Aquila opened her eyes. She was lying in an unfamiliar bed. The room around her was plain, the walls undecorated. Kasumi sat on a chair by the bed, holding her hand.

    “Your magical knight again?” Kasumi asked.

    Aquila nodded. “The most shameful moment in my life.”

    Kasumi looked down at their held hands. “I wish I could help you bear that burden.”

    “You weren’t the one who murdered her,” Aquila stated. “And I wouldn’t want you to ever bear something like this.”

    “She was brought back to life in her story,” Kasumi pointed out. “Just as she was when you first met her. What you did to her...the information stream fixed it.”

    Aquila sighed and squeezed Kasumi’s hand. “Oh, my beloved, how I wish you were right. But what about all she became after she left her story? That’s the person I killed. And of all my victims in the war, she deserved it the least.” She propped herself up to a sitting position. “Anyway, how long have I been asleep?”

    “About a day and a half,” Kasumi said. “We were hoping you’d make it a full two.”

    “Well, I’m glad I didn’t sleep that long,” Aquila said. “I hate missing things.”

    “You should have slept while we were running,” Kasumi said. “How could you do something that reckless?”

    “I tried,” Aquila replied. “Every night, I tried. No matter how long I lay there with my eyes shut, sleep didn’t come. And the others needed as much rest as they could get, so I didn’t disturb them. Anyway, I’m rested now, and we need to be back on our way as soon as we can.”

    Kasumi shook her head. “Not happening. Cap says you need at least a week to recover, and that’s what you’re going to get.”

    “Beloved, we can’t wait that long.”

    “Why not?” Kasumi demanded. “You said that he can’t reach us here. We have all the time we need.”

    Aquila took a deep breath. “Because Balthazar is trying to collide the story worlds into the hub world. When that happens, this world will get taken out by the blast, along with all of the others. If we stay here, we die.”

    Kasumi went pale. “Oh. Are you sure? Couldn’t you be mistaken?”

    Aquila shook her head. “The distances between the story worlds are wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it until that last jump before the fight. Natsuki knows that something else is going on – she asked me about it, and I tried to tell her that I was still trying to figure it out, but...”

    “But Natsuki’s too smart to lie to,” Kasumi said.

    Aquila allowed herself a smile. “She really was wasted in a harem comedy.”

    “How long have we got?”

    “I don’t know,” Aquila said. “I’ve only ever seen the aftermath of somebody colliding the story worlds. I’ve never seen it in action before.”

    “The others need to know,” Kasumi stated. “Today.”

    Aquila nodded. “We also need a plan. Balthazar was ahead of us the entire time. I–” She buried her head in her hands. “I can’t beat him, Kasumi! He’s going to hunt us down, and there’s nothing I can do about it!”

    “No,” Kasumi declared, taking Aquila by the shoulders. “You don’t get to think like that. Not now, not ever.”

    “He is at least three times as powerful as I am,” Aquila said. “Probably four or five.”

    “And that only matters if you have to fight him,” Kasumi stated. “And even that doesn’t mean much unless you let it. How much more powerful were you than that devil king on Daiki Yamato’s world? And he still found a way to take you out of action.”

    Aquila frowned. “I wish I could remember how he did that.”

    “The healers told me that the blood loss probably affected your memory,” Kasumi said. “But that doesn’t matter. We’re not Daiki’s devil king, and we don’t have an army of tens of thousands. If we can’t out-fight Balthazar, or whatever his name is, we have to out-think him.”

    “His name is Balthazar. I read it on his character description. He can do things like heal people too, which is a power I wish I had.”

    “Doesn’t matter,” Kasumi said. “My point is this: he got ahead of us, but you realized he was hunting us as soon as you saw that murder. He’s at the start of his war, but you fought your war to the end. So, you already know every decision he’s going to have to make, and you know his capabilities. That gives you the advantage. And now we have time to plan.”

    Aquila looked into her eyes. “You sure about this? He was waiting for us.”

    “Because we were running scared and going in a straight line. And now we know he can calculate where we’re going to go when we’re going in a straight line and as far as we can per jump. So, we don’t do that again. No more ambushes.”

    “We need a way to keep him off our backs,” Aquila said. “If he can corner a single one of us...”

    “So, what if he can’t ever touch us at all?” Kasumi suggested, her eyes lighting up. “We don’t use the pre-existing story worlds. You create a new world along our path, and we go from here to there. And then we do it again, and again, until we’re home.”

    Aquila thought for a moment, and then shook her head. “It would take too long. You know how much creating a world takes out of me, and I can’t create one very far away. And even if I could...with the time I’d need to recover between jumps, we’d never get out in time.”

    “Okay, so what if we do the last thing he’d expect,” Kasumi said. “We go to the hub world, and then we jump to one of the story worlds on the far edge, and then away from there.”

    Aquila threw off the covers and stretched out her stiff leg, feeling the scar from her wound through the fabric of her pants. “That requires me to be able to see the full geography of the story world galaxy from the hub world. And, I can’t do that. My view of the geography of the multiverse inside the story worlds is pretty limited, and from the hub world it’s almost non-existent. And once we get there, most of my powers stop working, because they all depend on manipulating things created by the information stream. So, we’d just be jumping blind, and we’d be less protected.”

    “Most of his powers wouldn’t work either,” Kasumi pointed out.

    Aquila stood and stretched her arms and shoulders. “It still doesn’t solve the problem of jumping blind.”

    “Okay, so let’s make our jumps random,” Kasumi said. “Roll a pair of dice for both direction and distance. All he’ll have is a general direction we’re trying to get to, and since we won’t know the route we’re taking to get there, he’ll have no way of predicting it. If we’re lucky, he might lose us completely.”

    Aquila nodded and then winced. “Why am I this stiff? That has promise, but it’s going to slow us down. Our odds of getting out in time get a lot slimmer.”

    “Better than none,” Kasumi stated. “And you were in really rough shape. Take the time to get some proper rest. It’s a pity we can’t just...” Kasumi’s eyes widened. “But why can’t we? Why take the long way home at all?”

    Aquila blinked. “What are you thinking?”

    “I draw us a portal home,” Kasumi said. “We go directly there, safe and sound.”

    Aquila frowned. “That’s iffy. We’re a long way out, far enough that it would take us months to get home with my jumps, and that sketchbook is using my powers to create what you draw in it. It probably has my limitations too. A portal you draw might not be able to take us that far. And, besides, if it does work and Balthazar finds his way here, he’ll have a direct path to our world.”

    “So I build in an automatic self-destruct,” Kasumi declared with a grin. “Five minutes after we leave, all that’s left of it is a smoking hole in the ground. No path from here to there.”

    Aquila nodded. “Okay, that’s a plan. We try the portal, and if that doesn’t work, we use the random jumps.”

    Kasumi grinned. “Good. First though, you’re going to need some extra rest. I need to draw this world a sun. It’s bitterly cold outside, we’re all stuck in this house, we’re running out of stories to tell each other, and all we’ve got left to occupy ourselves once we’re done telling stories is a deck of playing cards Cap carries around with him.”