The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Stars in the Dark
You quickly get used to these starless San Francisco nights.
Between the fire of early evening lights and the fog that tries to suffocate them, the stars are lucky if any of their light reaches the roads. You know there’s no need to search for anything past the smoldering sodium lights, past the pinnacles of those thousand towers. Only the moon glows through, a fragment of a disk.
If you ride to the outer hills and south to the suburbs, you might see their light trickle through. But that’s not how it goes. Most will never leave: queues of tents stand frail under the freeways, and beggars lie in benches by piers of LEDs, waiting for something better than a view of the stars.
From your fledgling days, you’ve learned about the stars from what others say about them. Dozing in a sling on your mother’s hip, you listened to her spin yarns about sailors in space while she cooked. She told you how the stars were brighter in her childhood, how they began to disappear as the city grew taller.
In middle school, you smuggled your tablet into class to watch the launch of the Fortitude 3 under your desk. While Ms. Santos read off her slides about random-access memory, you watched the tiny, historic shuttle draw a path of smoke through the stratosphere.
The year that shuttle passed Jupiter, you began detouring to the corner library after school every week, to borrow the same book again and again. You no longer remember its title, but you remember what lies between its covers: the entire night sky, scattered across a two-page spread, with the ecliptic of the sun marked by a dotted line. The book would never belong to you, but you made it as yours as much as you could, taking photographs of its diagrams and paragraphs.
When you left home for college, you kept those notebooks with you.
Looking up, Lea sees the Milky Way for the first time.
All of Japantown is dark tonight. A third of the city has been snuffed out by the blackout, and now there are only the silhouettes of antennae and jumbles of dark, mismatched roofs, crowding each other out like teeth in a jaw.
Beyond them, this strange vision of stars, crisper than in the two-page spread, unfolds.
There is more depth and distance to the image than Lea could have imagined, a cloud of lights, a pool of glitter. San Francisco has not seen this many stars in a century of flickering neon and sodium incandescence.
As if meeting an old friend for the first time in a century, its many eyes glisten, black windows mirroring the sky.
On the straggly lawn of the Hexagon, a crowd of frazzled tenants mills and mutters around her, a noisy contrast to the silence she’s used to. She herself has only just come down from her window on a blanket rope five stories long. From other windows, similar ropes of knotted cloth flap in the breeze, and flashlight beams swing back and forth.
“Lea?”
She whips around. Someone’s running towards her, and she almost doesn't recognise him, but the name finally breaks through: August, the sleepless office worker she sees at the café, only ever in businesswear with bags under his eyes. The eyebags are still there, but the businesswear has been replaced with cargo shorts and a large sweatshirt.
“What the heck?” he exclaims.
“Auggie?” she shouts in unison. “Do you live here?”
“I’ve been in unit 203 since last year! How long have you been here?”
“Three years, dude! I’m in 509.”
“You’ve been here the whole time I’ve been here? And we never saw each other?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who lives here. It’s weird.”
Finding a mound in the corner of the lawn, they sit down in the grass, August complaining about his back. Inevitably, they both look upward.
“Oh, whoa.”
“I know, it’s unreal.” Dark towers reach up into a fogless sky.
August blows out a breath through puckered lips. “I’ve never seen so many stars.”
“You know much about the constellations?”
“Uh, not really?”
“Cool, I can introduce you! You see the three stars in a line over there? That's the Belt of Orion.” Lea points, though parallax means August sees her pointing at different stars. “And there’s Deneb, Vega and Altair, the Summer Triangle—”
It fills their eyes both, and many other eyes around them. The chatter wafts through the summer night. There is no booming of karaoke speakers tonight, no screeching of tires; their voices are thin and alone.
“I wonder when my landlady will come by,” she says absently. “She protects her units like unhatched eggs. She even has a no-guest rule, though I kinda broke that one last week.” The picture of her two friends flashes through her thoughts, the elevator doors closing between her and them. “Maybe the blackout will drive the rent down.”
“God, I hope.”
A torch flash casts long shadows across the grass before them, outlined in white. “Don’t mind me, you’ve got a good spot,” calls out a newcomer, as they drop onto the grass beside the mulling companions. They sigh. “What a night.”
“Tell me about it,” August replies. “You just watch, we’re gonna be out here on the lawn all night. I refuse to sleep out here.”
Lea has flopped backward onto the grass, staring straight up at Cygnus. “What’s your name?” she asks, turning her head to take the newcomer in. Their short, curly hair is bleached to some pale shade, indiscernible in the moonlight.
“Morri,” they reply, reaching out for a handshake that Lea returns with the wrong hand. “You?”
“Lea. You live here too?” she replies.
“Yeah, first floor, in whiffing distance of the garbage collection point.” Morri grimaces while the other two laugh.
“I wonder what the news has to say about the blackout. You guys didn’t happen to check, did you?” August taps a search query into his phone as he speaks.
Lea pats her pocket for her phone, then slaps her forehead. “I forgot to take my phone down with me.”
“Oh, huh, it says here,” August turns his phone around to show them a post that neither can read from where they are, “there was a power surge thousands of times bigger than any we’ve had before. They’ve shut off the power across a third of the city, it’ll come back once they’ve figured out what caused it.”
“Who knows how long that’ll take,” Lea sighs, then immerses herself in the view again. “You know what, let’s play a game. I made this one up myself, it’s actually so good for getting to know people you just met, i.e. like the three of us right now. Basically, you interview each other and try to find as many people you both know as possible.”
“I know one—Morri,” August says at once. “The president. Tim Lee.”
“Not like that, they have to be new connections. Also, no famous people. That’s no fun.”
“Then what if we don’t find anyone?”
“Between two people living in this city? No way. I’ve never seen it fail before, and you know what they say, the universe isn’t getting any bigger.” She pauses. “You guys get it?”
Sometimes, you roam the library shelves together with the daughter of your mom’s best friend. She gravitates towards a different end of the hall, towards biology and history. You watch her disappear behind the shelves while you get to yours, and discover her two hours later, nestled in a beanbag chair, reading about castles and jousting tournaments.
You convince your mom to take you both stargazing, when you are seven and still don't know that the Coit Tower overlooks the glowing piers. Halfway to the tower, it becomes clear that the view is no better than below. Then your companion’s ankle is bitten by ants in the grass, and tears gather in her eyes, sparkling in the lights below Telegraph Hill. The tears are still there when you snap a selfie of the both of you, for a keepsake.
You support her down the slopes back to the car beneath the cloudy orange sky, her arm around your shoulders, heads heavy with disappointment. She falls asleep in the back seat of your mom’s car in the night traffic. You wait for her to stir so you can talk to her, but she doesn't wake till you pull up at her front gate in Daly City.
Morri chuckles. “Okay, Lea, show us how to play it.”
“I always start by asking about work. Do you have a job?”
“Mhm, I have two,” they say smartly.
“Two timer, huh?” August pipes.
They shrug. “I do what I have to. I’m a teller at the Transamerica Pyramid branch, that’s my job job, but I’m also a live sound mixer. I’ve done some big gigs, Overripe this May was actually a dream come true.”
Lea looks them in the eye. “Overripe? For real?”
“It sure was a thing that happened. I didn’t realise how much their performances are EQed. Had to turn the lows on Felipe’s mic way down.” Morri mimes pulling a slider down. “There’s enough bass in that man’s voice to rattle the gates of Hell.”
“That is hella cool,” Lea says under her breath, tapping her chin. “Oh, I know a dude who’s really into Overripe—Zainul Rahim? He drops by Kiana’s Place on Saturday evenings and blasts their music from his tablet while he’s studying. We’ve chatted a couple of times. He tells me his boyfriend Josiah is a big fan too, they met at their job—”
”Wait. Josiah?” Silent for a while till now, August perks up. “Does Zainul have like, big glasses?”
“Yeah, purple ones.”
August is clutching at his head. “No way, I think I know the Josiah you’re talking about. I mean, how many people named 'Josiah' are there, even? He lives in the area but I don’t know where. I bump into him on the trolley sometimes, sometimes he’s with his hipster BF Zainul. Band tees? Huge headphones?”
“Oh! Yes!” Lea raises her voice to a shout, slapping the ground. “That’s Zainul, one hundred percent. Alternative band nerd! There we go, that’s one guy!” She turns to the other two. “You get how it goes?”
August is grinning. “I get it, let’s keep going.” He turns to Morri. “Um, you work at the Transamerica Pyramid? My stockbroker’s office is there too, Leona Mills—seen her around?”
When you close your eyes at night in Japantown, San Francisco, you hear the bassy boom of a karaoke bar one street down, filtered through the rev of outlawed motorcycles and the screech of wheels. The noise seeps through the walls, and you can’t help but to wonder if you might someday discover who that is you hear, wailing into the microphone. The thud of a trance kick conjures images of neon logo signage, noisy red and orange, the weed smoke and frying oil swirling rose and gold in the night.
You’ve walked there in the dark, looking up past the apartment roofs and their tiny glowing windows, thinking it’s the wrong time to be looking for stars. Stars would fit the scene, you think, the temporary against the permanent. But they’re nowhere to be found, sheltered from view by the glowing veil of fog above, the same fog that keeps everything in this city right where it should be.
Sometimes, you like to stand alone on the corner of a street and listen to the telltale traces of other lives around you. The amateur singer straining their voice in a room two blocks away. The veteran motorcyclist veering down a shortcut around the hill. The disgruntled worker banging a fist on their hydrogen car’s horn.
Lea lies back as August and Morri uncover the epic tales of each other’s lives. She offers a helpful word or two every now and then, but they hardly need prompting. From the moment they discover that they have both had company brochures printed by one Veranda Chase at Delphi Solutions (the print store on the third floor of the Marah Tower), the game takes off.
Both Lea and August have been served by the same braces-wearing waiter at Sushi One up at the head of their street. Morri’s aunt and August’s mother were enrolled at the same high school twenty-two years ago; both told tales of the gargoylesque Mister Hornsby, the discipline master with the ancient glasses.
Five years ago—when she was fourteen and they were sixteen—Lea and Morri frequented the library at the corner of Geary Boulevard and Scott Street, and had the same favorite librarian.
“There was this book I read once,” says Morri. “And then I could never find it again, for some reason. It was called A Beginner’s Atlas—“
“—of the Night Sky?” Lea completes the title without a thought.
The stars grow bright above them. Another blanket rope shoots out of a window nearby, flopping down with its tip barely falling past a second-floor windowsill. There’s a yell, and a glow stick lands with a thud up by the Hexagon compound’s gate, and somewhere else, a silent car flashes its yellow lights across the street.
“You’ve read it?” asks Morri quietly.
Lea nods. “I borrowed it every week. Week after week. Ran down after school the day after I returned it every time, just so I could borrow it again.”
“Shit, you’re the reason I never could find that book again?”
She chuckles. “Weird as it is…I think so. Sorry buddy.”
“I swear,” Morri gasps, jabbing their index finger into the earth with every word, “we are heading right down to that library tomorrow morning and finding it, and I’m borrowing it on your card.”
Lea slaps their shoulder. “Sure thing, then we can both swing by Kiana’s Place. Maybe we’ll get to hang out with Zainul and Josiah.”
“You really weren’t kidding,” August chimes in. “Everyone's connected in San Francisco.”
She smiles. “Like I said, the universe isn’t getting any bigger.”
“I’m starting to feel it,” Morri sighs with a shake of their head.
Most of the romance of constellations is stolen from you at six years old, when you read that most stars in the Big Dipper are farther from each other than the earth is from them.
All of a sudden, it seems silly to draw imaginary shapes in the sky, when they really only exist from the vantage of earth, in the brief twinkling of time that humans have been around.
“What’s wrong with the Big Dipper?” asks your mother, giving the steering wheel a whirl.
“It doesn’t exist!” you cry, curled up in the back seat. “It’s fake! People made it up! If we were on a planet orbiting a different star, the sky would be different! None of the stars would be in the same place…”
But night falls again and again, and no stars are visible besides the same handful, pricking through the light pollution and fog: Sirius, Procyon, Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka. You spend a good year disillusioned with the myths that your parents have told about them.
Then your best friend is taken away, to a place behind locked doors where no one will see her again. That May, a star winks out of visibility, according to the American Astronomy Annals. Two hundred million years ago, it falteringly completed its life cycle and collapsed into a black hole, but only on that day does humanity watch its death.
You never thought you would live to see the night sky change, but it seems it can happen more suddenly than one thinks.
The year you leave home for college, the Fortitude 3's crew completes its first orbit of Saturn on Titan. In the radio interviews, the astronauts talk more about home than space, static punctuating their tearful grieving for the world they haven't seen in a decade.
The year you leave home for college, it begins to dawn on you that it doesn’t matter that the constellations wouldn't exist in another galaxy, in another epoch.
Nothing in life has meaning, by that token. All things are just arrangements of atoms. They will only mean something briefly. They will only mean something while you have stories to tell about them.
What difference is there, between drawing shapes in the stars, and molding clay into the figures of gods? Or framing up a photo where you and your best friend are still together?
August points past the facing row of apartments. “I know that one! It’s the Big Dipper,” he says. Lea follows his finger and sees the ladle-shaped asterism over the roofs.
Morri is staring across the road, past the stalled cars playing temporary bedrooms for their owners. “Hey, Lea,” they murmur. “Did you ever see this girl at the library, back then?”
“Who?”
“I used to go down every Wednesday afternoon, and she was always there in the same beanbag chair, by the science section. It all just, man, it all just came back to me, and I don’t know why, but I associate the library with her. The musty smell, the prickly cushions. And her, always there in green, never saying anything when I passed. Always lost in some book.”
“You don’t mean Adelaide Moore, do you?”
They look up, eyes widening. “The…the girl who got arrested for—for the mutant butterfly? The one who escaped?”
“Yeah, we used to have tea together. Our moms had tea together. We’d visit the library when our parents did.”
“My mind is officially blown,” Morri breathes. “I always thought it sucked, what they did to Adelaide. I'm glad she's escaped, to be honest. Danger to us or not.”
“Was it hard for you, when they arrested her?”
“Well, I was only eight at the time, so I cried for a day, and then I moved on with my life like nothing had happened. But—”
When you blink, you can still see her wide-eyed face on the backs of your eyelids, exactly the same as it was that night on Telegraph Hill. Years of silence, and suddenly, she is here again, slipping away again, behind closing elevator doors.
“If you survive, come back and see me!” you call, before the line between the two of you is severed, and the silence returns.
Sometimes, you feel like a star, alone in the dark, light years away from everyone else. A star among other stars in a galaxy, held in orbit by San Francisco’s gravity.
“—You know, it's weird but this whole time, she was always over in the next district. She’s always been nearby, just in a place where I couldn't see her.”
“I hope she’s okay.”
“She’s okay,” Lea whispers.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
City of Eyes and Fog - The Eyes
It was a week ago that Adelaide’s steady life was shattered forever by the appearance of Felix Mercer.
Eleven years of the same week playing over and over, beeping clocks and sliding panels and beeping clocks, and now the pattern is breaking, lying in glowing pieces on that penthouse apartment floor. This stranger stood there outside her room, offering her something she had not dreamt of till that moment: freedom. And afraid as she was of the unknown, of having no beeping clocks to live her life by, she chose to flee, descending through the city lights in the last rain of spring.
It has been a week since their eyes first met. Today they sit watching the sky through a rain-streaked window, the light forming faint parallelograms on the burgundy hotel walls. The paint is old as the furniture and it has not yet outfitted with all the pleasures of modern life, but in some ways, that is for the better.
Felix ponders some handwritten notes, and Adelaide lies under the silken covers, stealing a glance at him over the pages of a novel. He has been bizarrely cautious about never occupying the bed while she is in it, and she cannot tell if he minds sleeping in the armchair every night.
“How many more nights can we afford to stay here?” she asks.
Felix glances at her and loses his unfocused stare for a polite smile. “Don’t you worry your pretty head about that,” he replies, fanning out the receipts in his hand. “As I said, we are in no danger of running out of funds. The first dividends for my shares arrive next week.”
Those ill feelings are dispersed momentarily by puzzlement. She arches an eyebrow. “How did you open a bank account here? You don’t have proof of ID, do you?”
Felix smiles that same unrevealing smile. “I have my ways,” he says.
Her eyes shift to the wall beside her. He keeps so much of himself veiled in shadow—or in light so bright that no one can see through it. How can she know he has benign aims? But his secret ways are keeping them both afloat, and she isn’t about to aggrieve the only person standing between her and capture.
Back in that penthouse apartment, standing in the blue light, she didn't know where her moment's fire and folly would take her, though that "moment" has lasted a week now. She is out here, on the run, unable to show her face anywhere. And nothing is written. And everything is possible. She gets to decide.
The pair know that the SFPD is casting its net wide. Photos of the escaped lab prisoner Adelaide Moore as she was last seen, brown-haired and distraught, have been circulating in the news at every hour for a week now, appearing on billboards between lurid pink-and-yellow advertisements.
This is a city of eyes, hiding in every wall and looming over every screen. But these are the eyes of the four megacorporations that puppeteer life from behind the scenes, and most of them operate with the greater parts of themselves distributed in networks across the world, so they do not answer to any law.
Felix does his best to keep her disguise up about her when they are in public, but even he cannot maintain it constantly, particularly not when she is out of his sight—though those moments are few. Although Adelaide has no doubts that she has been seen by a camera somewhere, the city cannot get hold of that data just yet. Still, she ducks her face away every time she notices a glass lens pointed her way, and averts the eyes of drivers and their dashboard cameras.
In their corner of Noe Valley, where trees stand manicured behind speed-trapped traffic lights, Adelaide buys herself a tiny green pair of scissors so that she can trim her hair. Her roots are growing out dark blonde, instead of the brown of her childhood, and flecks of blue have emerged from the grey of her eyes. She is caught between the past and the future, brown- and honey-haired, blue- and grey-eyed, staring into the dressing mirror of their little burgundy hotel room at someone she only half knows, tufts of hair scattered across the desk and the hotel phone.
