobby ridge behind its ear. The kid bleated once, satisfied, and wandered off toward a patch of clover it had apparently negotiated with the Golems.

  He turned back to the notes scattered across his makeshift desk, an actual desk and chair he’d pulled from his satchel a few minutes earlier.

  The top page listed every outworlder in Anjelica with even a whisper of Space magic, short-hop portals, warps, folded steps, and other experiments that would someday matter for real interrealm work. Most were still green, but strands strengthened where they were used with intent. They would grow.

  Sometimes while he worked, morning burned itself away. His stomach reminded him he was still D-…for the moment. Jack said that after his own breakthrough, hunger dimmed to a suggestion, and mana gems did the heavy lifting. You could still eat for pleasure, but your body learned to draw from Myriad and leave almost nothing behind. Petros snorted. The only other C-tier in Anjelica would never mention that part aloud. Jack, on the other hand, had already tried three jokes about it.

  Another rumble decided it for him. He packed the desk with a thought, slid his notes into the satchel, and headed for the mess.

  He made it with fifteen minutes to spare. Today’s special was boar-and-barley stew with charred leek, a heel of brown bread, and a wedge of hard cheese, a cook’s way of saying last call. The hall was nearly empty. After filling a tray, he angled toward a table where four outworlders sat close, speaking low.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  “Of course!” the nearer woman said without looking up, then did look up and sat a little straighter. “Mister… Petros… sir.”

  The other three, for a beat, he counted two women, two men, shifted in their seats as if royalty had wandered in with a soup bowl.

  “Petros is fine,” he said, setting his tray down. “Truly.”

  “Yes…s…Petros,” she corrected, cheeks warming. Then, as if remembering her own name, “I’m Lucy. This is Gary, Selena, and Sebastian.”

  The names clicked. He caught himself too late. “You’re the group that,...” He cut off, but the sentence had already reached them. Four expressions closed over a hurt that hadn’t had time to scar.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  Lucy shook her head once. “You’ve all been… kinder than we deserve.”

  “Nonsense,” Petros said, more firmly than he felt. “You’ve been a gift, actually. Your names keep showing up in our weekly briefings. Newcomers come back from runs talking about clear instructions, good routes, and hot food.” He nodded toward Gary’s tray. “Especially the last part.”

  Gary blinked, then huffed a surprised laugh. “Cooking buffs are only tier-one, but they help. I can keep a team steady for an hour and a half on a bowl if they don’t sprint like lunatics.”

  “Working on the sprinting,” Lucy murmured.

  Sebastian eased the tension with a dry aside. “Gus would want the record to show he preferred cloaks to capes.”

  They all laughed, genuine laughter this time, the kind that lets a room breathe again.

  Petros took the opening. “What were you each, back on Earth?”

  “Systems analyst,” Gary said, shrugging with a little apology. “Turns out if you swap servers for stew, the debugging feels familiar.”

  “Logistics,” Lucy said. “People and parts in the right places at the right time. We’re… repurposing that.”

  “Track and field,” Selena said, then added, almost daring him to laugh, “and amateur knife-thrower. Renaissance fairs. Don’t judge.”

  “Judge? I’m jealous,” Petros said. “If I threw a knife, I’d aim for ‘not a wall.’”

  Sebastian tapped his chest with two fingers. “Construction. Chose Dwarf because the beard was better.” A beat. “And because the armor fits like sense.”

  They traded short stories: a botched interview that led Gary into kitchens, Selena’s first thrown-knife bullseye on a plywood knight, Sebastian’s favorite bridge back home, Lucy’s spreadsheet obsession she swore she didn’t have. In return, Petros gave them slivers of his own: Arizona heat, the “beta test” that wasn’t, lectures turning into triage, how a Journal could feel heavier on certain days for no reason at all.

  Lucy toyed with the edge of her bread. “You sound… young to be talking like that.” Then, quickly, “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

  “It’s fine,” Petros said, amused. “I am young. Just shy of fourteen.”

  Lucy blinked, a little color rising again. “Right. Good to know.” Her smile shifted into something sisterly. “We’ll try not to corrupt you.”

  “Too late,” Gary said. “He’s been hanging out with Jack.”

  “Point,” Petros admitted.

  They ate and talked for another fifteen minutes, discussing routes worth testing, wards that hummed wrong in crosswinds, why the west orchard’s Thorns strand overdrank when Sera’s wind picked up, and how to settle new teams without smothering their initiative. Somewhere in there, the four forgot to be careful around him, and he forgot to be careful around them.

  By the time the bell thudded for kitchen close, bowls were empty, moods steadier. Petros stood, slid his tray onto the stack, and nodded to each in turn. “I’m glad you stayed,” he said. “Anjelica’s better for it.”

  “Thanks for sitting with us,” Lucy said.

  “Anytime,” he answered, and meant it. Then he headed back toward the fort, mind already stitching their notes into the ward map and, beneath that, into the quiet, stubborn plan he carried everywhere: braid a path to the places that still held his family.