Katrin was worried. "Should we be concerned that he's going to send another spirit to you if this one doesn't report back?"

"Nah. I mean, I don't know for sure, but I really get the impression that Betokat won't think about that for like a hundred years. I think being immortal has skewed his sense of time pretty badly, he was talking about shit that happened a few months ago the same way as things that he did before Brinkmar fell, or before the Clockmaker died. It's all the same to him."

Errod grunted in agreement - he'd heard more of my conversations with Betokat - but he didn't turn to join in our talk. He was still watching out the most subtle of the holes in the wall at the other side of the room, a job I was performing in my memory palace thanks to divination and my extra mind. With me floating through the wall at my end of the building, and Errod watching the other side, we'd kept a detailed list of all the patrols that had gone by - it had been two hours since I'd seen one, but we weren't going to stop watching just yet.

It was infuriating, because at this point I felt confident in our ability to kick most people's asses - but we still had to hide, since getting spotted would potentially draw an entire army to our location. If it had been any normal kind of patrol, we'd be way more willing to risk it.

The plan was still to see if we could swing past the device that was blocking planar travel, and adjust it to allow us to come back before the next alignment. I wasn't totally confident we'd succeed, given that someone else surely would have turned it off by now if they could, but it was possible I had access that Gilbrect Halenvar didn't - or that he had decided it was more beneficial to leave it in place for some reason.

Maybe he couldn't turn it off without making it too easy for people to get in, though what we wanted and were expecting was that we could leave the restriction in place for who could open portals, while also lifting it enough that we wouldn't need to wait for the plane to be in alignment. There was no way to be sure until we got there, and even then it was possible the device would be too complicated for me to understand. It wasn't like they left instruction manuals around.

Oh, right. The instruction manual.

It wasn't for the planar seal, it was for the Causality Engine, or the Rivet as Jake Ross had called it. Also, fine, it wasn't really an instruction manual either - but the point was, I had started to look at how it targeted Earth as a way of figuring out if I could do that too. Specifically I wanted to recover my real memories, but I hadn't tried too hard before due to the colony of Granch that would try to rip me apart. With them gone, and us just waiting to be certain Tindelus' sweep was over, there was no reason not to dive in. Katrin joined me in my memory palace and I gave her a copy of the book, then we talked through it some to identify what was simple and what was... not.

We had already identified one key variable that seemed to be the main thing needed, but putting it in context was requiring us to untangle all the surrounding code - it was like we'd found a dial set to "Earth" but didn't know anything about how the dial connected to the bits that did the actual work. The Clockmaker was a very organized person, which was good, but he was also so smart that I couldn't figure out what the fuck he was trying to do half the time. We did, slowly, rule out whole sections as not relevant to our current situation which was a good start.

In the end, of course, almost none of it was going to be relevant - we weren't trying to do the same thing. It was like the strange inverted squiggle I'd seen when probing my Dumine about how to do planar travel to Earth - not the same as accessing a memory for sure, but clearly related. Both it and this formula involved... well, a negative variable that felt impossible... and in both cases the more I looked the more I was sure it was all related to bending the planar membrane in a direction that didn't exist.

Except... well, none of the directions existed for it in the way I was used to, right? When I used divination and felt how the membrane overlapped with my lutore, the lutore itself arguably was centered on me like an aura but the planar membrane wasn't in a real-world direction like down, or left, or North. I was dealing with the part of it that was me-ward, or between me and my memory palace, kinda. It was hard to talk about where parts of the planes were in relation to each other since everything was on one of the planes, meaning there wasn't any outside reference. Although... well, there was. Earth. Earth wasn't on any of the planes, so it was outside the planes, so hypothetically I needed to push "anti-planeward" to reach it.

That felt right, in a headache-y kind of way. It shouldn't even really need a new ability, because I could just do the same thing I'd practiced a thousand times to use divination. I just needed to do it backwards and in high heels.

After doing the preliminary planning in my memory palace, we dropped back to the real world and cobbled together a runic formula for a sort of plane-scope. It wasn't exactly elegant. It relied on Perception magic, and if we'd designed it right it would look into the prime plane. We knew the runes for the prime plane, and were using a simplified version of the targeting thing from the Causality Engine, but Katrin didn't seem totally confident about the Perception part of it and my foggy memories of making runic stuff when I was Connie only went so far. I volunteered to be the guinea pig, partly because I hadn't been a ton of help on the rest but mainly because I already had experience perceiving things through the planar membrane.