It isn’t till they are standing at the intersection by Mitchell’s Ice Cream the next day, drenched in the golden afternoon light, that Felix turns to her and says, “Your present look is very becoming, quite the shame that it wouldn’t do for a disguise. It is too memorable.”
“You mean the disguise you have on me right now?”
“No, your actual look.”
“Ah, thank you,” she murmurs, though she isn’t sure of why this is something she should thank him for.
“Most would pay for these colors, but here you are, changing them without a thought.”
Not five minutes later, Adelaide glimpses a strange visage in storefront window, and halts to stare. That’s me. Isn’t it? Her face is sharp and round-nosed; her hair is all honey-brown.
She sees Felix come to a stop behind her. “Is something the matter?”
“Is this still necessary?” she asks, pointing at her reflection in the Tesla Futures storefront. Lights spelling NEW ARRIVALS glow behind it. “I’ve already changed my looks a great deal on my own. You noted it yourself.”
He lowers his week-old tablet-phone behind the shopping bag on his elbow. If he is putting any effort into her light mask, he barely shows it. “The cameras can identify you from the features you cannot change,” he replies. “Nose shape, jawline, distance between the eyes...those are the parts you cannot hide from cameras.”
“How do you know that?”
“I read an enthusiast’s page on facial recognition technology.”
“Where?”
“On the internet.”
“Did they have the internet at home, in your England?”
“Not at all.” He beams as she turns away from his reflection, and to him. “But it wasn’t hard to master; these marvellous contraptions come with their own tutors.” His phone emits a blip. With a smile, he holds the screen up for her to see it: a ginger cat with a cartoonishly large head gazes out at the two onlookers beyond the glass, tail swaying. “Like her,” he says. “This is Lillie.”
“How may I help you?” Lillie mews.
He smiles absently. “My country built the Tunnel Machine, the very crown jewel of contemporary engineering—sorcery, they liked to call it. Never mind that it dropped me off in the wrong universe. This, however. This is true sorcery.”
Adelaide reaches out to take the phone for a closer look, but he swoops it away.
“Patience, my dear,” he says, letting one cord handle of the paper bag slip off his wrist. His other hand, he plunges into the bag, and from it pulls a large box-shaped package wrapped in plastic film and labelled in silver: PalmNote ES Vert. While she gapes, he hands it over.
Adelaide spends a whole five minutes of the walk staring at the box, not even daring to make a nick in the plastic. “Did you buy this for me?” her question comes five minutes late, as they approach the gas station near their hotel.
“If I were you,” he replies, “I’d be concerned if that weren’t so.” She turns to him with round eyes. “It is for you,” he clarifies.
She finally tears the box open and slides the packing foam out, the device gleaming darkly as it emerges, sitting in a perfectly-sized indent in the foam. She pulls it out and presses once on the power button. Instead of a cat, a green frog pops onto the screen, waving its webbed hand at her and introducing itself as Freddie. “Oh, wow,” she murmurs.
“We can use these to stay in contact,” he says. “Just in case.” She nods, tapping through the onscreen guide, voiceover and all, until it reveals a home page with a menu of icons. One is a speech bubble labelled Messages. Touching it takes her through another onscreen walkthrough, where she is guided through the creation of her profile. Adelaide Moore, she types into the name field. The onscreen keyboard looks like the one she had on the screen back at the—
Seconds before she taps the confirmation button on her completed profile, Felix snatches her hand away. “Use a different name,” he says in a hush. Her mouth forms an “o” of understanding and she erases it, typing out the name of her favourite Greek goddess instead, and then casting her eye about until it lands on the box in her hand.
To the rest of the messaging network, her name is Artemis Glass.
Watching her over her shoulder till now, Felix turns to his own device. “Lillie, search for,” he laughs, “Artemis Glass. I should never get used to referring to you as such.”
“I found four profiles for the name Artemis Glass,” Lillie answers. “Is this what you're looking for?”
“Why, yes, and thank you, Lillie! Four Artemis Glasses…”
“You have received a friend request!” pipes Freddie.
“Uh…show me the friend request?”
“Gladly!” the notification pops out to fill the screen. Felix’s profile image unfolds with it: he is a silhouette in front of a carnival landscape, the golden lights and painted horses of a carousel blurring behind him.
“Is this you?” Adelaide pipes, scanning the profile. Gender: Male. Age: 21. “Are you really twenty-one?”
“It is convenient for me to be twenty-one, especially where the purchase of spirits is concerned.”
She taps her lower lip with her fingertip, slowing to a stop on the sidewalk. “When did you go to the carnival? In here.” She points at the photo on the screen.
He shakes his head. “I made it.”
“Really? How?”
She leaps as a flash illuminates the air around them, and the sunlight cools to black. She stares as a scene resolves around her: an empty carousel whirling, fairy lights illuminating its every edge, like stars scattered across the night, horses bobbing in the glow. The horse manes gleam, pink, white and gold and studded with faux crystals, but their eyes are dark and deep, no light touching them. She can still hear the car horns blaring, and feel the gentle beat of the setting sun.
Adelaide stumbles back, till she bumps against Felix. He catches her by the shoulders. “That’s terrifying,” she says, lights glittering in her eyes. She glances left and right, searching for something to give lie to the illusion—and she finds that the scene scatters into indistinct bokeh at the edges—but front and centre, the vision is so crisp that she can almost hear the carousel music playing, far away. “It looks...real. How do you do that?”
“Lovely, isn't it?” his voice answers from over her shoulder while everything continues to whirl. “I have spent no less than two weeks perfecting this scene. Every detail must be crafted—I must be able to see it in my mind’s eye with perfect clarity, every crystal on every mane, ever fragment of chipped paint.”
“But you missed the eyes,” she adds then. “The horses have no eyes.”
The vision unfocuses and dissolves, replaced again by the sweltering junction, except too bright now. Adelaide blinks. A man with a shopping bag is staring at them as if they were a circus act.
Felix tilts his head. “Ah, so I did,” he says. She looks down at her screen again, recognising the carousel in the profile photo plastered across it—the same horses with the same black eyes. She taps the word “accept” on his friend invitation.
By the time she slides the tablet phone into her pocket, he has wandered over to the traffic light. Hugging the box close, she races after him.
He is peering at a checkered code printed in black on the curve of the traffic light pole. It doesn’t take him long to figure out which application corresponds to the odd pattern, and almost as soon as his camera has registered the monochromatic sigil does the quietly-blipping speaker give a merry jangle and the pedestrian light turn green.
“Did you just—” Adelaide rubs her eyes, coming up beside Felix moments before he takes her wrist, and she lets him lead her onto the tarmac. Cars stop on the other side of the painted line that marks the crossing, their silent engines glowing white.
“I could get used to living here,” her companion sighs.
Two Tuesdays after Adelaide’s escape, they overhear an exchange of shouts in the lobby under their feet that ends in a threat of a police report.
Five frigid minutes ending in mutual glances of terror, they silently agree that it is time to start moving soon. The longer they linger, the more trails they leave.
“We ought to leave the city, go down to the suburbs,” Adelaide says in a hush. “There are not as many people there as there are in San Francisco proper.”
Felix, sitting on the desk chair with a hand on the edge of his suitcase, taps a finger on his chin. “We would stick out there like a sore thumb, suburbs do not often play host to the unusual.”
“They’re looking for me in San Francisco. The farther we are from here, the more places they’ll have to look before they find us.”
He clasps and unclasps his suitcase buckle with his left index. “A fair point, but who would harbor us? The farther we go, the fewer hotels and inns there will be.”
“My parents,” she breathes, more to herself than to him. Feverish with the thought, she turns to him. “We can go find my parents. I remember where they live. They’ll let us live with them.”
Felix takes care to retain a pleasant look, but Adelaide can see his gaze harden with suspicion. “Surely not the same parents who gave you away to the law?”
She feels a pleading anger well up in her chest. “No, it wasn’t them, it was the doctor they called who did that. My parents are okay.”
“Now, now, your attachment to them is understandable,” he presses on, “but I’m afraid it might be misplaced.”
“You don’t know the last thing about them!” The shout startles him straight. “You’re talking badly about people you don’t even know!”
He touches his hand to his heart. “I do know they were responsible for your arrest. Adelaide, you must keep your wits about you!”
“They are the only people in the world who would care about me, why won’t you understand?”
He knocks his suitcase over. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, I only want to keep you safe! Why won't you trust me?”
Like the turning of a tide, Adelaide’s anger shrinks back into her heart where it was caged. She pulls back against the backboard, hugging her legs close to herself. “No, that’s not what I meant, that’s not—I know you care, I know you’re just trying to protect me—we won’t visit my parents, we won’t, we’ll do what you say—”
As Adelaide’s sentences disintegrate into broken-record repetitions of her pleas, Felix’s face goes blank. “I’m sorry,” the words barely break through her pleas. She shakes with sobs, but he repeats himself louder, “I’m truly sorry.” This time she hears him, and looks up, tears splashing on the blanket. He weaves his fingers together. “I didn’t mean to distress you.”
“I just thought it was a good idea. I just…”
“It might prove to be yet,” he says. He stands his suitcase up on its base again and comes to the bedside, sitting down on its edge. “Why don’t we call upon them? You say you remember where they live?”
Adelaide lifts her head enough to nod, a tear rolling out of her eye as she does. From his pocket, he offers the tablet phone, and she taps on an icon that brings up a map. “Um, 68 Belhaven Court, Daly City?” she says, the words igniting a firework-burst of memories, of dry lawns and red roofs. The address appears in the search bar. The map begins to scroll on its own, roads and fields zipping by, before it slows to a stop on a red-outlined patch of roads labelled Daly City.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
City of Eyes and Fog - The Fog
68 Belhaven Court is a small thoroughfare in Daly City, tucked away in some low, dry knolls. On the morning of the visit, Adelaide picks a sunflower yellow dress to wear, her favorite one in her current collection of three. In this weather, Felix has developed a fondness for collared t-shirts, and he exits the hotel room in a deep blue shirt trimmed in black, the top button undone. Adelaide wheels their navy blue luggage bag out after him, and pushes the elevator button with her knuckle.
They alight from the intercity bus with their luggage bag and cross a three-lane road at a junction, the low wind rustling in the silence, punctuated by the steady beeping pulse of the traffic light.
The things that they walk by are starting to illuminate patches of Adelaide’s memory. Morgan’s, the chain diner at the entrance to the city. Sushi One on the corner, paint peeling, red signboards several shades lighter. The decrepit BP gas station where they used to fuel up before driving down to San Jose, sporting a fresh coat of green paint. The family mart beside it, where she and her mother used to buy six-packs of cola for day trips, has been supplanted by yet another Mick’s Mart, occupying the same glass building—the same shelves in a different configuration.
But the houses are unchanged, if faded: the roof shingles are red and the lawns are brown, the one with fairy lights in its fir trees still has its fir trees and fairy lights. Heartache hits her.
“Were you close to your family?” asks Felix quietly.
Adelaide nods. Can she still remember their faces? “We went on boating trips. We flew kites, swam by the beach. Sometimes visited the library.”
“Pleasant pursuits,” says Felix. She glances at him to see what he feels, but his face is a mask, or she is not astute enough to read it. They cross in front of a driveway. “Have you thought that they might have moved since?”
“I don’t think so. The house was my grandparents’, they’ve had it for sixty…seventy years now. They bought it right after the crash.” She paused. “Sorry, you don’t know about the crash.”
“Well, I'm well aware of what a crash is," Felix replies. “I sold all my bonds in the West Indies preceding one.”
“The Caribbean? I…see,” she says noncommittally, turning away.
There is no conversation for a good ten minutes, as the light turns green and they cross another road, passing a chain of shops and the cars parked before them. It is the sort of silence that resists being broken.
As Belhaven Court gets closer, Adelaide’s heart begins to boom. Here the memories gather like swarming flies, and the nostalgia is heady, filling her with a cocktail of hope and dread. The sky is the same heavy orange, lying in layers across the peninsula. An eleven-year-old airplane streaks through the clouds. Some trees are taller, and some are dead. The silhouettes of the faraway hills peek over the same rows of houses. She tastes lemonade and ice.
Can these eleven years be scrubbed from the slate?
Adelaide stumbles on a drain grille, and the corpse of a day eleven years past hits her, of the last time she did the same. She finds her footing, dizzy, and all of a sudden she is standing in front of Number 68.
The gate is open, as if anticipating a car, and there are the sounds of life inside: an advertising jingle, spoken over by a jaunty, cartoonish voice not unlike that of Lillie the cat.
“Is this the one?” asks Felix over her shoulder. The voice pulls her out of her graveyard of memories.
She nods, eyes lingering on the white doorbell. “I’m scared.”
“Us both,” he admits.
Her parents never were gardeners; it was always too hard to maintain a lawn in the dry California heat. She remembers how her father once bought a shrub from a nursery and planted it by the driveway; its dead stump is still visible right where it used to be, beside the pillar.
Drawing in a huge breath, Adelaide reaches up and pushes the doorbell. A chimed melody answers. “Who’s there?” calls a voice that, despite the eleven years of absence, immediately snatches an instinctive reply out of her.
“It’s me, mom!”
Silence answers. The low mutter of the television unit cuts out, five seconds later. All they hear are the cicadas in the trees.
Up at the top of the driveway, the door clicks and swings open. A pale face peeks out, light brown hair clipped in a bun to the back of her head. Adelaide hears Felix’s feet shift in the gravel.
“Adelaide?” she calls, in as much of a whisper as she can manage, eyes large as the moon. She shuffles out in a faded t-shirt, baggy shorts and flip-flops, every bit the same woman she was a decade ago, with more lines in the corners of her eyes and across her forehead.
By the time Mrs. Moore has come up before them, her eyes are red with tears. “How and why?” she mutters between sniffles as she leads the visitors into the house. “Why, after so long?”
Adelaide only starts to speak once in the safety of the living room. A new set of couches sit in a square around a screen mounted on the wall. It takes her a minute to recognise the door to the kitchen, the base peeling.
“Felix broke me out of the lab,” she explains, and her mother turns to her companion with a hand awkwardly extended.
“Pleased to meet you,” he says, shaking the offered hand smartly.
Her mother continues to stare quietly as Adelaide steps through the doorway, as Felix hoists the luggage bag onto the doorstep and wheels it inside. They do not hug, nor even shake hands, and there continues to be a secretive caution to her every movement.
“Millie, turn on the television,” she calls across the living room.
“Gladly!” The screen lights up with the blithe face of a pink puppy, which prances offscreen while the luminescent white background fades into a scene from the news.
“Pineapple punch? Ginger ale?”
“The punch, if you please,” Felix answers promptly. “I have grown quite fond of pineapple since arriving.”
While the woman goes to the kitchen to take drinks out of the refrigerator, they settle into the couches. “This has so far gone better than I expected,” whispers Felix, right hand tucked into his left and resting on his lap. “But I am starting to think it won’t yield the results we were hoping…”
“The forest fires continue to spread across South California, enveloping San Diego in smoke,” the TV says. “PSI levels this afternoon are in the low two hundreds all across Socal. If you are heading out, wearing a face mask is strongly advised, especially for young children, the elderly, and those at-risk…”
“Do you think things could go back?” she whispers. “If we stayed here, in my room, with mom and…”
“Sorry for the wait,” her mother cuts in, placing two glasses of punch on the coffee table. Then she drops into the neighbouring single couch, and her face softens again. “Addie, baby, what have you been up to? What was it like in there?”
“Lonely” is the only word that makes it out of her. When she tries to call up images from her life before the escape, terror clogs her throat.
“I’m so sorry,” says Mrs. Moore, smiling with sad eyes.
“I’ve been…I’ve been getting up to date,” she goes on. “Felix has been here from England for two months, but he knows San Francisco better than I.”
Her eyes turn to Felix. “England? Which part?”
He nods. “The borough of Kensington and Chelsea.”
“Aha, the part most people think of when they haven't visited.”
“Have you? Visited, I mean?”
“A few times, on work-related business—”
A hydrogen car zips by on the road outside, gravel rattling below its wheels. Mrs. Moore leaps from the seat and straightens. She does not settle back in until it has driven out of earshot. When her gaze meets Adelaide’s again, it is disturbed.
“I hate to hurry things,” she says, “but I need you both to leave before Mi—before your father comes home, Adelaide.”
“Why? I want to see him too.”
“He…won’t be happy.”
“Oh…will he be afraid of me?”
She does not answer.
The chasm of dread widens, swallowing the hope she harboured. “So…I can’t come back,” she says blankly.
“When will he be home? Adelaide.” Felix has already downed his glass of punch; he stands, shaking Adelaide’s shoulder, but she is still staring at the rim of her glass. “Forgive me, we must go. If we leave too late, it will be hard to see in the fog.”
If she has begun to sense that things are about to turn, Felix is many steps ahead. He has stood up, a preemptive hand on their luggage. He intently eyes the doorway into the kitchen, through which she peers as well, spying a half-open window over the sink that looks out onto the garden.
“Adelaide, through the window,” he whispers, then turns to her mother. “Madam, we are most grateful for your hospitality. We must be—”
That is when the car tires roll onto the driveway, gravel clattering beneath them, and when her mother whispers, “Michael,” and Adelaide’s mind begins to race.
A door clicks. Steps crunch in the dirt, one after another. A key turns in the lock. Mrs. Moore takes one stricken glance at her daughter, and then her face contorts into a strained smile as the door clicks open. “Honey!”
“Jen.” The face of the man who steps through, aged a decade but no less surly, with his hair combed back from his brow, connects right away with a hundred memories. His mouth opens . “Adelaide?”
