Stepping back into the real world felt like going from technicolor to black and white. The air felt less alive, the colors less vivid, and the scents and sounds were dull. Lanie had to stop for a minute and adjust to the lack of… She searched her vocabulary for a way to describe it and came up short. Significance, she guessed. It was as if a comfortable pressure had been removed, and she was untethered. Or, maybe it was more like she was walking through a movie set full of props and scenery that lacked the solidity of the real thing.

  The feeling was fading, like the images from her dreams. It left her feeling hollow inside, and for a moment, she wanted to step back through into the Cedar Forest to get it back. She shook herself and forced her mind back to the here and now. She didn’t need to be jonesing for a magical hit. She could understand why the stories described people pining away for Fairy.

  Nips put a hand on her arm. “The feeling will pass. The Cedar Forest is ancient; it has accumulated a great deal of Significance over the eons. It’s not quite a Divine Realm, but it has to be pretty close to one. I feel it, too. Give yourself a few minutes to adjust.”

  She leaned back against the wall and, while the disorientation eased, asked the question that had been on the edge of her tongue since the fox had vanished, “Nips, who was that fox? They felt… I don’t know, important, I guess.”

  “I’m not sure who they were, to be honest. There are a lot of spirits, gods, and demigods who like to use that form. Kitsune, Reynard, and even Loki are all possibilities. That’s why I counseled caution. You’ve caught the eye of someone powerful, that’s for certain. Who they are and what they want from you, though… I just don’t know.”

  A chill ran down her spine. She whispered the name, “Loki,” with wonder. He’d always been only a tale, a story, words on a page, but now she knew different. The same with the other possibilities Nips had named. Kitsune had been only anime fox-girls on a screen until tonight. Now, they were real beings that she didn’t understand, and needed to.

  It was too much right now, too heavy. She needed a library or an internet connection, and she had neither. The momentary detached feeling had passed, but it had been replaced with the head-spinning revelation that she might have met an actual god. Her mouth went dry, and she tried to swallow.

  She scrubbed her hands over her face and shook herself. Opening her eyes, she focused on what was real and solid around her, grounding herself in the mundane until she had the time to ponder the esoteric tangle her life had become.

  It was night where they’d come out of the portal. They were surrounded by rough stone walls, ancient and weathered. Ruins. The roof of whatever building this had once been was gone. She looked back at the Way and saw only the outline of an arch carved into a weathered stone wall; a bas-relief of a door with no opening. She could feel the portal there, where two worlds met, even if there was nothing to see.

  The air was cool and dry. The walls were curved, old sandstone, and the floor was dirt. The room they were in was a half-moon shape, and there was an opening in the flat wall where a door might once have been. Lanie crept up to it and peeked through, only to find another empty room, this one shaped like a quarter of a circle. It was a round building, she realized. Not very large, either. Maybe twenty feet across.

  She walked quietly to the next doorway and peered out of the ruined building. The ruins of other small buildings clustered close, now only the crumbled remnants of mud bricks and stone foundations.

  Nips watched quietly from his perch in her bag, examining the ruins with interest. He reached out a little hand to run his fingers over the worn stone of the doorway. There was a melancholy cast to his features. Lanie thought it must be sad for a creature whose entire purpose was to care for a home to see ruins where homes once stood.

  It was an old archaeological dig. A section of an ancient village had been excavated, revealing what little was left of the buildings. She crept quietly up the ramp and peeked out over the edge.

  For a moment, things seemed too silent. It made the hair on the back of her neck prickle until she realized why it felt off. She’d gotten too used to the constant bird calls and wildlife cacophony of the Cedar Forest. After that, the crickets and night birds of the mundane world felt like the quiet static of a forgotten radio; background noise barely loud enough to hear. She focused on the sounds for a moment, reminding herself that these were normal, and the song of the Cedar Forest wasn’t.

  Standing some distance from the excavation was a semi-permanent shack. There was no one around and no indication that it was an active dig site. The only sign that it wasn’t completely abandoned was a rope tied to stakes around the perimeter of the site, probably put up to keep people from falling into the hole. The frayed remains of a blue tarp suggested that the dig had been covered at some point in the past, but the tarp had long since grown brittle and blown free to crumple against the perimeter stakes.

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  The shack wasn’t that old, and there were relatively fresh tire tracks in the dirt on the far side of it. Not abandoned completely, then. If there was no overnight security, then it had probably been well enough excavated and cataloged that they weren’t worried about relic hunters. Or they had run out of funding.

  No watchmen meant no awkward explanations, but it also left her stranded in the middle of nowhere with no clue where she was. She crouched on the ramp with just her eyes above the rim of the pit for several minutes, watching, making sure she was really alone. When nothing moved, she crossed to the shack.

  There was a sign on the outside of the shack in Turkish, but she couldn’t read it. The only word she recognized was Tepe, which she’d seen as part of the names of other archaeological tourist sights in the area.

