She closed her eyes, pulled on the Swarm thread, and seven swarmers popped into being beside her. Alice took a moment to slip behind each pair of eyes and look around to get a feel for how the tower looked from their vantage point, six inches off the ground. Then she sent the first one hopping down the stairs.

Ordinarily, Alice could only send the swarmers out about the length of a football field before they became too difficult to maintain, which wouldn’t be useful to locate the others. But Alice had been thinking about the nature of the “fabric” she had folded. Here in the labyrinth, distance was an illusion, a malleable, changeable thing in the hands of creatures like Torment and the Dragon. She guessed—hoped, really—it would make a difference.

Well. No percentage in hanging about. Her lip curved in a half smile at her father’s favorite phrase. She kept hold of the Swarm thread and reached out for the fabric of space. With a pinch and a twist, she connected the stairway to the bridge outside the tower.

The first swarmer dashed from here to there without any trouble. She ought to have felt the distance as a weight on their connection, but it was as if the swarmer were only in the next room. It works!

The next step was managing all of them at once. She folded another pinch in the fabric and sent a second swarmer through to a different bridge, then a third to yet another, until all seven swarmers had left the tower.

Then she started them moving down their respective bridges. At the same time, she shifted her grip on the labyrinth, keeping a portal open just behind each swarmer to maintain the connection to her real body. It was a bit like letting slippery cloth slide through the pinch of her fingers. Alice took a deep breath and sent the swarmers into a run, keeping an eye out for anything human.

Most of Esau’s towers were just dumps for books, but here and there were structures dedicated to prison- or portal-books, and those were very strange indeed. One tower was full of water, waves crashing around its doorways with salty ocean spray. Another had been filled from top to bottom by thick, cottony spiderwebs, and Alice hurriedly sent her swarmer running in the other direction before some arachnid decided to have it for a snack. A third tower shone with shifting colored lights, and the happy strains of a vigorous waltz drifted over the nearby bridges.

Alice kept pinching the fabric of space, moving the swarmers deeper and deeper into the fortress, past towers and stairways and endless, crisscrossing bridges. At first she despaired of finding the others—Torment could have scattered them anywhere in the near-infinite sprawl of iron and stone.