“No, you must have something wrong,” Jennifer Moore’s voice veers off pitch. “This isn’t, this isn’t Adelaide?”
“What? You think I wouldn’t recognize my daughter?” He snatches his phone out of his pocket in a flash, trembling visibly with one hand upon the doorknob as he dials three digits. Adelaide already knows which ones.
She feels like she might suffocate. Suddenly the leather of the couch seems to hold her fast. If she leaves the seat now, she might prompt her father to strike. But if she doesn’t move, and doesn’t move now, then she will never move again until the police are here. “Felix,” she gasps, but Felix has vanished.
She leaps from the couch and over its back, not even giving herself a moment to process the startling pain that shoots up her knee as it collides with the floor, springing straight for the kitchen, exactly as she has been rehearsing in her head. Behind her she hears Michael Moore’s thundering steps as he yells, “Stop right there!” She feels as if her lungs were being squeezed by a vice. She lifts one knee onto the edge of the sink, then the other, hoists herself up by the metal faucet, shoes on ceramic, and bends it as she does.
Her father comes barreling into the kitchen right as she springs out across the unwashed dishes and through the window.
Adelaide lands with one leg in a scratchy bush, and her vision is cloudy with tears. But there is no room for tears here and now. She sweeps them off with the back of her right forearm. The air is colder than before. She remembers this yard, it goes around the right side of the house and back to the road, but the gate is the last place she wants to go; her father is surely rounding the perimeter of the house right now.
Her eyes sweep her old yard. A grey apartment looms up on the other side of the back fence, and there is a woody vine creeping over it. If she can make it onto the grounds of the apartment, then she could buy herself time.
She sprints for the vine. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the tall shape of her father emerge from around the side of the house. She has not climbed in years, but in the screaming of her every thought, her arms and legs move as if she’s practiced this a thousand times. Her skirt snags on twigs. Her throat burns. “Get down from there!” His demand only spurs her to do the opposite. She throws herself over the fence at the gunshot boom of his voice, and lands on the other side with a crack on several rocks, scuffing an arm against a chunk of limestone.
Adelaide is back on her feet before the pain has even hit. Without turning to see if her father is following, she runs till her legs are burning, skirt tangling around them. She dodges around the side of the apartment, across the empty road and through the parking lot on the other side. Behind her she hears an engine’s roar echo across the neighbourhood; whether it is her father’s or someone else’s, she doesn’t know and doesn’t check.
For fifteen minutes she runs. Past a church, then right onto Southgate Avenue when another row of houses presents itself, flagging at times until terror spurs her again. The highway swoops across the road up ahead. She doesn’t wait for the traffic light to turn. She narrowly misses a car as she sprints into the highway’s shadow. On and on. Out of the highway’s shadow.
Adelaide is running on the fumes of her fear when, at last, a thicket of green thrusts up from around the bend of the boulevard. Without a thought she throws herself into the foliage, and landing elbow-deep in the grass by the roots of a tree, she curls up and sobs, reining her voice in so they come almost voicelessly.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mom,” she whispers, over and over till she runs out of breath. Then, in her mind, the pressing question bobs to the surface and stays: where is Felix?
Adelaide pulls her phone from her pocket. The battery is in the green. The clock glows a serene four forty-five against a background of water droplets on leaves. There are no messages waiting for her, but it has only been fifteen minutes since they parted ways. If Felix is in hiding right now, as she is, and she sends him a message, it might give him away. Any effort she makes to find him now—she realizes, her stomach turning—could put him in danger.
Instead she focuses on the nearby branch. Watching her companion put his light-changing talents to such versatile use has brought a new question to the forefront of her mind.
Brushing the bark of the shrub behind her, she knows it to be a hollyleaf cherry tree. She read about it no less than five times during her incarceration. It is not their fruit that are prized, but the flour that can be made from their pits after the hydrocyanic acid has been boiled out of them. Either way, the fruit is still edible to birds, and no doubt to humans as well.
This particular tree is not in its fruiting season, but numerous flowers hang over her head like a veil, and now that the sensation of burning coals in her throat has cooled, she begins to notice their gentle scent.
Reaching up, she touches a finger to one stalk of florets hanging before her face, and in her mind, finds the image of cherries, the sensation of them, of the pattern that they leave in her mind, the shape of their epigenomes.
When she opens them, all the flowers' petals have fallen off, unbroken, into her palm.
Her breath quickens. Anxiety bubbles up in her chest. Her mind shrieks for her to fling the branch away, to wash her hands, to scour her skin. But she squashes the terror down, as if she were putting a lid on a putrid jar, and sharpens her focus upon the branch. She squeezes her eyes shut, and squeezes the stalk tight as if pressing her will into it, the way she used to, the way she hasn’t done in years.
The plant’s filament has begun to swell and redden, and her heart has begun to race so loudly that she cannot hear the cars on the quiet road beyond. Even as she looks, the stalks harden to brown, the fruits ripen to scarlet, as if in a time lapse film, till they are deep crimson.
Adelaide’s breath hangs suspended between her lips as she gently lets go of the newly-ripened cherries. Released from her grasp, the branch rises. She watches them bob, almost blithely, in the wind.
She doesn’t notice her tears till they spill over her cheeks, and when the world is all a blur, she reaches up, wraps her hand around the first cherry and plucks it off, cramming it into her mouth. She chews till her teeth crunch on the pit, extracts it from the fruit’s flesh with her tongue, spits it into the grass.
I changed it, she thinks, sobbing as she plucks another from the branch. An electrical car zips silently past. Leaves rustle all about her in a vast, whispering chorus. I changed it and now it’s wrong.
Above her, she silently watches the fog roll in, through the canopies, between trees. It swallows the entire peninsula, and every soul in it. She remembers how her heart used to race when she watched that fog blanket the town, like a creature always looming outside her understanding. Now, she understands too much, and the fog no longer frightens her.
Her dream of refuge with her family has been crushed to dust. Her father wants nothing to do with her. Felix could be anywhere, but he is not here. Here there is nothing but fog.
For the first time since she fled the lab, Adelaide is alone.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Where Threads Interweave
For a second more, all four of them are standing on Hungarian soil, amid the gentle forest and the rustle of the river.
And then they are not.
As Honourless gives a cry, Vesper sees the world start to stretch and warp into rippling lines, like electrocardiographs charting the beating of a heart larger than the earth.
Then a great roaring surges through her skull, drowning out her thoughts, and she is torn from the world that previously tethered her, like a button from a piece of fabric.
All her years of warfare have barely prepared her for this. Forces throttle her in every direction, shaking her loose of all sense of location. She is hurtling through an abstract painting of unplaceable visions. The world has been drawn into threads, stretching on towards the distance no matter which way she looks. She shouts, but she cannot hear herself over the sound of space pulled thin around her. The only thing telling her she hasn’t become a thread in reality’s loom is the feeling of a hand grasping her own, though even that, she fears, might be wrenched out of her grasp at any moment.
There is nothing she can do but to close her eyes against the nausea roiling in her chest, and let this otherworldly storm spin and pull and toss her as it will.
She can’t say how long this monstrous roaring lasts, or how long she is detached from any notion of place or identity. Ten minutes? Twenty? She wants nothing more than for it to end, and when at last she sees things starting to solidify from the striated vision engulfing her—a flash of sky, a bit of grass—she almost cries out in relief.
The lights slow, and still, like a pond after a stone has disturbed it. As suddenly as she was dragged into it, Vesper is thrown out of this space-time vortex.
Her senses are awakened to the world by the rustling of grass. She tries to turn her head. Behind her, she hears the groan of a child’s voice, a thud of a body against earth.
She blinks. Grass fills her vision, bright green in the daylight, and the air here feels…hot. Like the heat in the underbelly of a tank, pressing down on her prone figure.
She looks ahead. Out of the grass rises a dark square plinth. Upon the plinth towers a statue of a seated man, and his name Awolowo engraved in gold beneath him. Ribcage aching, Vesper begins to prop herself up on one arm, sagging as a wave of dizziness slams into her.
On a road off to her left, a grey car rumbles by. She stares at it through her daze, and a strange rising sensation, between thrill and dread, fills her chest, for the car is too flat for a car, and it sits too close to the ground. Its corners are too smooth and its engine does not rattle or chug. She cannot take her eyes from it till it is out of sight.
“Honourless!” The same child’s voice pierces through that thought, accompanied by the sound of her feet stomping on grass. “What in the Light’s name was that landing?”
Unintelligible, gravelly grumbling answers.
That sound is the thing that finally shakes Vesper out of her stupor and drags her back up to the surface of awareness. She turns and sees the tall woman with ash-brown hair—Honourless—sitting on the ground with her head in her hands. She gasps as that vision starts a fast-forward film reel of the past day unspooling in her head.
Orobelle. The self-proclaimed duchess. Orobelle, who first found her on a beach at Dunkirk, appeared before her again at Kalocsa, bringing a man named Dorian and a woman named Honourless who does not speak a lick of any language she knows. They all linked hands on the river’s edge, when the rest of the Number 60 wasn’t looking, and then everything…disappeared.
A rumble swells overhead, almost so reminiscent of the sound of that strange place between existences that another reflexive wave of dizziness sweeps over Vesper. She glances up—to see a large aircraft is passing over them, roaring like something out of an H.G. Wells novel, larger than even the Yorks that took them to Gergen Bridge.
She stares as it passes slowly beneath the blue, and she shivers.
It’s one thing to stand on a beach in the wind, and hear a mysterious child tell rave about other worlds—easy to think she might be going slightly mad, rather than believe the more frightening possibility.
But now, watching an aircraft that could not possibly exist pass overhead, it is beginning to sink in. The Number 60, their tanks and their rifles, the war that has scarred the world indelibly—is not here. It is nowhere. This is not the world she knows. There is only grass, and this serene obsidian sculpture gazing out over them.
“Well, focus harder next time!” Orobelle snaps, while Dorian offers his arm to the child. Honourless groans back, her face buried in her lap. “You are here to do just one thing, so do it right!”
“Give her some slack,” Vesper shouts.
“Tell me what to do again, I dare you!” The glare Orobelle shoots her could melt iron. For once, however, Vesper knows she can suffer no repercussions from glaring back, so she does.
“You can take it or leave it,” she says, walking to Honourless’ side—a movement that makes her head spin again. “Yelling at her won’t help.”
“Dorian, my watch,” Orobelle says coldly, turning away.
While he swings the luggage bag off his shoulder onto the grass and unbuckles the flap, Vesper sits back down on the ground and heaves a great sigh, waiting for the dizziness to ebb. Beside her she catches a glance from Honourless. The woman smirks as their eyes meet.
Only now that they are not hurtling through space does she see the scars that crisscross the woman’s neck and limbs, and the ragged knotted fabric she wears as clothes. There are bite and claw marks from predators much larger than any she’s seen, and some that look more deliberate on her left arm, forming a row of symbols. The hand of that arm is missing the last two fingers.
“Lived quite a life, haven’t you,” Vesper says. Honourless doesn’t seem to comprehend the question, but her gaze is now attentive. “So have I, you know. But I s’pose that’s to be expected, with powers like ours.”
“There! There is one here!” Orobelle proclaims in the background. With a sigh, Vesper begins to stand back up, and Honourless is also making an effort to do so. The duchess strides toward them and plants both hands on her hips. “Let us go now.”
“Go where?” Vesper asks.
“Go find the next Core,” she says. Dorian picks up her luggage.
“Core? An apple core? The earth’s core? That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“You are a Core! Dorian is a Core! We’re here to find the next one like you!”
Her eyes widen. “Someone with abilities like ours?”
“Maybe. Dorian’s domain is heat and cold, and yours are nothing like his, so I assume this third Core will have a completely different set of skills.”
Vesper casts a glance at Honourless. “You’re not a Core?”
“No, she is a Ghost, and she was a convict, and she’s earning her parole by transporting us. Now, are we going to stop wasting time?”
“Ghosts, Cores, this is a lot of words being used in unusual ways,” Vesper mutters. “How are we supposed to find the next person?”
Orobelle motions one of the two gleaming watches forward, and it occurs to her now that it may not be a watch, but a compass.
“Does that thing tell you how far away the person is?”
“No. But we aren’t getting any closer by standing here.”
“But why are we—“
She groans. “How many questions do you have?”
Vesper folds her arms. “You just spirited me away from my company without explanation! You can’t frankly expect me to follow you without knowing what we’re doing.”
“Fine! Take notes, because I will only say this once. I’m gathering you—the eight Cores—to protect me from my villain. Now do what I tell you, move fast, and stop asking questions!”
This is not the sort of storybook I want to be in, thinks Vesper with a sigh. Orobelle and Dorian have already marched away in a direction that she can only suppose the magical compass is pointing, and she follows the strange troupe, lost in the daze of everything she’s still in the midst of understanding.
A day’s walking northwest later, Vesper Lovelace finds that the fact of the matter—that she has landed in a new universe—has slipped straight from fiction to understanding, more easily than she expected. Now that she’s past disbelief, she is on the constant lookout for things she recognises, reference points for comprehending this new place and its relation to her own.
“This is Lagos!” A pair of passers-by, one with hair shaved to her scalp and the other wearing it in fine braids, fill in the group of sweaty tourists with bemused frowns. “You don’t know where you’re having your vacation? How did you know the right airplane to take?”
Airplane? “We didn’t come here on an airplane,” Vesper says. “It’s a long story.”
Vesper would like to know so much more, but that is all she asks, for now. An hour or two longer, they journey northwest with no bearings on time or place, Vesper trying desperately to pick out some sign of what year it is as they go. It is clearly the future relative to where she came from—the cars are quieter, the aircraft are twice as large. But none of the science fiction tales she read and watched voraciously as a child—Flash Gordon, the Rocket Men series—prepared her to reckon with this reality, for this reality is simply, infuriatingly...normal.
Everywhere she turns, there are no silver towers or egg-shaped cars—there are certainly towers, but they are colourful and worn by age, and so too are the people, in colourful gowns and blouses, some holding palm-sized slabs that beam photographs and moving pictures at them. Where she thought there would be steel and white plastic, there are riotous colours, colours and scents, and rust and earth like her own, and heat.
And it is alive with electricity. She can feel it surging through the wires overhead, in hidden conductors beneath her feet, through almost every piece of signage. A great circulatory system of power lines keeps the city breathing, and the farther she walks, the more she finds her heart racing with her growing awareness of its omnipresence, moving as it moves, through this great network, till she's racing around in wonder like a child in a museum for the first time.
Two streets down, on an orange grime-streaked wall, Vesper finds the answer to one of her questions in a film poster.
July 2013, it reads. This is the world past the turn of the millennium.
While Orobelle and her strange entourage catch up to her, Vesper lingers before the poster and stares, awe welling up in her chest. Front and centre, there stands a giant mechanised suit of armour, overshadowing the boat in the foreground. The armour suit, the boat, and the ocean they're in—the scene is blue and grey and uncannily lifelike, but still clearly a fabrication, like a painting, with more detail than a human painter could possibly produce.
An unexpected twinge of familiarity seizes her. For seconds, she suddenly understands why being here is nothing like being inside a sci-fi story. The futuristic worlds she knew as a child were nothing but projections of the present, and their denizens floated in temporal bubbles, severed from the past, dreaming of no distant futures of their own—existing only for the reader, the watcher.
But history is made up of overlapping layers or interweaving threads, past and future bleeding into each other. The city plans of 2013 are the city plans of 1945, though the stone-and-mortar slowly and surely becomes cement and steel. But between them, cars and buses still rumble, wires still criss-cross, and trodden grass lies by pavements by intersections.
Is this the future awaiting her own world, or one of many? That's a trick question. She is standing here, enveloped in sound and colour, and she understands. This is not a future. It is the present, the only present.
Then Vesper blinks, and she is only staring at a film poster again. Around her the chatter is steady and dull, English accented differently from her own.
In this heat, it is not hard to imagine she is simply on a different continent in the same world as always. But this place bears no mark of her twenty-year existence, and she has all at once been cut loose from memory, and obligation.
She finds the thought liberating.
They begin to feel the beating sun take its toll barely an hour into the walk. Orobelle grumbles of thirst and Dorian offers her a glass flask of some pale pink liquid, from which she takes no more than a dainty sip before returning it. Vesper, however, must endure the the heat without drink.
It takes perhaps two or three more hours of northwestward progress for them to realise that finding the next Core isn’t simply going to happen. Vesper can tell from overheard conversation between Dorian and Orobelle that they are reaching the end of their patience. They aren’t about to waltz into the home of their mark and invite them to a universe-hopping adventure over a spot of tea.
By the time the sun has sunk to the horizon, the needle still points unwaveringly northwest. Stopping in front of a boutique whose entrance is framed in rainbow threads, Orobelle turns back to the rest. “That’s it!” she shouts. “We’re not going to find them today. And also, my feet hurt, I’m sweaty, and my mood is poor. We shall find lodging.”
“That seems wise,” Dorian murmurs.
“Lodging where?” Vesper says. “You don’t intend to march into a hotel without any naira, do you?”
Dorian and Orobelle exchange a look that both seem to understand instantly. That same understanding takes a bit of time to dawn on Honourless, but when it does, she grins at the duchess for the first time.
It isn’t until the child and her retainer vanish into the boutique beside them that Vesper realises what they mean to do. She stands in the orange sun and faces away from the door, alone with her horror, until she becomes aware that Honourless is still there, grinning in the shop’s direction. As a breeze blows by, she returns Vesper’s stare with a look that might be amused or curious. She says something Vesper does not understand.
“What was that?” She leans closer.
“Athe,” Honourless replies—or at least that is how Vesper hears it.
She raises an eyebrow. “Athe?” she imitates the syllables as closely as she can. The tall woman chuckles, and then utters a longer sentence that Vesper does not catch the whole of—she points at herself and says, Ka’Inith, or something, then another sentence, slower and with an air of dignity.
