POV: john-west
Summary
John pulls up short. Standing in the middle of an Anglo-Saxon forest in a Robin Hood outfit is Ryan Chu — detective with the Seattle PD Anti-Cartel and Illegal Augments Division, childhood best friend, the man John had been impersonating in his amnesiac fantasies. The bandits are Ryan's team. The pointed-beard man who shot John apologises — he hadn't expected the aelv stunning device to drop him for that long. Ryan, to the others, credits John with saving the thegn yesterday. Sefawynn catches John's eye from across the fire; she is uncomfortable, but nods that the captives are all right.
Ryan takes him aside. The truth comes out in pieces. John confesses he picked this dimension at random from Ulric's list — and only this dimension. The one in history where magic appears to work, the one Ulric was quietly building an empire in. Ryan groans: that, of course, is the point of the list. A thief who pulled it would face a thousand decoys with no way to tell which mattered. *Assuming,* he says, *one doesn't run into Johnny West and his own brand of dumb luck.*
Ryan doesn't quite trust him; he half-thinks Ulric sent John in. John admits that he wanted out of his old life — out of Seattle, out of the league, out of Jen's memory. Ryan looks away. The two of them have always had a wedge between them — the detective, the door-guard for the cartel he was supposed to take down, and Jen who chose John two years before her death in Europe. But by the time the conversation has run on far enough for Ryan to crack a joke about John's grandmother preferring him, the old easiness is briefly there again. All it took was getting stuck in an alternate world.
They compare notes. Ryan is here on a sanctioned operation: a week ago he destroyed Ulric's portal and his beacon in Maelport, expecting to be picked up by reinforcements via his own portable beacon. They never came. John's arrival, Ryan now realises, means Ulric must have a second hidden beacon of his own — only one beacon's signal can dominate a dimension, and the stronger overrides the weaker. That's why the cavalry isn't coming. John adds the bad news from Thokk's message: Ulric's own check-in team is due in tomorrow, on Wodensday. Ryan swears. They have one day to find that backup beacon and shut it down — keep Ulric trapped while their own reinforcements lock on.
Ryan is rueful about the costume. *I had to act the part,* he says, gesturing at his merry men. *Maybe the Robin Hood legends back home are about me, garbled up over fifteen hundred years.* John reminds him that the legends are from a different dimension; Ryan shrugs that maybe some alternate-reality Ryan came here long ago. John gives the hat two stars, privately.
He presses Ryan on the magic. Ryan — son of physicists, hated talking like one — produces a tidy hypothesis: a quantum-probability oddity, public expectation collapsing probability fields in this world the way it cannot in theirs. Unlikely things happen here because people *believe* they will. John points out the obvious other answer: perhaps there really *are* unseen things — the wights — and perhaps they used to live in their own world too, which would explain the stories. His book exploded when he carried it through, after all. Ryan dismisses fairies; John takes the loss.
What he can't dismiss is Ryan's answer to *what does Ulric even want here.* Ulric is not, and never has been, a movie supervillain. He wants money — money that opens doors and buys politicians and never has to be laundered. The wyrd in this dimension lets him bring blank lottery sheets through, pick the winning numbers, and cash them on his home Earth. From there it scales — stocks, elections, rival bookies, insurgencies. His potential for harm becomes literally infinite, and the dimension itself, John realises, is too dangerous for anyone at all to own.
*We'll let the feds decide that,* Ryan says. He'll move up the timetable. *Is there enough cop in you to help, Johnny?* John agrees. It is, after all, what he and Sefawynn and Ealstan had been marching toward already, and the odds with Ryan in the mix are vastly better than the odds without.
He is, all the same, a little disappointed. This had been *his* fight — his proof, finally, that Ulric did not own him. With a competent operator in the picture, it isn't his fight anymore; it's Ryan's. Then his gaze drifts back to the firelight on Sefawynn's blond curls, and another idea forms. If he wants to fix that relationship — to be seen by her as he actually is, rather than as a hero-aelv — he simply has to ruin things. A goal that, for once in his life, plays directly to his strengths.