Thick dust sealed Mari’s eyelashes shut as cool, dank air enveloped her still form. She drew a ragged breath that caught, the dust heavy in her lungs. One arm swept out to trace the dirt-laden stone floor while the other paw rubbed her eyes free. A faint blue glow pooled in the cavern's corner, delicate and steady. She blinked into it, and her pupils widened.

  She was back in the cave.

  For a heartbeat, relief washed through her so hard it almost made her laugh.

  A dream. It had been a dream.

  Mari sat up too fast, and the world swam. The shattered mural spread across the wall in front of her, fractured exactly where it had been before. Familiar cracks. Familiar missing pieces. The same jagged lines cutting through imagery that had once been whole.

  Relief curdled.

  No. Not again.

  Her mind reached back to the old solution. Let it blur. Let it drain out. Let the names slip away until there was nothing left but the cave and the quiet and the blank.

  Pressure built behind her eyes instead, steady and rising, like her skull was filling with water.

  She pressed a paw to her chest and forced a breath in. Then another. Slow. Measured. An anchor.

  Stay.

  The memories hit, but this time they didn’t slide off her. They slammed in and held. The Burrow. Rufus. Station. Jerro and Greg. Phlip’s warm weight when he leaned into her like he belonged there. Squiggy’s small tremble that never stopped her from choosing to stay close. Prince Lukyaza. The Borruki. The Glorp. The Queen Regent’s violet gaze.

  All of it stacked together until she couldn’t tell where one moment ended and another began.

  My friends, she thought, and the thought tried to fray, tried to dissolve into the familiar blankness.

  She clenched down on it.

  “My friends,” she said out loud, the words small and raw in the open air. Proof it wasn’t a dream. Proof she was still here.

  She swallowed hard and tried to breathe through the pressure rising in her throat. They had gone through the transit—she was sure of it. The certainty made her paws shake. She had held the connection by leaving a version of herself behind, astral and translucent, just long enough to get them home.

  Home.

  Where did home even land them? The question came with the next breath. She didn’t know where they ended up, only that she had not gone with them. She could still feel the shape of that choice in her bones, like a burn that hadn’t cooled yet.

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  She tried to reach Jerro and Greg, shoving her voice across the distance. Nothing. The channel was gone, cleanly cut.

  Mari pushed herself to her feet, legs unsteady, and stumbled toward the passage she remembered crawling through the first time. The rough stone scraped her fur as she squeezed through. She expected the rope to be there, dangling like it had before.

  It was gone.

  The absence hit her harder than it should have. That rope had been a window to her time. This was not then.

  Mari closed her eyes and let her mind extend outward. She felt the space around her, not with sight but with that deeper sense she had learned to trust, the psionic architecture of the world brushing against her awareness. Her forehead throbbed with heat, followed by the pinging, metallic sensation that waited for her every time. She gathered what little remained, then lifted.

  Weightless, she eased through the opening.

  Darkness met her, soft and immense. A partial moon hung low in the sky, dim enough that shadows still owned most of the valley. Its light painted everything in a pale, quiet silver that did not feel welcoming, only present.

  She drifted down and landed lightly on the ground, paws sinking into cool grass. The crisp floral air of Long Valley greeted her as she emerged from the hidden entrance. The boulder was still there, but it had split cleanly in two, a dark fracture running through its heart like something had finally given up. Grass had overtaken the tracks, erasing any trace of its past journey.

  Mari stepped forward a few paces, then stopped as if her body remembered where to pause.

  The night sky was clear and full of stars. She lay on her back, letting the grass cradle her, and stared upward into the vast emptiness those specks of light inhabited. Something cool between her eyes made her reflexively lift her paw. The symbol. It had gone cold, like a candle had been snuffed by ice.

  For a moment she allowed herself to pretend she could hear Jerro’s commentary about structures, Greg’s impatience, Phlip’s contented snorts, Lunda’s quiet presence and Squiggy tucked somewhere close to the human.

  The thought cracked, and loneliness slid into its place.

  Mari blinked slowly. The stars above her seemed to sharpen, then soften, then shift. At first, she thought it was her vision, dust still clinging to her eyes, but the sky itself was moving. Not drifting like clouds. Rearranging.

  The specks of light drew closer together in gentle arcs, pulling into lines that had not existed a moment before. A curve formed, then another. The outline of a muzzle. Eyes that weren’t really eyes, but she recognized them anyway. A prominent nose. Incisors. Wisps of starlight stretched into the suggestion of old fur.

  The face of the old marmot stared down at her from the sky.

  It smiled.

  Mari smiled back, the expression arriving before she could decide whether she wanted it. She felt tears sting her eyes, not from sadness alone, but from the weight of recognition, the sense that she had seen this before and would see it again.

  How many times? She wondered, and the question did not feel like fear. It felt like the edge of a bigger truth.

  The voice came then, not loud, not violent like the Queen’s intrusion, but steady and intimate, like a thought placed gently into her mind.

  The Burrowing Rodent Empire lives within you.

  Mari exhaled into the night air, staring up at that starlit face as it held its shape, patient and knowing, with all the time in the universe.

  And somewhere far away, in another light, her friends were without her.