“Ka’Inith,” she replies. Honourless. The woman grins wider, tipping her head to a side in an affirming gesture. “I’m Vesper, pleased to meet you.”
“Vesper? Athe,” she replies, and the sound of her name from Honourless’ mouth startles her.
She blinks in the sunset light, and the moment’s reverie is cloven in two by a sudden bellow of “Thief!”
Then Dorian hurtles towards them, setting gowns aflutter, and he shouts, “catch!” There is a flash of white and red as he flicks a familiar card at Vesper. She gasps and snatches Orobelle out of the air as he himself leaps and shrinks into a bright pink rectangle, solidifying into a second card.
Honourless lunges for Dorian’s card and shoves it into her sash. Seconds later, a shopkeeper with a shaven head thrusts his face through the archway of gowns, eyes glistening with tears of frustration. “Where did she go?” he shouts, clutching his forehead with his free hand. “For God’s sake, help me! She took everything!”
It takes every ounce of mental fortitude in Vesper not to apologise, not to turn to the card and threaten to tear it till the girl inside emerges with the stolen money. Gritting her teeth, she puts on as good of a show of concern as she can, pointing up the road and exclaiming, “yes, I saw them go that way!”
And then she sprints off up the junction, only glancing once to check that Honourless is following—and then dashes across, fast as a bullet—dodges in front of screeching cars and leaps off the road and sprints away without looking back.
Only two streets down, as the crowds close behind them and they round the side of a building of cement and peeling paint, does Vesper stumble to a stop and hold up the card in her hand, growling, “You’d better not have ruined someone’s livelihood.”
“Such a doer of good!” card-Orobelle scoffs. “If you would like to spend the evening out on the streets, you are welcome to!” Vesper bites back a reprimand. The card heats up in her hand, and the duchess springs out onto the tar. In her hand, she fans out what must be a fortune in bank notes. “You could stand to sweat less.”
Vesper clenches her jaw. “It’s easily thirty-five degrees.”
“I don’t know what that means,” the child says with a dismissive flick of her hand. Nearby, Honourless laughs as Dorian re-emerges on the earth-stained road. “Now we must find someplace to stay the night, and plot.”
Again, Vesper must fight the guilt welling in her chest, must force the image of the shopkeeper on the brink of tears out of her mind. Orobelle is right; without this, they would most certainly be sleeping in an alley tonight, or worse, not sleeping at all. And even she—who has spent years camping in forests and swamps—baulks at the thought.
Momentarily she is seized by an awareness of the absurdity of this. She has killed thousands. What difference does living on stolen money make?
Still, it almost feels like a crime as she nods in grudging agreement. “Alright, then, thieves,” she says. “Let’s find a place to stay.”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
A Needle in a Haystack - I
As the last of her rage seeps away, Orobelle finds the sounds of this place bobbing to the surface of her attention.
For a minute she stands silently in the breeze. She can hear unnameable machines whining in the distance, wheels turning, and the whisper of rustling grass over these uncharted roads, straight and obsidian-black.
It sounds different from the last world, from the first world: a world with its own history, unbeknownst to the Queendom till this very moment.
Travel from one universe to the next is not a novelty to Orobelle by any means. She is, after all, in charge of the Queendom’s diplomatic branch, and sees the Second World twice a month, going with the convoys to speak for her people.
But hurtling through space with a criminal is a far cry from riding through a worldgate, and entering an unrecorded world, she is starting to learn, is different from visiting one she has always known. Till a month ago, they were sure that only three worlds existed. Now, by the day, it grows clearer that the scientists really did know nothing—millennia of research overturned in a blink.
And that is simply…all right.
Perhaps all the implications are simply jammed at the doorway of her subconscious. She hopes it stays that way for a while yet, for there is enough else to worry about as it is.
That was two hours ago. By now, the reflexes of survivalism have taken the reins, and the only thing that matters right now is finding a place to stay the night. Having "found" their funds for the day, the bedraggled party hastens away from the boutique at the bustling junction, marching at double pace in the afternoon heat.
This may be the greatest trial Orobelle has endured since her journey began. Nothing here in Ikeja makes itself welcoming or comfortable to her: the heat presses down and the edges of the roads are cracked, pieces broken off so that it is hard to distinguish road from footpath. Spans of unruly vegetation interrupt the path so that every now and then, they must detour onto the road, dodging around roaring metal carriages. And the carriages, they smell of something not meant to be breathed, spewing smoke into the sweltering air.
Every minute there comes another inconvenience that becomes the subject of Orobelle's muttering—"damned rocks in my shoes!" or "there's too much grass here!" or any of the numerous offences that this place dares commit upon her.
As she trips on a stone for the third time, she finally stops and cries out, "This isn't fair!"
"Will you be quiet for ten minutes," Honourless mutters.
"My duchess, I'm certain we shall not have to walk much farther," is Dorian's best attempt at comfort. "Would you like to be carried?"
And she would very much like that, to become a card and be taken to the destination—but she knows it would be even worse within the card, stifled without moving air to cool her, and held by someone sweating harder than she. So she grits her teeth and endures the torment of the street.
Another gruelling hour is what it takes them to come upon a lead. "Looks to be a hotel," Vesper declares, pointing across the bushes ahead at a white signboard.
"Finally!" At once, Orobelle pushes to the front of the entourage with a burst of renewed vigour, onto the side-road and through the pedestrian gate.
The attendant at the gate grins at them and waves as they enter. "Good day!" he calls out as they pass. "Reception is up the stairs on your left."
Up the stairs on their left is exactly where they go. A collective sigh of relief escapes the group behind her as the glass doors part, inviting them into the chill air of the antechamber.
As the doors slide shut behind them, the sounds of the outside fall away—the rumble of carriages, the chatter of birds—so that all they hear is the click of their footsteps on stone. Here they are greeted by a room of marble and wood, and what she presumes to be the name of the establishment in bold metallic letters on the wall behind the counter.
Beneath it, there waits a staff member, perhaps a cleric or record-keeper, bespectacled and dark-skinned with her hair in braids, pulled together into a bun on her head.
She looks up with a smile as they enter, but Orobelle quickly finds that smile fading to a look of confusion as the Duchess starts to talk business. "Excuse me, could you call one of the adults?" she asks then.
Orobelle's eyes widen. "What? What do you mean? Won't you serve me?"
“We don’t do business with children,” she says. “Fetch one of the adults, please?”
One tantrum from the Duchess and one harried conversation with Vesper later, the keeper—Ms Olufawo, according to Vesper's reading of her nametag—finally turns to Orobelle with a tired smile, and says, “How may I help you, madam?”
The pleasantries of business eventually secure for them a Royal Suite for two nights, an arrangement that decimates half their funds there and then. It is no matter; more money will be easy to come by, and she deserves the best, even given the circumstances. Still she can barely obscure her frown as Ms Olufawo begins on her spiel, wondering how anyone could ever live like this, worrying at every step about running out of funds.
“Tea and coffee are provided,” says the cleric, tapping on some sort of mechanical device obscured by the countertop. “Free breakfast is served in the dining hall before ten in the morning. Check-out is at noon.”
“Good, thank you,” Orobelle replies. The lady hands her a card over the counter. She stares as she takes it, a gleaming bone-white slip with symbols scrawled in black on the surface. “What’s this? Am I supposed to do something with it?”
Ms. Olufawo briefly presses a hand to her forehead, before resuming her smile. “This is your room key,” she says, taking it from Orobelle and lifting it to point at the symbols. “The room number is written here. You go to room three-four-two, tap this on the panel, and the door will open. Understand?”
That simpering smile would be enough to drive her to ranting if she were not aware that the closure of this transaction hinges upon her politeness. “Yes, yes.” Brow furrowing, Orobelle takes it back, flipping it over in her palm in search of some mechanism, finding none.
She spends their walk up the stairs inspecting it. There’s no one inside, no glow of sentience or power. And yet, on the third floor, it unlocks the door matching the card's numerals when she waves it in front of the panel, exactly as told.
The room is carpeted and lit gold, with a bed the size of her own facing a long couch, a desk in an alcove, and a tall window with a view of the street.
The sky is already dusky outside, windows starting to light up in the distance—fluorescent white and different from the Duchy's lamplight, different from those lights of the last world.
Strolling up to the window, she lets her eyes rest on the heads of the pedestrians below. If two universes have always existed without Wonderland’s knowing, then who is to say there are not ten more? A hundred more? Layers upon layers of other worlds, all with their own separate histories, in a chain stretching to infinity, all bound to her...
She shakes her head and clenches her jaw because the thought of such infinitude terrifies her. ”Nothing is boundless,” she murmurs, before drawing the curtains on the grimy rectangular buildings across the street, and on the pedestrians bedecked in colours. She is thinking about the key-card again.
“Everyone!” she calls out across the room. “We meet in quarter of an hour. There is lots to discuss.”
It is only after this unlikely troupe of tourists find themselves in the cool air of the hotel room that the exhaustion truly hits Vesper, her eyelids dipping as she stares over the sink.
Only then does she realise she has been wearing her pack the entire time. She pats the pockets over her shoulder. No live ammunition, and her rifle is gone—those, she must have lost somewhere in that place between worlds. But perhaps that is for the better.
And she feels the holster on her hip, under her jacket, and freezes. The pistol is still there. “Won’t hurt to have it,” she murmurs.
How far away are we? she thinks, slinging the pack onto the ground by the sink. Surely there was a World War Two in this world, a World War One, a Boer War? The world is more similar to her own than different; there must be a point of divergence, or at least points of convergence.
One of those is tea, it seems. As Vesper lifts an unusually tall kettle from the counter, a power cord unravels, clattering on the countertop. She picks up the plug, inspecting the three-pronged implement before inserting it in a matching wall socket. She feels the voltage leap briefly through her hand before the plug is properly inserted.
Shrugging it off, she leaves the plug, glancing over the books on the countertop as she does. Nigeria Travel Guide, reads the bold text on one glossy cover.
She’s always known a little about Nigeria, from stories told by her friends in the Number 60. She knew it as a colony of the Empire of Britain, starting to rise up in the wake of the War. This Nigeria is no colony. Nothing about this surprises her. She fiddles with the unusual sink tap until the faucet turns on, intercepting the streaming water with the kettle’s mouth.
Returning it to its cradle, she turns it on and waits. The living room shifts with activity: Orobelle and Dorian rest in two cushy armchairs, conversing over a coffee table, their words impossible to hear through the hum of steam. Against the wall facing the bed is a broad wooden desk with a large lamp and a chair on wheels. Honourless is off in the corner by the door, picking at the scars on her arms.
Strange company for a strange journey. What has she landed herself in? How long will she be here?
There are cups, spoons and Twinings teabags in a drawer, exactly as promised; Vesper isn’t picky about the kind of tea as long as it’s strong. The kettle clicks and the red light goes out. She pours out some hot water and drops a teabag in it.
The first aroma of the drink brings an unexpected jolt of home: peeling walls revealing stone, the old television crackling with images of the War, Mum, Dad, the trees bending on the roadside. She knows this scent, through the unfamiliar layers.
Absently she picks out a beige paper sachet of powder labelled Creamer. Brow furrowing, she tears it open to sniff. It smells like it could be powdered milk, yet different. With a shrug, she empties the sachet into her tea and stirs.
The first sip brings a sigh, her shoulders slackening. Thoughts of home ringing clearer, that old place standing in contrast with this angular modernness. It’s not better nor worse, just...different. This is her world and yet not. Recognisable motifs among the alien, like in a fever dream.
Orobelle and Dorian turn when Vesper spins the desk chair to face them and sits down, a steaming drink in her hand. “You’re on time,” says the Duchess, rapping on the coffee table with her fist, glaring in Honourless’ direction. “Get over here, you lazy felon!”
“Could stand to use more flattering nicknames,” she mutters as she rises from her corner, skulking over.
“Let’s get to work,” Orobelle declares. “We are here, in this world, to find someone. One Core, with abilities of the same origin as yours, Dorian, and Vesper, and yet there is no saying how those abilities might manifest. The only information we have at our disposal is what the corefinder will show us.”
Now she places the huge golden instrument on the tabletop. In the wake of her disturbance, the needles swing chaotically back and forth, and it’s hard to read it at a glance—but Orobelle knows how to pick out the settled needles quickly: one points to Dorian, one to Vesper in her rotating chair, and the third comes to rest pointing out through the windows beside them.
“This needle,” she says, tapping her finger on the glass, “will always point in the direction of our mark. We know not how far away they might be, but we know which direction to look. And we could certainly keep travelling in a straight line following these bearings, but that supposes that we can charter a potentially endless ride across whatever terrain should stand in the way.” She closes her eyes before continuing, turning abruptly to Honourless. “What I think, is that instead of that, you,” she says, nodding at her, “will take us, via the Fourth World, towards progressive points along that straight line.”
“No.” Honourless answers.
“Excuse me? ‘No’?”
“No,” she repeats. “You don’t understand Ghosting if you think I could do that. If you think it’s so precise, and so easy. I’m not taking all four of us on a possibly endless gallivant.”
“Then take just me,” Orobelle mutters.
“Did you not hear me? I said it’s not precise. I can’t even promise you I can take you in a straight line.”
“Then what are you even good for?” the girl shouts, throwing a brochure at Honourless’ head, which she dodges.
She picks the sheaf of paper up, stares at it for a moment, and then points it at Orobelle’s face like a dagger. “You haven’t once bothered asking what I can do! Or how I’m doing, even. All you have done is assume I can perform your bidding to perfection. If I’m not what you need, that’s your fault, not mine. I couldn’t care less about your plots.”
“Good heavens, both of you. What about this?” Vesper cuts in, putting her cup down on the tabletop. They turn to her. “It would seem that aircraft carrying civilian passengers are commonplace here. We saw one ourselves when we arrived, and the two pedestrians who gave us directions mentioned them as well. You say we may need to travel great distances in a straight line? Surely we could find one of those to take us. If it doesn’t cost a fortune—and I can’t frankly expect otherwise.”
“That seems our only choice. How much do you mean?”
“Don’t ask me, we didn’t have civilian aircraft back at home.”
“How helpful.”
“I’m only saying there is a way.”
For several minutes, there is a silence between them. Orobelle breaks off, muttering to Dorian about the other two and their insolence, but Honourless and Vesper simply stare at the coffee table between them, and at Orobelle’s corefinder, the brass case gleaming with reflections of their faces.
“Look, I have an idea,” Honourless says suddenly, lifting her head. “Here’s what we can do. You’ll hand me that compass, and then—“
“Absolutely not!” Orobelle shouts, snatching the instruments from the tabletop to clutch it to her chest. “You’re an idiot if you think I’m entrusting this to a criminal.” Honourless throws up her hands. Orobelle’s face hardens even more. “If you must use the corefinder, then I must come with you.”
“You’ll just make Ghosting harder!”
“I shall come with you!”
“Fine!” She bares her teeth as she spits the word out. “Make it hard for yourself, I don’t care. As I was saying, we could get a map of this world, and then, we could Ghost to three, maybe four different cities across it, with the Fourth World as our crossroads.”
“Yes, and?” Orobelle glances about the table. She can tell Vesper is not following, but then again she cannot understand a word out of Honourless’ mouth.
“So at each city we arrive at, or settlement or whatever,” Honourless goes on, “we’ll locate it on the world map, and mark out the direction the corefinder points. It will always point towards the third Core no matter where we are, yes? Then by drawing lines from each city in the direction of the needle, we’ll find the third Core at the place where they cross. And then we use whatever means of travel it is that Vesper is suggesting, but only once.” She folds her arms expectantly. “That’s simple enough, no?”
Orobelle frowns. She refuses to give Honourless the pleasure of knowing her idea is a decent one. “It could work,” she says through drawn lips. “But you just threw a stink about how imprecise your Ghosting is. There’s certainly a better chance of us landing on three suitable points than you miraculously landing in a straight line repeatedly…but if we were to land in the wilderness, there’s not going to be a way to locate ourselves on a map.”
“And that would be entirely your doing,” Honourless mutters. “If I went alone, I’d have no such trouble. Ghosting usually takes me to places with lots of people like that, and I could keep trying till it works. Not so easy with an annoying child in tow. But you insist, so…” She shrugs, no longer meeting Orobelle’s eye. “If we must do this, we must do it soon.”
“We rest first,” she says. “We do this tomorrow, when our strength is replenished. You’d better rest right tonight.”
“That’s one order I’ll follow,” the woman mutters. “Now can I go?”
“Yes. Go back to your corner if you so please.”
“A recap, please?” Vesper looks at the other two in turn. “The two of you are Ghosting to other cities?”
“Yes, to triangulate the next Core’s location,” Orobelle answers. “Once we have enough points of reference, we can find one of your civilian aircraft to take us there.”
“Alright. Then I’ll get us more information tomorrow,” she says. “Find out more about these aircraft.”
“Good,” says Orobelle. She has gone from contrary to cooperative in no time at all, much better than that wildling Honourless.
“Even then…” She pauses, mouth open as if she were about to change her mind. But she only says, “Even by triangulation, we can only narrow it down so much. To one city, if we’re that lucky.” She sighs, picking up her cup. “Like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“Yes, but we have the best instruments in the world,” Orobelle replies. “If there is nothing else, you are dismissed.”
With that word, the duchess withdraws her attention from the rest of the gathering, peering once again at the face of the corefinder. Only once she hears Vesper walk away does she speak again. “Dorian,” she murmurs, “do you think I ought to give them the True Queen’s gift?”
Dorian is silent in thought for nearly a minute. Just like him to be so considered, as if the very Gift she speaks of, in his possession, would not ensure he is perfectly understood. “It would make matters easier between the four of us,” he says. “But I understand it has...formal meaning.”
She tilts her head, takes the metal instrument with her fingertips around the rim and swirls it around, unsettling the needles. “I can’t be giving it away on a whim. Particularly not to the likes of that criminal.”
