I arrive at the tavern, winded. I didn’t run that hard, but the excitement and anticipation make my breath short. I stop and steady myself, pull back my shoulders, and straighten my back. The door opens as I’m drawing in a long breath. I half expect it’s the Janitor trying to impress me again, but it’s Lille.

  She’s not even looking at me as she pushes the door open with her left hand. ”You sounded like a stampede, running like that. Come in already.”

  I twist and make sure not to poke her with my bow as I squeeze past. The warmth of the tavern washes over me in contrast to the cool night air. The heavy smell of food and people still lingers, but the room is empty, except for Lille and the Janitor. Durn must have closed the place down early. As I enter, the Janitor drops the last clean-picked bone on the plate and pushes the plate away from himself.

  He sighs a long sigh, a smile still playing on his lips. Then his smile falls away. ”We’re heading to Tenorsbridge to meet the rest of the team. I’ll take us there once you’re ready.” He drums on the table with both hands while talking. ”Say what you’re going to say.”

  His last words make no sense to me. Then Lille grabs my shoulders and turns me toward her. ”Listen to me, Locke. I don’t like what is going on or the way it’s being done. But my feelings don’t matter here.” Her grip on my shoulders tigthens. “Don’t make us proud. Instead, come back alive and as yourself.”

  The Janitor’s still drumming the table, seemingly not listening to us at all. His eyebrows move in time with his tapping like he’s playing some private song.

  Lille looks like she might say something more, but she hesitates for too long. The screech of the Janitor’s chair against the floor makes Lille let go and take a step backward.

  He leaves the chair standing in the middle of the floor and takes a step closer. ”Take my hand.”

  I remember he said his name is Lictor, but I can’t yet think of him as a real person. He doesn’t seem to be here. His hand is reached out toward me, but his eyes are fixed on a candle burning at the edge of the table.

  I lift my hand slowly and the Janitor grabs hold of it. World winks at me. Darkness covers my vision for a heartbeat. When it passes, I’m somewhere else. My ears pop and the Janitor lets go of my hand. I run it over my face, trying to wipe away the cobwebs. It’s like I’ve passed through something sticky and intangible, but there’s nothing on my face.

  ”We traveled through the ether. The feeling will pass in a moment. Welcome to Tenorsbridge, Locke.”

  I exhale a breath that still smells of the tavern, of home, and breathe in the dry, unfamiliar air. It’s cold and there isn’t a single smell to it. I lick my lips, trying not to show how bewildered I am. If teratomes can exist, maybe teleportation can too.

  I look around the hall, rising in a dome above us. It’s huge and empty, except for a pedestal with a pyramid on it in the middle of the room. The thing stands around waist-high and feels like a miniature monument. Lanterns illuminate the whole space. They must be magical, as the light doesn’t flicker or smoke at all. I think of teratomes and take a deep breath. This is it.

  Adventure.

  The Janitor walks a couple of steps toward the pyramid and raises his hand to hover over it. He takes care not to touch it, as if it would burn his hand if he did. On closer inspection, the shape resembles a mountain more than a pyramid. Its shape is organic, haphazard. Bumps and wedges jut out of it, runes circling and snaking around its whole surface. The pedestal isn’t merely a base for the pyramid, but the two are molded together. The pedestal’s stone surface is also layered with runes, shining with a blue light.

  He offers his other hand to me. I hesitate, my hand hanging by my leg. I didn’t go to meet Ral like he asked. Gran’s words about war and kids play in my ears. I wonder what Lille was about to say to me before the Janitor grabbed me.

  ”I’ll take you back and let you finish the discussion with Lille, if you want,” the Janitor says, hand held out. Then, he smiles. ”And please, Locke, start thinking of me as Lictor. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together in the future. There’s no need for titles, not when so much is at stake.”

  His smile is easy, open. Maybe this won’t be as weird as I feared. The Janitor, Lictor, stays completely still and lets me grab his hand.

  He doesn’t move. I tighten my grip a bit and when I do, he presses his other hand on the pyramid. The pyramid lights up and there’s a slight hum, then the glow fades.

  Lictor draws back his hand and clenches it into a fist. ”There, now we’re not in a hurry anymore. We can relax for a bit.”

  Nothing on his face tells me he’s relaxing. And why would he, because nothing happened? He pushes back his cowl and walks away from the pyramid. He drags me behind him for a couple of steps before I let go of his hand.

  ”Keep up. I’ll use this Ride to explain everything and you get to practice meeting them for the first time.”

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  He’s striding along the hall toward a small door in the corner. I catch up to him and use the opportunity to look him over. He’s maybe twenty years older than me, his head already balding, and what hair is left is wispy and greying. His small eyes stare out from his face, piercing and dark. He resembles an angry pig. I feel bad for thinking that way, but what can you do? The boars I’ve hunted have been clever, strong and dangerous, so maybe it’s not an insult.

  Lictor pushes open a door. There’s a small room, with a clerk sitting on the other side of a desk. The man looks up and smiles, an easy smile, like seeing a friend. He looks young, maybe the same age as Hendrik. He puts his quill into an inkpot, being careful not to smudge his papers with his sleeve. ”Oh! Welcome back, sir Janitor. Found your man, eh?”

  Lictor grunts and walks past him.

  ”Done for the day?” the clerk shouts after us.

