"I don't think Kers wants to be houses. Kers, they've got instantaneous signaling that persists between universes," Tab explains. "It syncs time, if nothing's at relativistic speed - and if there's a person on both ends. Their usual person is not working, and the backup person insists on being houses. Very nice houses, but it's a constraint."

"Although I feel silly for not having thought of installing him in the castle before the most recent breakage."

"I have never had any particular ambition toward being a house," says Kers. "Sure, I'll try it."

"One of you is a werewolf," volunteers Shell Bell impishly. "One to start? Where should we put the other end, the Belltower?"

"Belltower's good. Tab, you want to run it there?"

"Sure." Tab conjures up an ansible with Gift-friendly plugs, twists it in half, waves one in Kers's direction. "Where do you want this?"

"Orbital ring would be good. It's not like we're short on network hubs up there."

Tab nods, pops up, inserts the half, pops back down, gestures at Shell Bell, goes to Milliways, plugs in the other half, and returns to Aelise's office. "All set," she tells Kers.

"Well, it's definitely a computer system," she says after a moment. "Weird aftertaste to it, though. And it's six kinds of fried. Some of the problems go right down to the hardware, I think. I can barely get it to squeak when I poke it."

"The hardware, really? I guess that's another reason to go to Eos next instead of Origin."

"I tried wishing it fixed. Maybe I didn't know enough to be specific correctly."

"Are the clocks synced up?"

"In the ring and the tower? As much as they can be," she says. "Right now there's such pervasive instability, the tower isn't synced up with itself. But the two ends of the link you gave me agree with each other. I'm guessing there's more links in the tower, but I can't reach them to tell you how their clocks are doing."

"She is so, so broken," sighs Shell Bell. "Last time wasn't this bad. What is in that world?"

"I'll stick my head in first and find out but I want Golden covering me while I do it. Or Tab, if Tab can do that," shudders Glass.

"I can blanket other people as long as I'm awake," Tab assures her. "I can also do it inside-out but that's probably not what you have in mind. And - Kers, I didn't wink out when I left the world, did I?"

"Nope," she says. "Do you want me to start covering your friends?" She eyes the small crowd. "I can get these, but how many more are there?"

"I'm number fourteen, total," says Tab. "If you only count Bells and not anybody's partners or children or siblings. It's mostly Glass, she's the one who'd need to peer into uninvestigated worlds like the one that broke Jane. The rest of them should be fine coasting on wishes and torching."

"Done," shrugs Kers.

"Thanks," says Glass. "I like my aura powers. On net. The part where I'm the bellwether for - oh, hey, that's a pun in English, cute - for nasty worlds is a little scary."

"Well, now you have fewer things to be scared of."

"...Why, what are you seeing?"

"...It looks like she almost killed you."

"It was an option on the table but I was pretty smart when I was six so she could stash me elsewhere instead, I sulked about it for a while when I was thirteen," says Tab. "How is that the sort of thing you can see? It's not exactly a Bell attractor, is it?"