“You do not have to give it to Honourless, if I understand correctly. If Vesper has it, then all of us would understand each other.”
“Yes, and what of the next one to join us? I cannot distribute the Gift like trade bonds. It is not given lightly.”
Orobelle looks Dorian in the eye, and something uniquely grave passes between their gazes. She has never told Dorian much of the truth about her place in this millennia-old Queendom. It was always her mother Adamanta’s way, her firmest teaching, her last rule. Keep your truths close to yourself; each who holds one holds a key to your downfall.
In the Queendom where every secret can be made a weapon, where the matriarchs have the most secrets of all, there are things about her that can never be known. The barest knowledge of her life is scattered across a hundred subordinates, each with only one strand of her tapestry.
But out here, so far from home, in this world two worlds beyond what the Queendom knows, it hardly seems to matter if she were to tell Dorian just a tiny piece of the story. This man from the Cracked Land, who has proven true time and again, who cannot possibly have any cause to harm her.
“Have I told you about it? About the last True Queen, the duchy, and my mother’s mission?”
Staring past her till now, he straightens up, face betraying the surprise he normally tries to obscure. “My duchess?” he says. “I do not think you have, but…”
“It started almost five hundred years ago, when Queen Candoresse split the Queendom in four.”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
The Story of the Queendom - I
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts childbirth and blood, and mentions murder.
It is known—as has always been known—that the Queen of Hearts’ throne stands on a pedestal of worm-eaten wood.
You see, the Queen of Hearts has been the supreme seat of the Queendom for merely five hundred and thirty-two years. Before her there was a True Queen, a queen with reign undivided—her blood a bond to the land, her body a wellspring of its power. So it was for millennia, before the other Worlds were known. So it was until Queen Candoresse.
Candoresse was the last True Queen. Then she made the original mistake, the mistake that ended the dynasty’s unbroken reign. It was by no misdeed of hers, only ill luck—but ill luck, in the eyes of history, is no different from villainy.
This was her mistake: she gave birth to quadruplets.
The order in which the four infant girls left their mother’s womb was a memory Candoresse could not allow to live in her mind. She realised this as she lay there in her blood, in the midwife’s chamber. For in this strange accident of birth, she knew she had seeded endless trouble. This was the way of the Queendom: everyone wanted a throne that held dominion in two worlds, and anyone would do anything to take or keep it. Among these daughters, the order of their birth amounted to a roll of the die. It meant choosing one daughter over the rest, and that choosing could only ever be unfair.
The only way around was murder—but how could she face her people after murdering her own daughters? How could that solution not be worse?
The Queen saw then, in a brief twinkling of clarity, that there was a way to craft a rule of succession that her daughters and subjects might accept. And the order in which these four children were born would irrevocably destroy that solution.
So as the throes of birth consumed her upon that marble table, Candoresse ordered her midwives to turn away. And these four children came into the world with their beginnings unseen, unknown, the memory of the moment lost forever to the obliterating sea.
The erasing of memories is not undertaken lightly, even less so than the process of transferring or confiscating them. By some mechanism that still eludes the universities of the Queendom, such a removal releases an explosion of force that cannot be contained by any structure we have ever built. The first time it was performed successfully, that force shattered every wall of the site where it took place, and brought the building down upon subject and performer.
The procedure in itself is deceptively simple, though I cannot claim to fully understand it myself: it is likened to a song, played on the strings of the Light, a vibration that disentangles the threads of the mind and shakes the memory out of the strands.
The scientists learned that the procedure of destroying a memory could only be done in the depths of the sea, where the water could dampen the force. This is where Queen Candoresse hastened off to, while her children were swaddled and fed their first milk. She, the Last True Queen, went in a sphere to the bottom of the Sea of Glass, to have that melody excised from the score of her mind.
On warmer days, Verna, Aula, Sol and Bernice played on the green in the palace’s shadow. The four sisters ran with ribboned kites billowing above their heads while their nurses smiled at each other and shook their heads, and Candoresse watched serenely through her study window. They lay on the grass by the swan pond, licking nectar from flower sepals and dreaming of the distant lands where swans saved girls from towers.
But the people knew these blithe days were numbered, and their grimness dimmed the prospects of commerce and diplomacy for the rest of Candoresse's life. The Queen herself only delivered vague portents to her daughters throughout their lives, but never quite revealed the gravity of the future she foresaw. While it was still the spring of their lives, and while the roses bloomed, they did not have to think of the fate waiting, like an executioner, for the time of choosing to come.
Those seasons of their lives fleeted by, thread from the spindle into the loom of history. Then all at once, the children were eighteen, and that day of fate—that long-dreaded time—drew nigh. That was when Queen Candoresse first revealed the solution she had crafted in the years before.
Her daughters would play a game.
A game of her devising, a game of strategy—a game whose outcome would fractionate the players by wit and merit. No dice would be rolled; none of it would come to chance. The winner would be named the queen; the other three accorded new titles in accordance with how they played.
None could dispute the outcome of such a game—she thought—a test of the candidates’ shrewdness and foresight, all-important traits in a queen of singular power. At least for a time, there would be none who would come forward with a defensible objection. On the day the game was announced, the denizens of the Queen's City sounded out equally in agreement and anger, but there is no honour in a queen who goes back on her word, so Candoresse pushed forth with her plan.
The game unfolded on a pavilion in the Grand Park of the Queen's City. Four sisters, with all the fate of the Queendom in their eyes, played cards on a table of iron wrought and painted white. They were taught the rules in front of the audience. They passed cards and called their plays, and pondered with masked fury.
The game wore on, hand after hand. Bernice and Solice were not quite the strategists their siblings were; they made their plans plain in their faces. Aula played a psychological game, calling it from the looks of the two when they were trying to take all, gauging from their plays if they lacked a suit in their hands.
But Verna’s strategy did not involve the mind games of her sisters. To her, the suits and the glances were but smoke and mirrors—fancy dressing on a puzzle that was, at its core, mathematical.
As she played her cards, and as her sisters did, she memorised every single one that crossed the table. Two of Clubs. Ace of Spades. She remembered every trick her sisters won, and she held the Four and King of Spades close. By the last three tricks of the very last hand, she was sure Aula's hand contained the Queen of Spades.
She forced the unlucky Queen from her sister’s hand. Aula, all options exhausted, was made to take the deduction, and the game ended with Verna the winner.
Candoresse oversaw the proceedings of the game with serenity and a slowly welling fear. As had been written, she named Verna the first Queen of Hearts, absolute ruler of this Queendom without end.
So it was that the Queendom was split between four bloodlines, each sister given a station befitting her rank in the game: Aula the Duchess of Diamonds, Solice the Countess of Clubs, Bernice the Baroness of Spades.
“The Queen was selected through a game?” Dorian murmurs, letting just a drop of confusion slip through.
“Yes, but, no! That is not the point,” Orobelle snaps. “She was selected by Queen Candoresse, who saw that she would be a good queen.”
“From watching her play a game.” Vesper answers from across the room. When their gazes come to rest upon her, she rolls her eyes. “And I thought we had unusual stories of succession.”
“Shut up! No one invited you to speak!”
“I'm simply curious about this One True Queendom tripe you've been spouting since we met?”
Orobelle bares her teeth, and jerks her gaze away. “Fine, stay and educate yourself, ingrate. But not another word.”
Vesper shrugs.
"Now, as I was saying—"
Verna was a just queen, remembered fondly for her orderly and forceful rule. Her sisters, who were first ashamed that they had lost the game and the Queendom, slowly came into a quietly seething resentment, as she rebuilt the country under her rule.
They knew no challenge could be sustained, for Verna had won the throne fair and square, by the rules of their mother. Still they knew—as did the people—that they could not roll over and allow this to pass without a reckoning. They knew it must come someday.
Duchess Aula, who had played surely and slyly, was the one Queen Verna feared the most. That fear was in its right place—though Verna only feared her in the capacity of a woman fearing an enemy. What she should have feared was much greater than she could see, greater than the two of them alone, and greater than the brief decades in which they were alive.
Aula was austere and an adept keeper of secrets. While Verna had a daughter—the future heiress Rosanthe—Aula had Marinne, within five years of each other. She put on airs of grace and veneration for the Queen, but for every lesson Rosanthe was taught, Aula paid off the royal tutors in street-corner taverns to share their works, and taught Marinne the same in secret.
In her waning years, Aula at last pulled her daughter fully into the weft of her plans. “It will not be your war to win,” was the last wisdom she gave. “Let your fire smoulder. Prepare your daughters well. Make everyone love them, and let them love no one. Let my voice be carried unto every one of your progeny.”
So while Rosanthe was complacent, bred in adulation and praise, Marinne inherited the resentment of her mother, every spite spoken against the Queen of Hearts tangled into her living creed.
Long before Marinne took the mantle of Duchess, she began to craft her own plots, and to further those of her mother. She recorded each one in her most secret book of books, in the vault that only Duchesses could open. We call it the Diamonds' Playbook.
In this book she wrote of her machinations. How she gave the Countess of Clubs servants from the Cracked Land; how she attended the birth of the city mayor’s son and, at the banquet, began a partnership of favours for political influence. How she joined the donor roll of the Queendom University, so that her allegiance to that bastion of learning was recorded on its walls.
And she recorded her anger at the injustice that was the bedrock of this new, cloven Queendom. All the theory and plots she amassed over her lifetime’s planning—all she would seek—she wrote here, for future Duchesses to learn.
It is through the Playbook that we know how she found inroads in all municipalities to the loyalties of the people, made sympathisers of mayors and counsellors, and positioned the Diamonds as their friends and supporters. It is an intricate art, and one I have learned all my life. The Duchess of Diamonds holds control of the World Gate--and though the Queendom officials came and went through it as they pleased, the Diamonds army guarded it well, for Marinne knew it would someday prove a bargaining piece.
The Diamonds' Playbook was a cornerstone of my education. This I inherited from her and her mother, and those mothers of mothers between us, forming the chain of birth from her to myself.
“I did not know that all your enemies shared blood with you. It is…” Dorian halts.
“Inevitable,” Orobelle answers. “Our families diverge and fragment easily. Sisters turn on sisters, children on their parents, almost as if war were in our nature.”
Something of the beginnings of understanding are dawning in Dorian's face.
“This is Candoresse's injustice, the original mistake. It needs to be righted, and my mother's purpose was that, always that.”
Forty-two years after her ascension, Marinne was succeeded by her own daughter Arminella. Queen Rosanthe had long begun to read the warning signs in the way each Duchess of Diamonds conducted herself in diplomacy. It was when Arminella took the seat of Duchess, years before she was ready, that relations grew terse.
Duchess Arminella was not like the two who had come before her: she was easily swayed to anger, and her mind was not the right place for a legacy like Aula's. Her younger sister, Alintora, had a better temper than her sister's, but she had come five years later and was never considered for the succession.
Old Queen Rosanthe saw, in Arminella, a weakening of the Duchy and a chance to nip the threat in the bud. She began to march armed contingents through its streets. Mayors began, unusually, to refuse the Duchess' bribes. Not long later, the Queen requested to station her own guards outside the World Gate.
Arminella, of course, could not help but make clear her rage. Against her sister's advice, she delivered a greater insult, by decrying Queen Rosanthe's request before a public audience.
Her story does not have a pretty ending. Though she successfully bought the Barony of Spades over to her cause, she is remembered for the way she died—tumbling off a mountain cliff, on a carriage driven by a mysteriously switched driver.
No court could ascertain the accident's connection to Queen Rosanthe—but of course they could not, how could a puppet incriminate its puppeteer?
Still, to the council of the Diamonds, and to those sympathetic to the house, the bloody transgression was stark as day. And right then, from the dredges of Rosanthe's crime, crystallised an unsolvable vendetta.
And so it was that not one Queen of Hearts could ever think she was safe in her seat. Indeed, all in the Queendom know it is inevitable, like the burning-out of a candle, that her throne must fall one day.
This all happened five, four hundred years ago. Many ancestors of mine have come after, some shrewder, some more authoritative. Each one carried that legacy, that game of waiting, to her daughter's time...
"...till it came to me. That day of collecting our due is nigh at hand, because of a singular person in my genealogy: my mother’s mother, Cotaria."
The door clicks shut, stirring Orobelle out of reveries of the past. Vesper has vanished from the room. “Where is she off to?” growls the Duchess, gaze pinned to the suite door.
“She said something about fresh air,” Dorian answers. As his last word falls away, a strain of snoring drifts over from the sofa.
Orobelle glowers, pulling her lips tight. “Alright, then. We shall continue this tale at a later time,” she says, rising from her seat. “Where's my stationery?”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
A Needle in a Haystack - II
Content warning (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts graphic injury and trauma response.
The royal suite sinks gently back into silence. Orobelle retires to the queen bed, sipping liquid satiation under the rosy warm light. Dorian contemplates the room from the swivel chair, brow furrowed in thought.
“So…how about dinner?” Vesper ventures, standing. She can see Honourless gnawing on her fingernails.
Orobelle does not dignify her with an answer until she has drained her pink bottle. And even then, her answer is not to Vesper. “Dorian! Get these two some dinner,” she declares. “The money’s in the luggage.”
He clears his throat, lowering his head with such a deep bow that his long hair tumbles over his shoulder. “Of course, my duchess…and may I—purchase dinner for myself as well?” he asks.
“Oh. Go ahead.”
“Thank you, my duchess.” He is already at the door.
With his departure, Orobelle returns to the journal on her knee, and Honourless curls up on the couch.
Sighing, Vesper unbuckles her pack and sorts through its contents: packets of jerky, a can of luncheon meat, twenty pounds from the wrong decade, two water canteens, and a change of clothes. She pauses on the last finding: a shirt and a pair of mud-stained trouser.
“Anyone meaning to use the bathroom?” she says as she scoops them out, and pauses. “No? All right, excuse me for a minute.”
*
It is the most pristine bathing facility Vesper has ever set foot in: the floors are bright enough to see herself in, and the sink shows no stain.
It's hard to leave the balmy shower once it's running. For almost twenty minutes, she stands in the mist and washes and scrubs, scouring weeks of mud and soot from her body.
She towels herself dry on the mat in front of the sink. The spotless mirror reveals every tired line on her face, her hair briefly tamed by the water. The omnipresent odour of sweat has been replaced by the gentle fragrance of their liquid soap. She digs her fingers into the towel fibres—it is plusher than even the ones at home.
Home. She mulls over the thought as she dresses, running a hand over the scars on her arms. What has she gotten herself into? A bloody predicament is what—strong-armed into waiting on a child who thinks herself the queen of the universe.
Vesper breathes out a long sigh. Almost as soon as she starts scrubbing at her hair does it begin sticking out in unruly spikes, and she wonders how she will last on two changes of clothes.
*
When Vesper returns to the hotel room, Honourless has unfolded the couch into a double bed.
“Oh, wonderful,” she calls, walking the long way around the counter to avoid the luggage. The woman looks up, and Vesper’s smile seems to register, for she grins back with a few chuffed words and a pat of the seat’s edge.
Vesper drops onto the other end of the couch-bed. “Oi, Orobelle,” she says.
“What, knave?”
“We might need an interpreter ‘round here. I don’t think I could learn Honourless’ language without any words in common. Not quickly, at least.”
“Well, too bad!” Orobelle mutters, not looking up from her writing. “I don’t do the bidding of commoners. The Gift of the Light is not shared lightly.”
“The gift? Is that what translates your words before I hear them? Some form of magic?”
Orobelle does not reply. Vesper rolls her eyes.
This child is going to be the death of her, if this mission isn’t. She thought the English nobles were insufferable, but this is something else. Does Orobelle even eat? Or bleed? Or bathe?
*
The answer to the first question quickly turns out to be “no”: Dorian returns with three meals. The fragrance of the rice that blossoms through the room would more than rival ten British dinners combined. Vesper and Honourless dive upon the food, the latter somehow more eager than she, but not by much. Dorian, though measured as he always is, has a light in his eye for the first time she has seen.
The dish of rice, fried meats and plantains busies them for a good ten minutes. Now that Orobelle’s protector has returned, Vesper renews her determination for a translator. “Dorian,” she calls, “would you be willing to interpret for me, so I may speak to Honourless?”
He swallows a mouthful. “Certainly. What shall I convey?”
Vesper almost blinks with surprise. She considers Honourless, who is shovelling rice into her mouth. “If you could tell her I said this: Thank you for bringing us here, and also figuring out how to do that with the couch.” She gestures at the upholstery. “And, I’m sorry you must ferry us about so thanklessly; you deserve better.”
Orobelle hisses at these words. Dorian repeats them with slightly different phrasing.
As he speaks, Honourless begins to smile lopsidedly, licking rice grains off her lips. She utters something back in a gravelly voice. “She says,” Dorian addresses Vesper this time, “‘A shame about this language barrier. I like you, you are a good one.’”
“Hah, even I am not sure of that some days,” Vesper answers, and Dorian echoes her words to Honourless. “So I appreciate it.”
Honourless wrinkles her brow and speaks again, in those curling, lisping syllables. “‘What do you mean?’” Dorian translates. “‘You are compassionate and responsible. No?’”
“If you had found me just a day sooner, you wouldn’t think me such a good person.” She props her head up on her elbow, now looking the woman in the eye. “I’ve killed more people than you would meet in a year.”
Honourless chuckles as Dorian repeats her words. Her reply—and his—is: “So you’ve killed five people? You overestimate how many people I’d see.”
“Ah, sorry, I forgot about that. You’re helping that haughty duchess over there in exchange for freedom, aren’t you?”
“Shut up!” Orobelle screams, and Vesper hears a pillow thud on the floor behind her. “I am the Duchess of Diamonds! I am the One Around Whom The Worlds Spin!”