  “I miss the translation app on my phone,” she muttered.

  “I speak several languages,” Nips said. “Unfortunately, Turkish isn’t one of them.”

  It took less than two minutes to pick the lock and let herself in.

  There wasn’t much inside the shack. Some shelving and workbenches, a desk, empty storage bins, all covered with a layer of dust and cobwebs. In one of the desk drawers, there was a stack of pamphlets held together with a brittle rubber band. The pamphlets were written in three languages, and, thankfully, English was one of them.

  She smiled. It would never have crossed her mind that a forgotten tourist brochure could ever have been a comforting thing to find, but this one felt like a lifeline.

  There was a brief blurb about the dig site, the name matching the one on the sign outside. Much more useful, though, was the map showing the location of the dig relative to other dig sites and Istanbul. This dig was fairly close to Arslantepe, and only about a five-mile walk to the city of Malatya. From there, she could catch a train to Istanbul, then the express to Sophia.

  If nothing else went wrong, she could be back in Minneapolis in about a day… she did some quick math in her head. No, more like two days. Still. She had a path forward, and it would start with a short hike, a hotel room, and a long, hot shower in Malatya. She wasn’t sure how large a town Malatya was. It was too bad she couldn’t fly to Sophia, but that was where she’d stashed her real passport, and she wasn’t sure the fake would stand up to airline scrutiny.

  She took one of the pamphlets, but left the shack otherwise undisturbed. She even locked the door behind her. There was a short dirt track leading away from the site, and with the fresh tire tracks in mind, she stayed ready to use her Cloak of Shadows if she heard a vehicle approach. Her shoulders stayed tight with tension until they reached an asphalt road.

  After the long run through Ergenekon, an hour’s walk along the verge of a paved road was no hardship at all. It was impossible to fully relax, though. Every flash of headlights had her ready to pull a shadow around herself and dive away from the road into the brush. She trusted Tolus’s word that the scarf would work, but she didn’t know how it worked, and she didn’t know how Dieter and his crew were tracking her. There was always a chance that they were using some method that the scarf wouldn’t protect against.

  Nothing was ever guaranteed.

  Plans and contingencies ran through her mind as she walked, and she talked them over with Nips. He was a font of supernatural trivia and suggestions from books he’d read over the years. With the introduction of plans worthy of James Bond, the conversation took a sillier turn, and Lanie dove into it wholeheartedly, relieved for the break from the constant tension and worry of the past few days.

  The conversation turned to other topics, and Nips said, “You know, it’s too bad we aren’t taking the train from Istanbul to Paris. I’d have loved to ride the old Orient Express line.”

  “Actually, when I was doing my research before the heist, I found out that there were actually two routes to the Orient Express, and the southern route went through Sophia, so we won’t be too far off. After Sophia, I’ll have my real passport. We can take the train all the way to Paris if you want, and fly home from there.”

  “You wouldn’t mind? That would be amazing, but it will mean taking more time, and I don’t want to…”

  Lanie cut him off, “It will take more time, but the longer we’re on trains, the more sure I can be that there’s no one tailing us. It’ll be an unexpected change to our plans, which is good. Besides, you’ve helped keep me alive. The least I can do is let you pick our itinerary for a couple of days.”

  His voice was thick with unexpected emotion when he replied with a simple, “Thank you.”

  Lanie walked in silence for a little while, giving him space to gather himself. When she thought the moment had stretched long enough, she changed the subject. “Hey, Nips, I’ve been meaning to ask… I love the whole Bag of Holding thing, but what’s it going to look like on an X-ray machine?”

  “Oh, I can use a glamour to make sure no one notices it. You should be able to carry it right through.” He patted the bag, proud of his work.

  Lanie’s eyebrows went up. “Now that has some interesting possibilities.”

  ###

  A little over four days later, feeling exhausted, grimy, and irritated with all of humanity, Lanie stood outside the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, waiting for her Uber to pull up. She’d stretched the trip out to make sure they hadn’t been followed, including doing some sightseeing and taking the cheapest flight with the most layovers possible. It had been a long, nerve-wracking journey, and she just wanted to fall into bed.

  It would be a while before she had that luxury, though. She would have the Uber driver take her to a hotel downtown, then hop on a bus back to her neighborhood. Then, she’d walk a couple of blocks to make sure no one was following her. It might seem excessive, but there was no way she was going to lead Dieter and his cronies back to Jorge’s place.

  She had to talk to him, though. He was the one who’d put her in contact with the client for the museum heist, and she needed to know who the client was, but it was more than that. She owed him better than to just disappear on him with no word.

  There was an ache in her heart at the thought of leaving him behind, but she couldn’t cling to his sleeve forever. He had his life, and she had hers, and it was past time she got out in the world and lived it.