Cheyenne gave him a sideways glance. “Isn’t it your job to teach the rookie?”
“Yeah, I see what you did there. Watch this.”
They approached the ends of the rows of buildings stretching away from the massive tower behind the entrance gate. Cheyenne didn’t know where these people could have possibly fit Q4, assuming she and Rhynehart hadn’t already reached it without him saying so. The man didn’t stop at the edge of the outbuildings. He kept walking toward the forest on the other side of the clearing where this Reservation 38 had been built.
Then he disappeared again.
“Oh, come on.” Cheyenne hurried to catch up. Her insides squirmed as she passed through the same spot, then she was staring at another huge black tower rising toward the sky in front of her and to the right. She saw more thick forest behind it, while on the other side of the tower, the same gently sloping rise of flat gray rock jutted over the ocean. To her left was the same open space and dirt frontage road they’d driven on to get there. The Jeep was where they’d left it, but she saw no electric gate or goblin in a checkpoint tower this time.
“What happened?”
“Q2,” Rhynehart called without stopping. “Don’t get lost, halfling. Come on.”
Cheyenne took another glance at the vast, dark-gray spire blotting out the sunlight. This is some serious déjà vu, except everything else is different.
Where the dark gray and black stone outbuildings had been before, there were now taller, wider gray buildings that looked more like an indoor convention center or a mall separated physically by stores. The closest building they passed had a billboard-sized sign bolted to the roof, a black background with a bright yellow sunburst in the middle and rows of green vines snaking across the center.
“What’s that?”
“Hospital, more or less.”
“What’s with the sign?”
“It’s a hospital for magicals.” Rhynehart swept his arm in a dismissive arc as they moved down the same track in front of the buildings as they’d traveled the first time. All the buildings were different. “Q2 is where the rez keeps its functional stations, right? Hospital. Food processing and storage. Supplies. Research and development. There’s a lab on the other side of the hospital. Schools.”
“Schools?”
The man shot her a sideways glance and nodded. “Lotta little magicals growing up on the rez, Blakely. You might see some. Behind all these big buildings are some of the more fun places. Training facilities. A gym. I think 38 has tennis courts. Or maybe they’re basketball courts. Hey, you ever watch orcs play basketball?”
Cheyenne snorted. “I would remember if I had.”
“They’re good. Maybe it’s the height, I dunno. Never thought those tusked bastards were very coordinated until I walked in on an orc pickup game. Blew my mind.”
The drow halfling didn’t have anything to say about that, so she skimmed her gaze over the tall gray buildings on their right. A few minutes later, they reached the end of the buildings and approached the edge of the forest again.
“We’re stepping through another magical wall, aren’t we?”
Rhynehart kept walking until he disappeared, and Cheyenne sighed in frustration before following him.
There was that tug on her gut, and then she found herself at the beginning on the south side of the cleared, flat landscape at the edge of the coastal cliff. She turned to look over her shoulder and checked if the woods were behind her. “So, we keep walking across the same strip of land over and over until we get to Q4?”
“Look at that, halfling. That energy bar must’ve juiced up your brain cells. Now we’re in Q3.”
Q3 also had a huge black spire rising into the sky, and Cheyenne followed the FRoE operative beneath its shadow as he headed across this next version of the same damn space. “Why couldn’t they build the place all on one…what? Plane?”
“Kind of a useless question, don’t you think? Seeing as the reservations are already built.”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes.
Rhynehart chuckled. “Okay, listen. This is all I know about it, and after that, you’ll have to take your questions somewhere else. When the Borders opened however many hundreds of years ago—don’t ask me how many, because I don’t know—the magicals built their own versions of these compounds. Of course, this is one of the older ones, so I’m not sure how the higher numbers have laid out their space, but I know 38 pretty well. Those giant towers?” He pointed at the huge spire as they passed out from beneath its shadow. “There’s one of those in every quarter. Those towers draw some kinda power from the Border, right? The portal. And it projects something, like, layers of all four quarters, which I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Walking the same strip over and over again? Yeah, I noticed.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not the same strip. Which you would’ve realized if you’d bothered to take another look around.”
Once he’d said that, she noticed Q3 was different from Q1 and Q2. Cheyenne stared at the colorful buildings stretching in long rows toward the edge of the cliff. Brightly-colored banners were strung between the buildings, and magicals of all different shades and sizes milled around, strutting down the avenues, talking to their neighbors, standing in doorways, and calling to each other. None of them wore black fatigues, and none seemed to notice the FRoE operative and the Goth chick strolling down what was now a paved sidewalk rather than dirt tamped down by many countless boots.
That or they don’t want to acknowledge us. We look like a couple of humans who popped into a magical marketplace. Yeah, that’s what this is.
A complicated drumbeat