Honourless is guffawing as Dorian translates, increasingly flustered with each word. She slaps the tabletop where the wrapper of her meal sits. “‘Exactly right,’” is the reply he interprets back. “‘And she knows she cannot do without us, so she must put up with all we say, too. Let’s make…’ I’m sorry, I cannot say that of my liege.”
Vesper has to pause to register that Dorian is no longer translating. He glances away, eyes cast down with poorly-obscured remorse. Honourless sighs and mutters something to him, which slackens his shoulders. Her eyes meet Vesper’s once more, and the next words she speaks are directed clearly at her.
“She says, ‘Are you alright sharing the couch tonight? It may not be as comfortable as you are used to.’”
“Hah, I’ve slept in conditions that would make a duchess hurl,” Vesper replies. “A shared couch is a luxury.”
Dorian sighs as he translates.
“‘Us both.’” Honourless gives a satisfied nod, grinning with broken teeth. “‘How is the bathing room?’”
“Also a luxury.” Dorian raises his eyebrow at this. He repeats the words for Honourless.
And with just a smirk, the woman rises from her seat and disappears through the doorway into that plush lavatory, slamming the door shut behind her. There are a number of clattering sounds from within, and the intermittent splash of jetting water, amid furious laughter. Dorian and Vesper look at each other.
“So, for tomorrow,” she says then, “what are our plans?”
“Well, my duchess has raised the need for a map of this world,” he replies. “If you are able to help us locate one, then it would be invaluable to us. I know too little about where such things are found in this world; you seem more familiar with its ways.”
She nods. “I might be able to. Never had to ask a stranger for a world map, but it’s nothing too rare, I’m sure.” With her belly full, she feels the first of pull of sleep on her eyelids. “For now, however, it may be bedtime.”
Vesper is creeping through misty forests, but she is not alone. Marlowe, Weston and Rajan walk at her side, following her silent lead. She knows she is meant to be somewhere, but the place eludes her. Somewhere in Hungary, somewhere that isn’t here.
Far above, there is a scream of planes. Her eyes flick to the sky. She watches the propellor aircraft pass, but no telltale specks of bombs fall from their bays.
A shout her cleaves her attention. As her eyes return to the ground she finds, all at once, that soldiers in the Nazi colours are tiding out from behind the trees, rifles glinting, sharp as death.
Vesper yells as she dives behind a tree. A rat-a-tat of gunfire. A rain of bullets. All miss her. Then she hears the keening, and her head whips around: not two feet away, Marlowe has stumbled to his knees, telltale red blossoming from his side. He reaches a trembling hand towards her, calling weakly before a bullet splits his shoulder and he screams, spattering blood on the leaf litter. She whirls around to see Weston dashing towards her—but a round the size of an EMPW electrode blurs from the trees, blowing his head off before he can clear the tree line, and Rajan shrieks, “Captain! Captain Lovelace—”
He only manages that many words. Convulsing like a puppet, he tumbles to the leaves in a puddle of red, an electrode round in his back with its wire tangled around the nearest tree.
“No! No, no, no! Rajan!” she yells hoarsely, as if his name might bring him back. When she dives to check for a pulse, a volley of bullets tears her hands from his corpse—
Vesper jolts awake with a yell, and feels her hand connect with a face.
Beside her, a stranger, too, springs awake—and with no more than a beastly snarl, lunges for her neck with hooked fingers.
Terror seizing her, Vesper winds up her legs to kick.
As those hands connect with her throat, their eyes meet, and she suddenly recognises the stranger: Honourless.
More memories resolve from the glaze of confusion. The room. The past day. She's not on the battlefield anymore.
Recognition seems to dawn on Honourless in the same moment. She retracts her hands with a jerk. They sit there, gasping for breath for many seconds.
Then the woman chuckles. She says something that Vesper can only assume is an apology, shaking her head.
“No, no, I'm sorry,” she answers listlessly. The dawn light seeps through the curtains, silhouetting her.
When her eyes sweep over to the queen bed, the young duchess is still snoring soundly. But Dorian lies awake in a bedroll beside it, propped up on one elbow. His eyes glitter in the early dawn light. “What's the matter?” he whispers, just loud enough for them to hear.
“Nightmares,” Vesper replies. “The usual.”
Honourless says something.
“Nightmares,” Dorian repeats for her.
Turning to Vesper, Honourless awkwardly reaches out to pat her forearm, an odd smile—maybe concern or pity—crossing her scar-furrowed face. Then she withdraws it again, and, mumbling one last thing to Dorian, slumps back down into her sleeping spot.
“She says she's sorry for attacking you. It's an old habit.”
“That's all right. I—I started it.”
While the rest of the room settles back into slumber, Vesper finds she cannot. She rises to her feet and shuffles to the bathroom, splashing her face at the sink. Then she steals quietly away with the keycard in hand, the hotel door creaking shut behind her.
As she descends the polished stairs, tree shadows rustle on the hallway below in the first light of morning. The last of her panic washes away with the sound. Clinking cutlery draws her gaze: she ducks over to the cafe, and finds a catered breakfast waiting, two other guests dining with her. Buttered bread with jam, a comforting classic.
Then, she figures, it is time for business. It may as well be.
The reception desk opens at an astounding hour of day—a different clerk sits in attendance now, with a shaven head under his cylindrical cap, polishing the countertop.
She reads the badge on his chest. “Good morning, Mister Ibrahim,” she says with a wave.
He lifts his head from his polishing. “Good morning! I hope you are having a good stay,” he answers, smiling toothily, a local lilt in his voice.
“It’s been excellent so far, thank you,” she replies. “If I may, sir, I’d like your advice on the matter of…travel.”
Dropping his cloth, Ibrahim folds his palms on the countertop with a curious smile, a quirking of eyebrows. “Of course. I’m not an expert, but maybe I can help. What do you want to know?”
“Two things,” she says. “Firstly, I'm wondering where I may find a map of the world.”
“You can look for a bookshop, there are a few if you walk...” He trails off. “Hrm. Actually, maybe we have a spare, there used to be maps on the wall. I can check for you.”
“That would be very kind, thank you.”
He nods once. “No problems at all. What is the second thing you want to ask?”
“Oh, yes. What is the price of a trip by airplane these days? We came by…not by airplane, you see. In fact, would you tell me more about flying in general?”
He chuckles. “You walked all the way from England?”
She can’t help a grin. “Something like that. I haven’t seen England in…years.” It’s the truth in more ways than one.
“Oho, travelling so long. Do you miss home?”
“I miss my parents,” she replies.
He nods. “I hope you can return soon, then. Air tickets to England, I can help you check, but it will definitely be more than eighty thousand naira.”
Something has occurred to her then. “And…I’ll need a passport to fly, wouldn’t I?”
At this, Ibrahim chuckles. “Yes. You must have a passport, just like any other border. There are other things…they allow no liquid in your bag. And no scissors and no nail clippers. They are strict these days.”
“Huh. That's good to know.”
Vesper does not have a passport. Her father is the sole bearer of the family’s travel documents. And there is no way the others are in any better standing than she is.
While she ponders the implications of this fact, Ibrahim busies himself with unlatching the counter door. “I can check for your map now, one minute.” Then he steps out from behind the counter and vanishes into the corridor to the right.
It turns out that there is a world map in the stores, one that used to hang on the wall for years. Vesper returns to the hotel room with the rolled poster under her arm, and as she pushes the door open, she declares, “I found one.”
Amid their stares, she spreads the map on the hardwood dining table, where Orobelle is polishing off her pink vial of breakfast. Each country on the map is coloured differently from its neighbours, forming a rainbow quilt. Though faded, the city names have yet to disappear, printed in stark black.
Orobelle places the empty vial next to the map. “Alright, let us see.” She lays her translation glass on the tabletop.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Vesper murmurs as she squints at the city names through the lens. “Does your compass account for the curvature of the earth?”
“The corefinder does, thank you very much. Do your instruments not?” she replies. “Primitive.”
“Sorry that we don’t have magic, I guess.”
“Alas for you. The Light flows weak through these worlds.”
They pore over the map for a minute, Orobelle uncapping a stick of graphite in a metal holder. “This city is…” She reaches for her lens, but Vesper quickly points out the capital of Nigeria, nestled in the Gulf of Guinea.
Orobelle marks it with a circle. “Do you have a magnetic compass?” she asks.
“Do you not?” Vesper replies.
Orobelle glares at her for five full seconds. “Bring it here.”
With the patience of a hundred saints, Vesper opens her pack. Sure enough, it is right where it has always been, hanging on a keyring from an inner zip in her pack. She teases it off the zip and brings it to Orobelle.
The duchess lays the two instruments side by side, the compass and the corefinder, and begins to draw straight, ruled lines with her graphite.
Vesper cannot help noticing the steadiness of Orobelle’s hand. She draws without a ruler, and yet the line, marking the trajectory from Lagos to their unknown mark, is so clean as to be severe, like a knifestroke. It curves to match the map projection—it is unclear if she can perceive the distortions, or if it is by rote, but the markings appear sound.
When she is done, she squints at her handiwork. The line extends northwest, across the Atlantic, bisecting North America, and then halfway across the Pacific Ocean. It passes through no labelled cities. “Well, hmph, that’s my closest guess,” she says. “Without a globe nor the right instruments, I cannot say for sure.”
Then she peers over the map, and her pencil comes slowly to rest over the city of Lima. She waves her glass over it, and circles it with her pencil. “Our target is almost certainly in this half of the world,” she says, waving at the Americas. “And this city here ought to be the ideal first staging point. Honourless, fetch me some funds.”
Hong Yi’s phone starts to explode with texts about a week before he’s slated to return to the States. It wasn't two hours ago that the entire Marine Bio gang declared a video call—for the sole purpose of catching up with him. That's what they say, anyway.
“Hey, Hong Yi, my man!” It’s Jake who's first to pipe up, then he's joined by a chorus of exclamations from Tana, Andrea, Berrigan. Berrigan looks like he might burst into tears.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he replies, breaking into a grin despite himself, at his friends' faces filling the laptop screen. “What's up?”
“Not much, man. You're back in town the day after tomorrow, right? You got an ETA on that?”
Hong Yi squints. “Are you planning something?”
“Wha—nah, literally why would we plan anything just ‘cause you’re coming back? We barely even missed you, lol.”
“Jake, shut up! Hong Yi, we love you and we’re not asking for any reasoning in particular.”
“Suuure… So, my flight lands at eleven in the evening in NYC day after tomorrow, but I'm holidaying there for a couple days. I'm back in Boston on, like, evening of the 20th.”
“Twentieth August?” “Twentieth evening.” “Gotcha!” Hong Yi chuckles.
“So, how’s it going, man? How are the parents?“
Hong Yi feels a twinge at this, though he doesn’t suppose they can see his ambivalence through the webcam. “Oh, you know, same old parents, same old house, same old invalidation…”
“Hey, Hong, can we set them on fire?” this time it’s Tana who pipes up.
“Yeah, like, parents, man,” Berrigan mutters. “If they ever visit us here, boy am I giving them a piece of my mind.”
He glances over his shoulder at his bedroom door. “Chill out, guys. They’re still people, you know. I mean…” He sighs again. “My dad had cancer while I was away. He’s almost better now, but…”
“Goddamn.”
“Oh…I’m so sorry, Hong.”
“Hey, Hong Yi,” Tana interjects, “when you get back, I am gonna give you a hug at the party—that totally isn’t happening!”
“Tana!” gasps Jacob.
He grins, shaking his head. His luggage lies half packed at the foot of his bed. He’ll have to put it all away soon—his hopes and sorrows, and the half-written dreams of his past, so intricately bound to this tiny house that he cannot take them along with him.
But it’s about time he wrapped up this month-long ordeal, anyway.
*
The flight from Beijing to New York is like every other flight before. Twenty hours across the Pacific, cold dry air and tongue-burning food, barely a drop of sleep. He lands in the only city on the East Coast that sees direct flights from China, the signs above the baggage claim welcoming him back like it has every year since he began flying.
Sleeplessly, Hong Yi boards the MTA to his lodging by Central Park. Even at one in the morning, he sees people milling in the dark—smokers, guards, retail workers on tired feet. Reaching the door of the hostel, his eyes ache with drowziness. He piles his luggage into the room with the others, takes his tag and toiletries, and goes straight up the curving stairs to his room.
For a three-day stay, it’s not too bad, despite the moldy blankets and the uneven paint. Even the snoring of his temporary roommates is not unwelcome. The light is rickety and white, and he is here on his own financing. All this looks and smells to him like…relief.
Honourless has no qualms, when asked, about theft. By the time Vesper returns with three people's lunch, the exile is the only one there, and littered across the table are stacks of notes, of which she is sorting through one, grinning. She waves Vesper over, and then holds them up for her, saying something: “Ko’the i?”
The woman has handed her the rainbow stack of bills in her three-fingered hand. Vesper starts counting them, each with faces of famous figures. The man said eighty thousand would buy a person a flight to London, and if she knows anything about flying, it’s that the fuel costs a fortune.
When she passes the eighty thousand mark, and notices that she hasn’t gotten through even a tenth of the money strewn here, she meets Honourless’ eye and says, “This is a proper fortune, blight me.”
“Fortune?” Honourless repeats the word back, phonetically. She makes two gestures—sweeping a hand upwards towards her face, and then downward to the table.
Vesper thinks for a moment. Picking it up or putting it down? “Yes,” she says, imitating the gesture of lifting her hand towards herself.
“Ah!” Honourless grins, and then starts to sweep the stacks of notes across the tabletop towards her.
Vesper stares in horror at the hundreds of thousands of naira gathering before her in a tangle of colours. She starts stacking the notes in roughly hand-sized lots, then glimpses the red rubber band pile she has gathered on the other side of the mountain of funds.
“Now you're just mocking me,” she mutters, taking the first rubber band.
An hour before the jump, Orobelle makes Vesper teach Honourless about the city of Lima: the name, the geography, everything she remembers. “I've never been there,” she quickly admits, “but here's what I remember from my mother…”
It is a coastal city not far from mountains—the capital city of Peru. It was an old settlement, then it was colonised, and it is at least half a millennium old.
“And,” she adds, closing her eyes as if to uncover her memory of the city, “it’s where the raw fish dish called ceviche comes from.”
Orobelle turns to Honourless as she translates. “And is that enough to get you there?” she asks.
Honourless hmphs. “It should be. It may not be. But even names have anchoring power.”
“Then let's find out,” the girl answers, holding the corefinder close as she is swallowed in pink light, to be replaced by her card-form. She watches Honourless pick the map up with one hand, and her with the other. “Alright, let's get moving.”
Vesper steps back. From within the card, Orobelle feels the distortions of spacetime in a muted way—they are almost no different from feeling her card bend or flutter in wind, but all at once she sees the world streak away in a vortex, and swirl, ripple, stretch.
It is an unnameable time later that the streaks snap back into steadiness, and the cold swallows them. The wind tears with its teeth and flecks of snow sting their faces.
“End me!” Honourless spits, steadying herself on her feet. Far beneath the peak, an endless blanket of clouds unrolls.
“Hurry on with it,” Orobelle answers.
“Shut up, kid,” she answers.
“What did you just call me?” In her white hot rage, she begins to glow and vibrate, but then remembers the blizzard and stops short of materialising.
“What should I call you, prissy pants?”
“Insolent wretch! My name is Orobelle Brilliant, Duchess of Diamonds, Bearer of the Knot of Worlds!”
“Oh, perfect, that's what I was forgetting! Let's get out of here.” Then, as the cliffs and crags start rippling again, Honourless mutters the name of Orobelle Brilliant while she screeches to unhearing ears.
Honourless lands back in Lagos almost an hour later, atop the coffee table at the precise midpoint between Dorian and Vesper. The two are sipping tea in the armchairs, and apparently discussing the Second World, when she crashes onto the furniture piece and tumbles onto the floor.
Orobelle rematerialises with arms akimbo, while Honourless lies sprawled on the carpet, the map several creases rougher in her fist.
“What in the Light's name was that?” screams the duchess.
The exile’s eyes are squeezed shut. “I told you it wasn't precise. I told you the names may not be enough.”
“You disappoint me, exile.”
“You infuriate me, child.”
“Oh! Oh! You've gone and done it again! I will scratch my name into your eyes if you do it one more time!”
“I didn't spend your name, Orobelle Brilliant, Duchess of Diamonds, Bearer of the Knot of Worlds. I just don't care to call you by your name when you can't even call me by my name-of-penance!”
“You, you—”
Orobelle sputters and points and before her next word can exit her mouth, Dorian puts his tea down and steps between them. “My duchess,” he says, bowing low with a hand to his heart. “Please, what may I get you, if anything at all?”
“Tranquillity!” she snarls, holding out a hand, and he dashes to her luggage, while she turns away with a sniff and walks after him.
Vesper massages the bridge of her nose and shakes her head. She bends over to pick up the crumpled map where Honourless left it, and unrolls it to find a matrix of arcing graphite lines scrawled across it, all intersecting near the north-eastern corner of the United States.
The markings sequester a large triangle on the map, overlapping the northeastern coastline of North America. It encompasses multiple cities: Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Providence, Newport.
The quarry of their search, it seems, resides in one of the most densely populated corners of the northern hemisphere.
“Hm. Well, if we were to choose a landing city,” Vesper says, after a prolonged pause of ponderance, “I daresay New York City gives us our best chances.”
By now, Vesper has explained the particulars of air travel that make it—at present—a useless option. “But that begs the question—Honourless—” she motions at Dorian across the room— “can you ghost twice with all of us in tow again?”
As he translates, Honourless meets his eye, then hers, grumbles out a reply, and shrugs.
“She says, ‘I’d hate to. But if it is the only way, then, sure, we may as well try.’”
