picking up where their conversation had left off. “Who did you think they were summoning? Random mercenaries? They’ve all been Chosen Ones—people who have defeated some kind of evil figure in their own worlds.”
Mox’s eyes were unfocused, likely from the pain, when he blinked up at her. “I didn’t know,” he said. “At first I tried to—talk to them. But they wouldn’t stop.” His face went blank. “So I killed them instead.”
Fear prickled in Sloane’s chest. But a moment later, Mox blinked, and his expression changed. It was almost like he had come back to the surface of his own mind.
“You could have hurt me in the cultural center,” she said. “And then again in the Tankard. But you didn’t.”
“I didn’t know how many of you there were or what I would be up against,” Mox said. “I always wanted to know why they wanted me dead, these warriors from other worlds. Wanted to know what was in it for them.”
“But isn’t it obvious why they wanted you dead?” She swallowed hard. Maybe it wasn’t wise to press him on this issue, but she had to. “The Drain. They wanted to stop the Drain.”
“As I said before,” he replied, looking up at her, “I suppose I should be flattered that you think I could cause that level of destruction by myself. But I can’t.”
“So the Drains—they aren’t you.”
Mox shook his head.
“Who controls them, then?”
“Nobody knows,” he said. “But my theory is they’re a natural phenomenon. A . . . byproduct, you might say. Of the connection between universes.”
“No, they aren’t. Here, take this.” Sloane waited until his hand had replaced hers on the gauze, then fumbled with the contents of the first-aid kit, looking for a bandage. All she could find was a packet made of stiff plastic. “The Dark One—the evil figure in my world, the one we defeated—caused Drains all the time. They stopped once he was gone.”
Mox’s hand stilled hers. He took the packet from her and flicked it open. What fell from it was a long, flat siphon, like the one the doctor had attached to her broken ankle. It looked like a bracelet with wide, flat metal links. Plain, unpolished, but still elegant. Mox held it over his hip, removed the gauze he was using to stanch the bleeding, and placed the siphon over the entry and exit wounds both.
“It stops bleeding, deters infection, and speeds healing,” he said, almost as if he were reciting something he had read in a textbook or an ad.
Sloane frowned at the strip of pale skin still visible over the waistband of his pants. “You can’t be saying the Dark One didn’t cause our Drains. He was present at every single one of them, and they stopped when he disappeared. What else could it have been?”
Mox frowned back at her. “I don’t know everything that can be done with magic,” he said. “Especially across universes. Dimensions. But I know what I can’t do. And I know that I’ve never encountered anyone here as powerful as I am. Maybe your Dark One was.” He shrugged. “Unlikely.”
She snorted. “Not suffering from a lack of confidence, are you?”
“No,” he replied, but he didn’t sound boastful, only . . . sad. “Not when it comes to raw power, I’m not. But there are more important things—you know that. It’s how you escaped.” He smirked a little. “Very clever, by the way.”
“Thanks,” she said stiffly.
Mox stood, using the table to steady himself, and went to a small cabinet in the corner of the room. Inside it was a small stack of clothes—all dark colors, of course, because supposedly evil sorcerers who commanded armies of undead couldn’t wander around in bright orange, after all. He took a shirt from the stack and limped into the bathroom behind the half-wall to change. “It’s my turn,” he said. “For a question.”
Sloane sat in the other chair and started gathering the scraps of gauze and wrappers from her stint as nurse—exactly what she had told him she wouldn’t be. Not a good precedent to set, she knew, but it was already done.
“You said—when you were trapped—that you didn’t choose to come here,” he said. She could only see the back of his head and one of his shoulders over the crumbling wall, but the flash of bare skin made her feel uneasy.
“You mean when you kidnapped me and held me against my will?” Sloane tilted her head. “Yeah. Before I got pulled into Genetrix, I was in the