I placed my hand on the metal plate, and a moment later I was dry-heaving - I would have been fully losing my lunch if I'd eaten anything lately. "Great news," I gasped, "it works! I could see... uh... there were mountains and things, it was... ugh... it was all distorted and it didn't feel great, but it worked."

It had been like looking at various funhouse mirrors through a fisheye lens while drunk and dizzy. I pulled Katrin back into the memory palace and started scribbling runes on a whiteboard, trying to diagram out what I was thinking. "Okay, so... we have enough scrap for this, I think, but you need to find some way to clip it on here so the runes line up. Then these ones, all along the side, and this line here all the way down the edge next to it. and then this bit... this bit will connect to whichever one, and we just slide it up and down."

She looked at my plans for the makeshift runic slider - a knob would be too hard - and she nodded. "I've seen things like this before so I know it can be done, I've just never incorporated moving parts myself. If I had developed my Dumine towards runes more, I could make them way smaller... but as it is, this is going to be a bit... clumsy."

It was fine. The pile of metal scraps we'd found weren't nice alchemical metals with fancy properties or enhanced mana conductivity or whatever, but they worked and there was a good amount of it. We ended up making two different variables adjustable, and then I dove back in and prepared to get sick again. This time, I slid the side bits so the different runes came into alignment and altered the formula, changing how it tried to send information to my brain.

I had to take breaks, and the best I could do was still bad, but we got to a point where I could see a fairly normal-looking spot on the prime plane without getting vertigo. There was no good way we could think of to move it around, and no indication why it had chosen this spot in particular, but that was fine. It just needed to be clearly the prime plane and it was. "Okay, this is officially a success. Now... we put in the negative variable and try again."

That took a while, but when it was ready I nervously placed my hand down on the plate again. I was maybe going to see Earth - not my memories, but the real actual Earth. My vision went black, and... no, that was all. Shit. We tried again, and again, and when we couldn't find the problem Katrin finally did something fiddly to one of the runes and then looked at me very seriously.

"This is officially dangerous, but I think mainly it's going to destroy itself - not you. I just... I can't guarantee what's going to happen. I took the limiters off, I'm sending as much power into it as the mana battery can push out which, as we've discovered, is a ridiculous amount."

Fuck yeah. I gave her the go-ahead, and didn't point out that she was the one that was supposed to be stopping Errod and I from doing stupid shit - it didn't apply to when she was playing with magic, I guess - and I tried again. For an amazing, brief moment I was seeing Earth. There was a dirt road, and a cinderblock building with a blue plastic tarp over one side and a satellite dish sticking out from the other. There was one of those cool little three wheeled auto-rickshaw things, and a telephone pole with wires leading off into the distance. It wasn't pretty, or even super interesting, but it was Earth.

But then everything was black, and my hand was burning, and the acrid smell of burning metal filled the room. Whoops.

The damage was minimal. Katrin healed my hand, and while her healing spell wasn't the best for things like burns I wasn't too worried. The device was also largely intact, having only melted at one spot before breaking entirely. "The point is that it worked," I said, "although I realize now that it shouldn't have worked as well as it did. Why did I see Earth?"

"Isn't that what we were trying to do?" She asked, looking genuinely confused. Of course she was, she was used to how things worked here.

"Earth isn't... it's not special, in the way the planet you grew up on is. Your planet takes up almost all of the prime plane, assuming you're right, and then there's a little sphere of nothing out there and the moon and then you just hit the edge of the plane. The sun and stars are just... you said they're projections or something, right?"

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"The sun is a hole in the edge of the plane, leading into Botara. And the stars... I don't know, actually. I'd have to ask a scholar about that."

"Whatever they are, they're not stars like I know them. They're in a big band, mostly, but they're moving and I'm sure now that they're actually in like thirty-five rings that correspond to the planes. I assume when the Grand Alignment hits there's going to be one really solid ring of light in the sky, and then... I guess two skinny lines of stars for the two planes that don't align this time around."

"Of course."