At a bank on Oba Akran Avenue, Orobelle switches a hundred thousand naira for six hundred and twenty-eight United States dollars. Then, ducking into a dusty carpark nestled between two shop houses, they link hands in a circle on the concrete, amid the blaring of horns and the patter of pedestrian feet, closing their eyes to the grimy walls.
As the world starts to warp, Honourless yells out—but to all others in the vicinity, they only hear her voice. Her last cry echoes across the compound, long after they have disappeared.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
A Needle in a Haystack - III
Honourless’ feet collide with stone in the centre of a blinding town plaza. Glass walls soar into the sky, reflecting clouds and trees onto the street. Rectangles of light glare down on her, and moving images scurry across them, brilliant as the crossing gates of Wonderland.
Then her elbow is knocked away by a man in a garish pink costume like a child’s stuffed toy, tearing Orobelle’s wrist from her grip. Someone points a handheld machine with a lens at her, flooding her vision with white.
She only lasts that long, and then she keels over and lands on bent knees, palms slamming into the ground. All around her is a whirl of voices she doesn’t understand and the glistening eyes of strangers, some reaching out to help her. Dorian gets there first, offering an arm that she grudgingly takes.
On one knee, she clutches her head. The world spins, it spins too much. “I can’t…keep doing this,” she groans.
“Could we find some lodging?” Dorian says urgently to Vesper.
She mutters something, and then takes off into the crowd.
“Wait here while she finds a hotel,” the duchess’ protector says, supporting her to the roadside, where she bends unsteadily to the paving. “She wants you not to move until she’s back.”
“Hah. Now I’m embarrassed.” She grimaces. “Look at me.”
“You did very well, my friend. You deserve a rest.”
A pair of pink shoes appears in her vision.
Orobelle swipes a pair of bills towards Dorian. “Get her a drink,” she says. “I’ll keep watch.”
Honourless stares. The duchess does not meet her eye, even as Dorian scrambles away in search of the first of several market stands. They listen to the racket around them, the clicking of handheld machinery, the roll of alien syllables off tongues.
“Awful nice of you to care, Orobelle.”
“You’ve proven yourself,” she replies curtly. “We shall need you again. Don’t get used to it.”
Honourless snorts. It is as if this child despises the very thought of being in her good graces. Of course she does. She’s the duchess. I’m a criminal.
In a day, Hong Yi relearns the fickle system of the New York subway. It’s all a ritual in basking in its tepid warmth and trash and excess, something he throws himself into so that the past month finally starts to evaporate off him.
The train he’s meant to catch at Madison Square Garden only stops at every other station, and he checks twice to be sure he’s boarding the right one. But he isn't on the right one: it takes him all the way up north to the edge of the Bronx, and even then he doesn’t notice for all his people-watching, the chatter of four different languages in his ears.
By tomorrow, he thinks, he will be home again, even though Boston still takes pains to remind him he isn't there for good.
He wanders up streets of cigarettes and buskers, stops to pick up a bagel and coffee at a corner store. He finishes lunch leaned against the brick wall of a hair saloon.
There's a wistfulness to being here in this old and storied city—a kind Hong Yi cannot place, as if it belonged to another person. Lunch long past, he strolls under a red and white canopy in Queens and watches people pass whom he will never know.
The plazas in front of shops are the territory of guitar-toting buskers, and the street corners outside clubs are patrolled by loiterers looking for spare change. As he passes the last row of shops and wanders past the first hedge of the public green, he closes his eyes and listens to it all—the thud of a basketball on a pavement, the beep of a car.
He has never been sure of his place in all this: in the world, in reality, in time. Maybe that is why he likes the streets more than any tourist landmark: there is no need to be someone, after all those years of having to be everything. Time could stop now, and he could live suspended in this moment, and he would be happy.
And maybe he could, too, if he understood his powers over gravity. There is something odd about them—though just why they exist, he accepts he may never know. They upend just about every theory ever written about gravity and relativity and space. They can't have arbitrarily appeared. But where from?
Hong Yi falters to a stop. A white gazebo has emerged from around the verdant bend in the path. Before the gazebo, a woman in a dark tank top peers up at the vines curling around its pillars. As he creeps closer, he hears her clicking her tongue, watches her beckon up at the leaves with her fingers. Two steps closer and he notices a tiny green parrot, perhaps a budgerigar, nestled among the ivy vines above her.
“Hey, ma'am! Can I help you?”
Her head whips around. He waves. She wears her hair in an afro and her glossy red skirt goes up to her knees. Tear-streaked mascara stains her cheeks. “Oh uh, yeah—I'm outta ideas, honestly,” she answers. “That’s my boy Mango up there…won’t even come down for his favourite snack.” She sags, waving the sealed bag of birdseed around. “I guess it’s good he hasn’t gone and flown off, but that's got me worried, too. You think you could reach him?”
Bravado surges like heat through him. Hong Yi steps up to the pillar. “Sure, I've got a trick or two…”
He studies the pillar, the vines weaving through the trellis. Then—with a weakening of gravity—he springs, clinging with four limbs like a lemur. Boost by anti-gravitational boost, he scrambles weightlessly along its height.
“No way! No way, that’s crazy!” she cries. “How are you doing that?”
The ground, and the woman, are a dizzying height away by now, but still he peers down and winks. “Superpowers,” he says. Hooking his left hand into the ivy, he stretches the other towards the budgie. It grows heavy, the vine sagging with its weight. The creature barely has a chance to cry before he swipes it off the branch.
With a screeching Mango firmly in his grip, Hong Yi shimmies down the trellis, breaking twigs on the way. The moment his feet hit the ground among scattered leaves and gravity returns, the woman flies to him, taking the bird.
She scrubs its head with a finger. “Mango! You silly thing, going off all on your own like that.” Then she raises her huge eyes to Hong Yi. “Thank you so much! You’ve gotta be an angel sent from heaven or something.”
“Hah! I can be an angel if you want.” He grins. “But call me Hong Yi. Nice to meet you!”
“Hong Yi? I'm Terri,” she says, extending a hand for a shake—but he hesitates, noticing an itch on his arms.
“Wait, wait,” he says, flipping his palms up. The beginnings of a red rash are surfacing on his hands down to his elbows. “Oh boy, yeah, that’s the ivy.”
Terri chokes back a sound between a laugh and a cry. “I can’t believe you copped that for my sake! Come back to mine, I’ll get you some lotion.”
Well, Hong Yi can't say no to an invite from a cute stranger. Beaming thoughtlessly, he tags along as she dashes to the closest traffic light and then across the road, to the block of brick apartments gazing over the traffic. The sky is stark blue and burns like a stove, though the sun is sinking over the antennae.
“So, where'd you learn to climb like that?” Terri asks at the far end of the junction, and giggles. “I mean, superpowers aside.”
“Oh, you won't believe me, but…playing pranks in college. I’m a big fan.”
Her chortle turns into a howl of laughter. Mango chatters back. Hong Yi wiggles his arms to ease the itch, stepping over the sidewalk cracks as she wipes tears from her eyes. “Man, you're something else. I love it.”
As they scale the creaky apartment stairs, Hong Yi trails a step behind. “My roommate may be home,” Terri says—but opening the door reveals an empty unit, bigger than his own dorm room, but no tidier. Jackets are draped over the couch, and Xbox controllers sit among the cushions and delivery boxes.
At the door, Terri pops open the wheeled birdcage and hums. “I'm gonna take him to the vet later this week,” she mutters as she returns the budgie to his roost. “You need that, don’t you, sweet little thing.” Then she strolls into the kitchen and he follows, becoming uncomfortably aware that the itch has advanced to stinging.
While she shuffles cabinet odds and ends about, he runs tap water over the welts. The white cabinet doors are peeling. The floor is a mosaic of unevenly white tiles and the fridge opposite the sink is plastered with gaudy magnets and faded notes. He can hear children laughing outside the window.
“Here we go,” says Terri as she pulls her head from the pantry, presenting a bottle of pastel pink liquid labelled calamine lotion.
“Ooh, I've always wanted to try that,” he replies, as he takes it.
“You've never used calamine lotion?”
“My family used tiger balm for basically everything.”
“That shit smells so good though.”
“Oh yeah, I know.”
Terri fills two glasses of water and brings him to the living room. They laugh as he sweeps clothes and controllers off the couch, sitting in their place.
The lotion is earthy pink and cooling on Hong Yi's arms, and the itch dulls almost at once. “Hey, thanks, by the way.”
“No problem—I mean, you got Mango down from the gazebo thing. It's the least I could do.”
“Mango is adorable though. Who wouldn’t wanna help him?”
“So true.”
He looks up as he pats the lotion dry with his palm. She's already staring at him.
“Hey, we should totally catch up again,” Terri murmurs, her eye contact unbreaking.
“T—that'd be amazing,” Hong Yi answers, heart leaping to his throat. “But there’s just something you should know…I don't live here. I'm leaving tomorrow.”
Five seconds of shell-shock. “Oh.” Terri tries to smile. “Where to? And what time?”
His heart hammers wildly. “I’m catching a bus to Boston tomorrow evening.”
“Oh, uh, so you're free in the morning?”
As Vesper jogs in search of a hotel, she notices it: the electricity. It crackles under the street and it surges up the glowing screens around her, and it shines out of the brand names on the walls. Everything is electric—screens in pockets and screens on walls and so much electricity she suddenly feels like she could disappear into the scene, a part irremovable of it all.
She runs down two blocks between dizzying screens with flickering faces—where are the bloody hotels? She swerves around other pedestrians, hair wild in her reflections, and turns onto a perpendicular street.
Hotel Riu Plaza presents itself just as she is about to backtrack—a black marble facade, pinnacle lost in the brilliance of the sun. She studies it for a minute, watching guests wander in the lobby and through the doors. It'll do. She commits its location to memory, then turns on her heel and sprints back the way she came, jostling other pedestrians who barely bat an eyelash.
There are too many things here: crowds and carts and shop names glaring down in light and steel. Times Square is declared on every shopfront and sign. She has heard its name before, but never seen it till today. These crowds put the ones in her London to shame, and these lights, they render it all a heavenly vision.
Vesper veers onto the fabled Square and along the pavement among the stands. Honourless now sits with her head in her palms, a half-finished bottle of bright green juice beside her.
“What the devil is that?” she asks as she skids to a stop, pointing at the bottle. Gatorade reads the label.
“Some kind of rehydration potion, as far as we can tell,” Dorian answers.
“It certainly looks like a potion,” Vesper mutters. Honourless snatches for another swig. “Well, you'll be happy to know I’ve found us our hotel.”
*
After some bickering, Vesper books a night in a family suite at Hotel Riu Plaza with cash out of Orobelle’s luggage. Then they are sent to the elevator with keys and their heartiest compliments.
Not one of the four can keep a straight face as the gleaming lift doors click shut, deadening the air, and the floor begins ascending with a breathy hum. Orobelle studies the buttons and doors with wild eyes; Honourless curls up in the marble-floored corner and makes a gagging sound. Vesper is readier for her third time on a lift, but this one rises like a bullet, faint lights flashing through the crack between the doors.
At the twenty-second floor, they pile into their reservation. The others head straight for the desks and beds, but Vesper pauses to take it in. It is a beige-carpeted room, outfitted with all the plush comforts of the royal suite, except with three beds and a tall window that makes the most of its elevation. Beyond the white armchairs, it's nothing but sky, roofs and windows of other towers, some yet taller than this one.
Weaving her way to the window, she gazes out the glass. Twenty-two floors up, and they are still walled in. Everything here, in every world, grows towards the sky.
Honourless groans and tumbles onto the innermost bed. She mutters something, pulling the pillow over her eyes.
While snoring takes the place of her voice, Dorian and Orobelle have already set to work. The duchess has her watch, corefinder and map laid out on the gleaming desk, glaring at the instruments and the map in turns.
“Northeast,” she says. “There are no other cities in that direction—none on the map. We could well be in the right place.”
“If so, we’ve still got our work cut out for us,” Vesper mutters, staring down at the crowds as they flow like water. “But surely we can triangulate this Core’s position across the city, too.”
“This document may be of help,” Dorian says, laying his offering of a garish brochure before the duchess.
She picks it up, flips it over, and unfolds the sheet. As she shakes it out, she shouts, “Dorian! This is brilliant!”
Vesper cranes her neck. The brochure is a map, more intricate than a monk’s manuscript, criss-crossed by a net of routes in ten different colours. Threads of streets and bridges bind the three bright yellow pieces of this city together.
“We venture tomorrow,” Orobelle says with a hardened voice. “I shall allow one day here. That should be enough to tell us if our mark is in this city.”
Hong Yi wakes up with a case of butterflies. There's no way, he thinks as he is brushing his teeth in the downstairs bathroom, even as he is shoving his toiletries and laundry away. No way I just scored a date here.
He's checked out and boarded the MTA almost an hour before Google Maps said he needed to, lugging his comically boxy maroon trolley bag between standing passengers.
At this hour, it's all yuppies and high school kids on the subway, conversing in undertones or lost in frantic phone calls. The train wheels roll on iron, lights scattering rats in the dark. It lets him off on 3rd Avenue where he lugs his trolley bag up the grimy stairs with his eye on the map onscreen.
*
Then he is there at the nameless cafe, dappled light sprinkled on the paving, umbrellas outside to catch the sun and faded birds on strings in the door.
Under the umbrellas, Terri is wearing a new tank top, this one pink with a print of two cherries on the front, and velvety purple lipstick. When he flies to greet her, she laughs, hand brushing his. His heart flutters at the brilliance of those brown eyes.
They find bar seats facing the window, but are almost at once caught up in each other. “Hey, so, how'd the packing go?” Terri asks.
“Oh, I didn't unpack much in the first place,” he replies. “Pretty much just shoved my laundry in one compartment and skedaddled. Hope I wasn't too late.”
“Oh, nah, I've been here for five minutes.” She is wearing mascara, this time unmarred by tears, and once his gaze catches on hers, it cannot turn elsewhere.
She takes his hand, and he fights down a compulsion—to get attached, to want her too much. He won't be here to see it through. The palpable film of temporariness coats everything—the words exchanged, the gleam of their coffee cups as they sip, and the warmth of each other’s skin.
“You worked at the big aquarium? That’s so damn cool.”
“Yeah, as a research assistant. 'Cause I’m studying Marine Bio.”
“Wait, the whole degree’s about marine biology? Like you stare at fish all day?”
“Well, that, and octopuses, and sea slugs…”
“And shrimp?”
“Yeah, heaps of shrimp.”
The fact that he has landed his first date in months in a city he doesn’t live in has to be fate's cruelest trick yet. For all of five seconds, he toys with the idea of postponing his departure. They can do without me for a bit longer…can't they?
“So when you get back to Boston, what’s the plan? Semester is a couple weeks out still, right?”
He props his chin up on the table, smiling as his mind wanders. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure my friends are planning a party for when I get back.”
“That’s so sweet, what? You totally deserve it.”
“Aw, I'm sure they missed me after like, one whole month out of town. But enough about that, what are you up to?”
“Not much, honestly. I work down at the grocer’s two blocks from where I live. But it's just a holding pattern, kinda. What I really wanna do is start a band…get a buncha folks together, hit up an open mic or two, get our name out there…”
It’s hard for Hong Yi not to smile along, despite the growing ache in his chest. The conversation unfolds as naturally as breathing, as it hops from music to aspirations to weekend chores. Their coffees sit unfinished for an hour.
Terri giggles at a joke, shoulders hunching, and in that sunny light, her smile pierce his heart like a lance.
They’re both here grasping at this tenuous bond, though it is doomed to end by tomorrow. She knew this, and she still asked him out. And he knew this, and he accepted. Maybe she’ll become a distant dream, just like her dreams of starting a band.
But hey, they could do something about it. Boston is only four hours from New York, and if Terri wants to keep this going, however unlikely, she would be worth it…
After waking, Vesper is not to have more than two hours of quiet. While Honourless snores in bed, Orobelle and Dorian drag her off on what is to be the most hurried introduction to the city possible, beginning with the Times Square station. Picking up the flat-priced tickets, they invent their journey as they go—one trip northbound and then another south, plotting the bearings of their mark as they go.
There is little that can be perceived from underground besides the names of stations, and a blur of people hopping on and off. Orobelle spends the whole thing staring at the map with her pen while Dorian holds up the corefinder for her.
Vesper watches and nods along. It was a distant dream once, riding the London Tube. She doesn't know how this compares, but there is no mistaking it for London. She hears snatches of English and Spanish: chatter about the mundane, a father berating a child, and a flutist busking amid the faint scent of urine and tobacco.
Her pondering is cleft in two by Orobelle shrilling, “This is the right city! Look, they're somewhere southeast now. Dorian, hold the corefinder for me!”
*
Within three train rides, Orobelle narrows their mark's location down to “southeast of Central Park, and not by far.” Vesper follows the girl as she marches them up the block, across the road at the flashing light, and then down the next left, keeping apace with Dorian.
As they go, Orobelle’s eyes narrow on the instrument. She slows past a small crowd of diners in outdoor tables, muttering to herself. Dorian and Vesper slow behind her.
When she comes to a halt and turns to peer through the cafe clientele at the shop's facade, the two exchange a glance. Orobelle has ploughed straight down to the door, waving her instrument about like a metal detector. And then…
“It's you!”
The inevitable disruption. Her voice is loud enough to penetrate the front door. Vesper and Dorian sprint in after her.
Orobelle has accosted a young man with a pair of rectangular glasses perched on his nose. He squints back, brow furrowed. He’s dressed casually, as is the woman beside him, with whose fingers his are tangled.
“What do you want? Cash?” they hear him say.
“Don't you deflect me,” Orobelle answers, effecting a grave tone. “I said what I said. I am here for you. I am the Knot of Worlds, and you are a Core of this multiverse. I require your protection. I have come seeking you out for that singular reason.”
“Protection? Uh, sorry, kid, I’m a marine bio undergrad.”
