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had never been so surprised at anything anyone said.
    She knew my name.
    She had been expecting me.
    God knew how many dimensions from home and in the middle of a raging dust storm, she had been expecting me!
    My first thought was to back slowly away before turning and running into the storm. But my legs remained frozen in place, my mind too stunned to even try to reason out anything.
    “Come on,” the girl said. “It’s windy out there!”
    Nothing on me was moving.
    Tananda finally pushed me forward and the girl stepped back, holding the door for all of us to go inside.
    If I hadn’t known this was the same cabin as we had seen in the other dimensions, I would have never have recognized it. Now it had a wooden floor, the cracks in the walls were all filled, and it was warm and comfortable.
    There was a table with a bowl of fruit on it, four chairs, and kitchen counter with cabinets on one side of the room. A fire was burning in a baking stove, keeping the cabin comfortable. A bed was against the far wall, with a beautiful blue and gold quilt neatly covering it and a pillow.
    The young lady didn’t seem to be at all surprised to see Aahz, which worried me even more. Pervects tended to scare people, either by their looks or their reputations.
    I finally managed to find the words I needed to ask.
    “How do you know me?”
    “She knows you?” Aahz asked.
    Clearly he had been too far out in the dust storm to hear her over the blowing wind.
    The girl laughed and I got even more afraid of her. The laugh was perfect, sort of gentle, yet free and high, like a soft breeze on a summer’s afternoon. The exact laugh I would expect from a young lady as beautiful as she was, yet never got, at least from the few I had met.
    “I don’t really know him,” she said, again laughing. “At least not in the traditional sense, or any other sense for that matter. Although I must say, I wouldn’t mind, if you know what I mean.”
    I had no idea what she meant. I wanted to ask just how many senses of “know” there were, but figured I’d wait to do that later.
    Aahz snorted and Tananda laughed.
    She went on. “My father said I should expect a young, good-looking man named Skeeve to come here. I just assumed you were Skeeve, since you are the first person to visit this place in the two weeks I’ve been here.”
    I think I was staring at her, stunned. At least that was how it felt. I didn’t know her and I had no idea who her father might be.
    She smiled at me and then turned to Tananda.
    “You must be the one Skeeve was traveling with before,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ve taken care of the dust bunnies. You know, don’t you, that they’re completely invisible to guys.”
    Then she glanced at Aahz and frowned slightly.
    “But I don’t know you and your connection to this, big guy.”
    I was so shocked, I couldn’t say anything. She had called Aahz “big guy,” and knew I had traveled with Tananda.
    No one said anything.
    Clearly Tananda and Aahz were shocked as well. From what Tananda had said, we were a lot of dimensions away from our homes. Yet in the middle of a dust storm, in a strange dimension, we had found someone waiting for us. Someone who knew my name.
    “Cat’s got your tongues, I see,” she said, laughing. She turned around and motioned that we should sit down at the table. “I bet you’re getting hungry by now, after all the dimension-hopping you’ve been doing.”
    I wanted to ask why she thought a cat had my tongue, and how she knew what we had been doing, and then decided against asking that, in exchange for what I thought was a better question.
    “Are you a Shifter?”
    Again she laughed, the wonderful sound filling the cabin and blending in with the faint crackling of the fire in the oven.
    “Not hardly. But my father said you might be getting a little tired of their costs by now. How much of the treasure have you given away so far? Thirty-five percent? Forty percent?”
    “Only twenty-five