"Of course." I sighed. I'd felt good about figuring that out, but I could have just asked. "Well where I come from, the stars are enormous things - hundreds or thousands of times larger than the planet - and they're super far away. The sun is just a star that's close up, and other stars out there also have more planets. Speaking of planets, the definition in English is a bit different but... basically, there's tons of planets out there, we don't know of any others with life on them but there's an uncountable number - like literally uncountable, there's so many. Around our sun, there's like eight main ones but then a shit ton of smaller ones, I'm not sure we even know how many since some are pretty small and really far away."

She wrinkled her forehead. "If even the ones near you can be that far away, you can't really know that the ones at other suns... if they are other suns... are really planets, right?"

"I don't feel like getting into the details because there's a point I'm getting to, but... we're a hundred percent sure. We've landed ships on another planet, built giant telescopes in space, measured the energy from the beginning of the universe... you're going to have to trust me for now on it though. When we get out of here I'll show you some shit, maybe, if I can think of anything that would really convince you. For now, just take it on faith. So. Huge, essentially infinite space filled with suns and planets and... well, mostly nothing, just emptiness between the stars. And when I used that device, I saw Earth. Earth, near a building, at ground level.

"I could have been facing the sky, or out in the void, or in the middle of the sun, or... almost anywhere else would have been more likely, if it was random. If it was just treating where I came from as one big place, and we didn't specify what part of it we were looking for, then statistically we should never have seen Earth even if we tried over and over once every five seconds for the rest of our lives and our children's lives and their children's lives. So that means... pointing away from here, away from all the planes, points directly at Earth somehow. They're linked. And that makes sense if Hugh is right, about - here, listen to him say it."

I pulled her back into the memory palace, and we listened to Hugh describe the creation myth. "The gods found an endless space," he said, "and in it a dead world. It had no magic, and yet life somehow survived there. Life so determined that it could exist without mana, without the touch of the gods, completely on its own surrounded by the void. And the gods saw humans there, without the spark of true life and magic. Hollow shells, struggling to survive, devoid of soul or mind. Out of... pity, or curiosity, or some unknowable desire of the gods... they took some and breathed magic into them and found that the creatures could hold it, and could possibly learn to use it. And so they created the planes, to find if these pathetic animals could adapt to a world with magic and learn to wield it."

She sighed, looking at the memory of Hugh, and then nodded. "That sounds vaguely familiar, I might have heard a version of it when I was little. But as you said, that makes sense. If it's true that humans started on Earth, why wouldn't magic point back there? Why do you think this is important?"

"Because I think it means there's an ongoing connection. I think it means... okay, so when I tried to talk to my Dumines - or whatever it is - about how magic works on Earth, and it mentioned something that translated in my mind as "planar antipodes". So like, the thing that's the opposite of... or, no, kind of at the opposite place? Like if you were on one side of the planet, directly on the other side would be the antipode, though I don't really just think of it like a place, the word feels... I don't know. My point is that at the time I was thinking in terms of anti-planes or opposite planes, but what if the planar antipodes are just like... counterbalances?"

I concentrated and summoned a pointed cone, with a plate balanced on it. "Okay, so if the planes are based on Earth, but they're not on Earth or in the same... what's a plane for planes? Whatever, they're not in the same place in any sense of the word. But they're hanging on, right, they're connected because there's something the gods were copying. Betokat said it too, he talked about Lenderatze being a plane that makes nature because they were cheating or lazy or something and couldn't get it to just work right without help. But where does Lenderatze get it? For all the planes, all the physical laws, all the... reality? If the gods are these crazy magic things from outside our reality - and if the thing I saw while using Yesrin's Loom was a god holy shit are they ever not from here - then maybe the planes are still attached to Earth."

I made a picture of Earth appear in the center of the plate. "So then on one side there's the planes the gods made, right..." I said as I placed a ball on one side of the plate, holding the other side steady with a finger so it would stay on the cone and not topple over, "and there has to be something else on the other side, where my finger is. A counterbalance. A planar antipode. A thing on the other side, not of any plane, but of Earth. Side, of course, in some twelve-dimensional sense rather than being a physical direction."

Katrin frowned. "I suppose. But you don't know this, right? Because it feels like you just had a neat idea while eating Sahrger food."

"Okay first of all, my last idea while high... not counting anything I might have said that day we were partying at that little town with the meat-farms, I don't really remember parts of that... anyway, my last idea while high resulted in us saving a bunch of kidnapped children. So, y'know, it's not a bad thing. But also, this is testable. Kind of. Sort of. See, the whole problem is that I need to be able to picture it clearly. I need to use my ability, and point it at the memories I want - and I think I already have the power, the raw magical whatever, but I can't conceptualize it. So if I'm right about this, and I... feel it out with that theory in mind... then I think it might work."