  Lictor keeps walking. I follow him, but take a final look at the clerk. His brow is creased in worry or confusion as he watches us go. Lictor rounds a corner and makes a gesture. There’s a muted flash of blue light around his hand and a metallic snap from a hidden lock of the door ahead of us. There’s no handle, but the door yawns open by itself and Lictor marches in.

  I keep following. What else can I do?

  Inside, there’s a small room with no other exits than the door we came in from. The room is furnished with a couple of couches and a table with a platter heaped with different fruits. The furniture is nothing like what we have in the village—dark, polished wood and deep purple velvet, not something put together from planks and furs.

  Lictor plops down on a couch. Finally, he seems to relax a bit. He runs a hand over his eyes and waves at the table. ”Eat. If you enjoy it.”

  ”Um, I just ate, thanks.”

  Lictor gives me a look. He squints again and raises a finger into the air. ”Consider the words I said. It doesn’t matter if you don’t need to eat at the moment. It only matters if you feel eating might be fun.”

  He watches me in silence. I don’t get it, but maybe it doesn’t matter. ”I guess I could eat some for dessert?” I say finally.

  ”Go ahead. They’re all excellent.”

  I pick up a small fruit unlike any I’ve seen before. It’s brown and wrinkled and smells sweet. I bite down on it and yelp as there’s a pit inside. My teeth crack down on it and the crunch sends chills down my spine. The flesh of the fruit is sweet and sticky as honey, but pungent. I carefully take out the pit from my mouth. It sticks to my fingers as I look for a suitable place to put it so it won’t cause a mess.

  Lictor lifts his hand and flicks his fingers over his shoulder. ”Throw it somewhere.”

  The polished stone floor is pristine. It reflects the soft magical light shining from above and I hesitate with the sticky pit in my hand.

  ”It doesn’t matter. Toss it. Eat as many as you like. Eating too many will work either as a laxative or cause you to get constipated, but that, also, doesn’t matter.”

  I put the pit onto the table, rubbing my fingertips against each other. ”I enjoy eating, but I don’t enjoy constipation.” My cheeks flush after saying that. Why did I say that?

  Lictor raises his finger up at me again. He leans in closer and points the finger at me. His small eyes focus on mine in a way that hasn’t happened before and the edges of his eyes crinkle. ”That’s the point. You don’t have to care about the consequences here. Making a mess, having a tummy ache tomorrow. It doesn’t matter when you’re on a Ride.”

  I frown.

  ”When I touched the Mountain Ride, you were holding on to me. That means we’re both on the same Ride,” he says and takes a breath to continue talking.

  Finally something familiar. Lille often used the same style with us: first the demonstration, then the lecture. I lean back and relax to listen.

  ”The artifact lets you experience the next 24 hours and then come back. Find and try things out. Practice a discussion. Try something risky. Once the time is over, you return to the exact moment you touched the pyramid the first time.” Lictor picks up a spiky fruit of some kind from the platter and shows it to me. ”This is poisonous. One bite and you’re dead instantly. And it’s not a fruit, it’s a gland from a certain teratome. One exists. Once we’re done, you can eat it.”

  Eat a gland of a teratome? ”I don’t think so.”

  ”Uh-huh, because that’s the quick way out.” He wags a finger at me. “If you die on a Ride, you get booted out. You don’t have to wait for the whole day. Or maybe you do, but it doesn’t matter, as you’re dead. Dead, dead, dead.” He singsongs the last words and chuckles.

  He jumps the spiky thing on his hand like it was a marble.

  He throws it high and catches it inside his fist, turning to face me straight on. ”Consequences don’t exist when you’re on a Ride. This is the ultimate meaning of that. If you’d picked this as the first thing to taste from the platter, I would have let you.” He leans forward, reaches with his fist, and lets the thing drop onto my lap. ”The difference would have been that I need to take you on another Ride and that the explanation might have been easier for you to believe.”

  ”You…” I try to put the thoughts together. ”You mean you would have let me kill myself to prove a point?”

  ”I would have killed you to prove a point if it would work on you. It doesn’t, though. You’re too uptight for that.” He pouts and leans back on the couch.

  The spiky thing sits on my lap. I swipe it away and it shoots into the corner.

  Lictor’s face doesn’t move, but he lifts his palm toward me in a placating gesture. ”I’m sorry. Being a Janitor does things to your sense of normality. I’ve lived this day now about eight hundred and fifty times. I’ve had this discussion nine times. This is important, but I want to keep this relatively natural, so I haven’t gone through this as many times as I normally would have.”

  He leans forward and reaches his hand to sift through the fruits on the table. He picks up an ordinary apple and bites into it. He takes another bite and throws the rest of the apple over his shoulder. It hits the floor somewhere behind him with a soft crack. ”The Mountain Ride is primarily used to keep Tenorsbridge safe. There are limits to its use. The main one being that you only have a day to travel to where you need to go. And that distance is going to become much shorter, very soon. That’s why we have been in such a hurry.”

  ”Wait, wait. You’re still going too fast.” I grab a cherry from the table and roll it around in my fingers. Lille said that the Janitors are something new. The Ride thing must have appeared first and then they used that to organize the Janitors. When was that? I put the cherry into my mouth, speaking around it. “How old is the Mountain Ride?”

  ”Two days.”

  The stem of the cherry drops from my lip. She didn’t say they were this new. But if I believe what he’s saying, it doesn’t matter that they’ve had it for two days. They could have spent weeks trying it out.

  No, wait. Much longer.

  I do the math. My stomach drops. ”You’ve been living this day for over two years?!”

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