She still looked skeptical, but Katrin could be a bit of a stick in the mud with stuff like this. Anyway, she would be excited if it actually worked.

I went into my divination room, and made it just a black void. Okay. Where was I? What was the thread of my life, the thing I'd seen and felt when I used Yesrin's Loom? I remembered that ripple as I plucked at it, the way it felt, the way it passed through everything about me and extended into the past and future. It reached back to Earth, it had to. I thought about how I'd felt looking at that vision of some random little building a few minutes ago, not the emotions or the details of the scene but the sensation of where I was looking, what direction. I imagined the planes, these orbs that were nested in each other from one angle and orbiting each other from another and strung together like a necklace from a third - I imagined myself in their place, and some smaller but denser counterbalance in the distance, and a pivot point between.

That's where I'd been looking. I just needed to look again, and that was easy - I knew the direction, had just felt it, and I had that thread of my existence to follow like a guardrail. I reached, stretched. I flared divination on the moment that I'd arrived on this world bleeding in the snow, and the moment I'd left in a ritual as a child - I'd never looked at that, wasn't sure I could even find it, but it came when bidden and for the first time I held two overlapping divinations with my two minds. Here were two places on the thread, what was in-between? The thread was whole - maybe it hadn't been for a bit, maybe it had been remade after the world ended or cut when I died, but those two parts of me were bound together now. One thread, even if it forked off a bit.

I felt something, some part that was easier to grasp, maybe a few small sections of thread close to each other. What were those? No, it was a distraction. Those weren't in the right direction, weren't where I was looking. Earthward. Come on. I still couldn't actually use divination on Earth, not yet, because this was too different; whatever was overlapping my lutore, if anything, wasn't really the planar membrane. It was something else, maybe, that tether between the planes and the planar antipodes, but I couldn't use that.

I didn't need to.

I'd recovered my memories once, while building out my memory palace. I'd moved them here from my physical brain, but more than that I'd pulled them from the past to make sure they were as accurate as possible - there were limits without divination, since my brain simply didn't process things I wasn't paying attention to, but they were more accurate than most people's memories for sure. It had been easy, for the most part. This... this was harder, but it wasn't a big difference. I just needed to reach... right... here.

The divination room collapsed, dropping me into a hotel hallway that was shaking and cracking. Doors flew open, slid down the walls like liquid, divided like cells under a microscope. I felt the warmth draining out of me, and knew that this was taking way more mana than I had expected - I spared a thought to boot Katrin out and make my body croak the word 'mana' and sure enough an instant later she was dumping everything she had into me. The world stabilized, finally, and everything was still.

I walked over to a door and opened it, and there I was in Bill's kitchen stirring a pot of mac and cheese. I... still didn't remember this, not really, but the image was crisp. Small details changed if I looked away and back, but it felt as solid as any of my other memories for sure.

"The trick," I was saying, "is to steal the cheese powder from the boxes at the store. I know, I know, 'Calliope, stealing is wrong and I'm a mandated reporter so if you keep telling me these things I'll need to take you back to the police station where I found you."

"Not what 'mandated reporter' means," he sighed, "and I'm not taking you back."

"But the point is," I said, "they're small and easy to steal and then you can buy the cheap macaroni noodles by themselves and save a lot of money. And it also means you can do double cheese."

"A wonderful tip for those in need," he said, and then kissed me on the top of my head.

The memory froze, color draining out of everything but me and the cheese sauce that I was still stirring with a wooden spoon. Slowly the spoon stopped, and I saw myself instead place her hand against her chest. The memory wasn't being literal, for whatever reason - obviously the whole world didn't freeze - but I felt like I understood what I was watching. The memory started to feel like it was really mine, like I wasn't just watching a play, and I could remember that strange warm spark. This had been the first time, probably ever. Just... making cheap powdered mac and cheese with Bill in his kitchen.

I closed the door, and sat down on the floor for a moment. I'd done it, I'd gotten that stolen year back, but I was only now realizing that watching it all would just mean that - in a way - I'd be losing it all over. I could see myself being happy, building a family with Bill, but I knew how this story ended - with me back in a group home, all by myself.

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