Vesper winces as Orobelle seethes, but she keeps a rein on her rage this time. “Yes! You have abilities you do not understand, I know you do. You must wonder why! And I can answer that for you. I am the reason your abilities exist. Your duty is, and has always been, to protect me.”
He freezes for too long. And then, haltingly, he answers, “I'm kinda in the middle of a date? Can I at least finish up here?”
Vesper rubs her temple, meandering up to Orobelle’s side. “Sorry about that, sir, we’re…working on the introduction.”
“You must understand! I come with a mission for you, one that was written for you all those years ago, when you first assumed the role of Core. You must become a part of it. There can be no avoiding it. Fate demands it.”
“Okay, how long will this mission take?”
“Sixty days, in the Queendom's time. Perhaps three hundred days in this universe.”
“You want me for a year? I mean, an adventure sounds cool and all, but I have a life. A degree. My friends are throwing me a party tomorrow!”
With a huff, Orobelle turns to her companions. “One of you, make him see sense. With force if you must. But we are not leaving until he agrees to come with us.”
Dorian glances helplessly at Vesper. Drawing in a deep breath, she steps forward and pulls the chair on his other side.
“Good morning. I’m Vesper, pleased to meet you,” she says. “What's your name?”
The furrow of his brow eases. “Hong Yi,” he answers. “Okay, Vesper, what is going on here?”
To that, Vesper can only sigh. “This might take a while. And before we dive into it, ma'am, you are…?” She gestures at the woman beside Hong Yi.
“Terri.”
“Terri, do you mind if I borrow him for a few minutes?”
“I get the feeling I wouldn’t be able to stop you,” she laughs.
Vesper chuckles back. “I promise I’m not as mean as I look. And, Hong Yi. Am I saying that right?”
“Better than some I've heard here.”
“All right. Can you answer this honestly? Do you have any abilities beyond your comprehension? Ones that seem to defy reality, even?”
“Oh, like my good looks?” he says, too glibly for him not to have done it before. “Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't be entertaining this…weird interruption if I didn't.”
“I thought so,” she replies. “We all do. That's why we came here. Orobelle has an instrument in her hand that has one sole purpose: to find the likes of you and I.”
At this, he blinks. “You…?”
She nods. She can see the realisation hit, like a train crash in his eyes. “As recently as a week ago, I was a soldier in the British army, fighting the biggest battle on the Eastern Front. And then, well, I deserted—on account of Orobelle calling on me to join her…”
“Wait, wait, wait. How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“What? You just said you fought on the Eastern Front. World War Two?”
“The very one.” From her shirt, she fishes her bullet pendant. His eyes widen on the metal trinket.
“But that was seventy years ago.”
Vesper shakes her head. “The story is…strange, but bear with me. When she appeared, Orobelle—our young duchess here—claimed she had come from a different universe in search of me. And I thought it some kind of improvised theatre, too, at first. But then she took me here, to this place. This world. It is both like mine and not. There are civilian aircraft. And…rehydration potions. Things I have seen, and things I have never seen. And the more I think about it, the more I’m realising that nothing about the situation—the things they've done in my presence, the things I can do—make sense unless they're telling the truth. I have always thought my powers must serve some purpose, and I think that purpose is this one.”
“No way. What?” Hong Yi has been clutching his head the whole time she’s been speaking. “You're gonna have to give me a few minutes to process this. This whole time I've amused myself thinking these gravity powers were—”
“—oh, gravity?—”
“—were like some sort of superhero thing…and now you’re telling me there’s a multiverse, too? Just more universes that we can travel between? It's just like in…” He pauses short of speaking the name of whatever tale he was about to reference, then looks Vesper in the eye. “Okay, I think…I think, I think I could believe you. But...what convinced you to just up and leave like that? Surely not just Orobelle's words.”
To this, Vesper smiles wryly. “I had no reason to stay. My world, my time, was Hell on earth. I s'pose I relished the room to breathe.”
Hong Yi nods, pausing for a spell. Then he says, “That’s where we’re different, I guess. I have a whole life here, and it's one that I like. I’ve got studies to complete. Friends to see. I'm in the middle of a date, dammit!” He glances at Terri with a pitiful smile and says, “I swear I had no idea this was gonna happen.”
“It's, that’s alright, man. It sounds super important.”
“I'm sorry,” Vesper puts. “I understand. You should finish your date.”
“We can't wait forever!” Orobelle hisses. “Promise you'll come with us after you're done.”
Hong Yi’s face is scrunched up in thought as he meets Vesper's eye again. “So, you must know how absurd everything you've just said would sound to a stranger.”
She nods, hands parting in concession. “I was that stranger last week.”
“But you did find me, the one person with powers, among all the people on this earth. There's gotta be something going on. But…just one more thing, help me out here. You've got them too? Powers?”
She nods.
“Okay, can you show me?”
Vesper lifts a hand, palm up. Hong Yi watches unblinking. She has done this so many times that she hardly has to think: a blinding electric arc loops between her fingertips, snapping, waving like a ribbon in the wind. Terri yelps, then her eyes brighten, like polished mirrors.
Solemnly, he continues to stare for half a minute, studying her face. She becomes aware that the shop has gone dead quiet, except for the two of them.
Then he says, “You won't let me refuse, will you?”
“I'm afraid finding you is the only reason we are here.”
Hong Yi nods slowly, swallowing. “Alright.” Pauses. “I've made up my mind. I'll wrap this up, and then I'll come see you.” Another pause, this one more sheepish. “Erm, one more thing. What…are your pronouns?”
*
“Mine? As in, how I'd like you to refer to me? Well. I generally think of myself as a woman.”
Once Vesper and her companions have stepped outside, Hong Yi fights to push the date with Terri to the front of his attention again. But his thoughts refuse to stop racing, and he can see from her intermittent frowns that her mind is wandering, too.
Hong Yi isn't sure why, but he feels an unbreakable thread pulling him along now, towards some invisible destiny. Maybe it is that this is the first time the greatest mystery of his life has seemed solvable. Maybe it is that Orobelle's summons feel inevitable—something that will come back to claim him if ignored. It is a glimpse, of a plot so strange and momentous it makes the cafe feel paper-thin.
Or maybe it is just that he is oddly fascinated with Vesper. Something about her—perhaps the scars on her neck and arms, perhaps the steadiness of her gaze and voice—tells him every word she spoke was true: she was a soldier, one without compare.
That, and she's stronger than him, and probably has fewer qualms about putting him in a sack and dragging him off.
But no matter the sensible arguments to the contrary, Hong Yi cannot muster up the will to resist the call. He has grown familiar with this feeling, of pulling his future apart at the seams, and he could do it again. A hundred times over.
Well, if he must leave, then now is the time. Now, in limbo. Before Boston sinks its hooks into him again.
“What were they saying? That they need you to join them?” Terri asks, finally accepting the new course of the conversation. “That you have powers or some shit?”
He nods slowly. “Man, people always joke about superheroes hanging out in NYC, but this is just absurd.”
“So…you actually have superpowers?”
“Yeah…they’re no big deal, honestly. I can change the pull of gravity. Make things heavier…lighter…I used it to rescue Mango yesterday.”
For a revelation so world-rending, Terri seems quite unperplexed. “So, you’re cute and funny and you’re an undercover superhero,” she says. “What don’t you have?”
“A clue about what I’m doing with my life,” he chuckles, eyes unfocusing on her. God, this is going to hurt, isn't it? “Hey, you’re amazing, you know? And if I come back in one piece from…whatever the hell they want me for…I wanna hang out again.”
Both cups of coffee sit empty. Terri gives a smile. “Promise?” she murmurs, laying a hand over his.
“One hundred percent.” But even he isn't sure. The universe has such a way of changing without warning.
She hands him her phone—her Facebook homepage is open. A bird video autoplays silently. He types his name and city in the search bar—Hong Yi, Boston—and taps on his profile picture, which feels embarrassingly nerdy when he hands the phone back.
All the while, he feels the stare of Orobelle burn into him from beyond the cafe glass, severing him from Terri by the second.
Before she leaves, Terri gives Hong Yi a head-spinning, soul-rending kiss. As the door swings shut and she vanishes from his periphery, he sucks in a deep breath, and steps outside himself, the afterglow of her company quietly fading.
By now, the strange party of three has diminished to one: Vesper waits by a tree on the sidewalk. Her eyes lift at the sound of his footsteps.
“Where did the kid and the tall guy go?” he calls out.
“Orobelle and Dorian?” she replies, reaching into her pocket.
In her hand she fans out two cards, and from the cards issues the shrill voice of the duchess, crying, “Don't you dare sweat all over me!”
He stares at the card for several seconds. “Okay, so, you've turned them into cards.”
“They turned themselves. It's one of their Lightly arts or something suchlike.”
All considered, this doesn't bewilder him much. Vesper can generate electricity, and those two can turn into cards. It's not the comic book opener Hong Yi fantasised about, that's for sure.
*
Amid the chatter of the MTA and the rattle of a boombox, Hong Yi files a leave of absence form on the BU website. He becomes aware of Vesper staring at his smartphone when he glances up at a baby's wail.
“You wanna try my phone?” he asks.
She hastens to look away. “Not at all, I didn't mean to be nosy. Is that a phone? It appears more like a book, of light.”
“Oh, it's so much more than a book. Like…what did you do when you were bored at home in the 40’s?”
Vesper shrugs. “Go outside, read the news, watch the television, write journals…”
“You know, you can do all those things with a smartphone.”
“Even go outside?”
“It can definitely help with that.” Chuckling with a shake of his head, Hong Yi opens the Skype app, which haltingly loads all his chat groups.
Even as his heart pounds with knowing he is about to veer off course again, the ache in his throat grows to drown it out. Never one for the beaten path, this one. He's torn his life a thousand times, but no one said it would ever get easier.
If nothing else, he has a feeling Vesper will be decent company, at least.
There is, however, one more loose end to tie.
Guys, I have some…weird news. I won't be coming back to Boston for a while. The reason is too wild to explain. But you might not see me till next year.
Still, throw that party in my honour, OK?
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
City of Smoke and Mirrors - Denouement
Content warning (may contain spoilers)
This chapter contains depictions of vomiting.
The lights of houses glow through the muddling gray. Adelaide can no longer remember the taste of berries, and all she wants now are food and warmth.
As her tablet phone's clock ticks to 7:30pm, she comes upon a bin in the dark, the corner of a pizza box peeking from inside. In a past life, she might have worried about the state of its contents, but today she is too starved to care.
She yanks the box from under the plastic flap, and flips it open to find a wedge-shaped slice covered in wrinkled discs of meat. It is greasy to her touch. She shoves it into her mouth, salivating for the sting of salt and spice. As she chews, her feet leave the bin and hurry her on, on and on, which way she doesn't care, as long as it's away from home.
All this while, Adelaide finds the inside of her mind crumbling into increasing disarray, as she wonders where Felix has gone. Has he left the house? Surely he has.
She stumbles to a halt on the edge of someone’s front lawn, and slips her tablet phone from her pocket.
“Freddie,” she whispers, shivering. “Show me Felix's profile.”
“I found Felix in your friend l—” Adelaide clamps her palm over the speaker, glancing over her shoulder at the misty window across the yard.
Tapping into his profile, Adelaide lets her eyes wander over the row of buttons beside his name, selecting the speech bubble.
felix where are you?
Her breath catches as she taps send.
Before she has closed the window, a new reply lights up on the screen:
I'm as far as I care to go.
But I can come find you. Are you safe?
Her shoulders sag, and she replies: i think so, in a neighbourhood but away from eyes
Perfect. Stay put, do you know what street you're on?
She glances across the street for a sign.
simpson drive
Felix spends a few seconds typing, then his answer comes through: You got far! Half an hour's walking from my location, but I shall be there. Do not move!
Adelaide does not move, not even to adjust her posture. If it will help Felix find her faster, then she will do as told.
The minutes tick by—five, ten, crawling like spilled tar. Felix is still not here. Every second she stares at the street lights, she tries to believe, like she did in that penthouse apartment when the lights had lit up her floor.
Her joints grow stiff from standing like a scarecrow, and she cannot tell if the blurring of her vision is from the fog, exhaustion or tears. At long last she lets herself sink to the sidewalk paving and hugs her legs close, though it does little to warm the chill away.
Staring up through the humid air, she feels the weariness weigh on her body. This is the only life awaiting her: a forever-after of living on the run.
At least, when she was living in the lab, no one was hounding her every footstep. No one toiled to track down her scent, to push her out of every place she dared settle in.
Now, she can never belong anywhere again—anywhere but that room they built for her.
Adelaide buries her face in her lap and fights her tears. The stale bin pizza sits wrong in her belly. “You should have left me in the room,” she croaks, shaking in the bite of the wind. “Why did you do this to me? Why did you do this to me?”
She rambles on and on into incoherence for several minutes, grasping at her knees and the linty fabric of her leg-warmers. Is this how it is to live in the world below her penthouse? How is it worse than captivity?
Then, footsteps. And the rattle of wheels—to her left, down the road, soaring towards the houses.
Her throat clams up. The steps hasten closer, breaking into a jog. Eyes wide, she looks.
In the same moment, a golden searchlight glares upon her, lighting every speck in a circle on the sidewalk, filling her eyes with such fire that she gasps.
She blinks, heart leaping to her throat as she tries to make out if the silhouette between the streetlights is who she hopes, or if the police have found her at last, and her brief flight is finally at end.
“There you are!” comes a voice she knows.
“Felix?” Adelaide chokes, springing to her feet.
Felix flies to a stop before her, his coat trailing after him. He smiles even while he catches his breath, disheveled and covered in fragments of leaves and twigs.
She dashes over and flings her arms around him, trembling with the relief of his warmth. “Felix! I thought I’d never see you again…” Her voice wobbles with tears, and she clings and clings because it makes her feel a little less worn down.
“Oh, er, good to see you too,” he says. This time, he makes no reprimand—in fact, he returns the gesture haltingly, a hand laid on her shoulder. “How are you?”
“I’m bad.” These are the only words she can find. Stumbling back, she notices dirt stains on his blue shirt, and twigs and fibers. “Were you crawling through the scrub to get here?”
Felix wrings his hands and glances aside. “Well, let us say the way here was…well off the beaten track. You have a fine talent for losing pursuers, it’ll serve you well.”
“I’m sorry…you didn’t have to do that.” She watches him attentively, then reaches out and picks a twig out of his hair. She lets it fall to the pavement; they both watch it go. Then she pulls out a leaf. A bit of an anther. His hair could really use some combing.
He meets her eye, seeming either startled or confused—and it makes her squirm in a way she can’t pinpoint. “All’s well that ends well,” he murmurs, and before she can remove anything else from his hair, he gently maneuvers her hand away. The light around them glows brighter, revealing the sidewalk for two feet in each direction. “Let us go now. It's only a matter of time till your father reports you to the police…but we shall worry about that once we've had dinner. Turn off your PalmNote for now, it'll give them one thing less to track.”
She nods mutely and does as told. Meanwhile Felix glances at his own device, the map glowing on the screen. “There is a gas station a few streets down, we could pick up a meal there.”
Adelaide twiddles her fingers. “I’m not hungry.”
“How could you not be?”
“I ate…”
“Here? What did you…”
She glances guiltily at a bin as they pass.
“Addie…” The nickname makes her eyes widen. “If…I may call you that…”
Of course, he heard her mother call her that. “Yes, you may…”
“...you know that discarded scraps aren’t fit for consumption?”
Her head sinks. “I was just…so hungry.”
Felix sighs. “Fair enough, you can’t uneat what you’ve eaten.”
They trudge on through the alternating light and shadow, Adelaide in a growing haze. Five minutes later, as they reach the edge of the suburb, the unpleasant roil of her stomach becomes chilling nausea. She stumbles to a stop, bends double at the roadside and vomits.
Her eyes and throat burn, and she starts to wail, wiping her mouth on the backs of her hands.
“Oh, dear God,” she hears Felix murmur. His hand extends a handkerchief into her view. She stumbles backward against him, taking the proffered handkerchief to scour her face and hands clean. He offers his arm, and the deepest look of pity.
Her vision spins. She crumples the fabric into a ball and snatches for his elbow.
Adelaide doesn’t notice when Felix drapes his coat over her shoulders, but she eventually realises that she is no longer shivering.
She clings onto Felix’s arm as they pick their way towards the BP station, their luggage bag trailing after them in a whir of wheels. Its sterile white-green glow seeps onto the walls of the neighbouring houses, announcing its presence above the prickly trees.
They stumble through the peeling pillars and sliding doors, Adelaide’s vision swimming so that everything looks like a dream of sorts. She’s only vaguely aware of it when the service robot rolls up to them with a bottle of water, a few protein bars and two chicken wraps, and her companion taps his card on the reader.
“Addie,” Felix says, sounding almost as tired as she is by now. In the baring white light at the edge of the station, he hands her the water bottle and a P&E protein bar, both too clean and shiny in her grimy hands. She bursts into a flurry of thanks, only noticing that her throat is parched when she gulps the water down, droplets spilling down her face.
“So…” she mumbles as she caps it again, watching as he leans on the luggage handle and demolishes a wrap. “What are we doing next?”
Lifting his face from his meal, he says, “Is there anyone else whom you’d trust to harbour us?”
At this, Adelaide withdraws slightly. “I don’t want to be wrong again. I messed that up the last time.”
“Don’t you worry about that, my dear. Family is…unique, in how we judge their character. Do you remember any friends?”
“Yes.”
“Oh?”
“There was Lea. She was my best friend—she was my only friend, actually—we used to go on little adventures together. I don’t know that she’s still here, in this city, or in this state even. But she was…she was always good to me.”
“Lea. Surname?” Felix has pulled up the social network search bar.
“Lea Johnson.”
“Lillie, find Lea Johnson.”
“Certainly!” declares Lillie. “I found two hundred and seventy profiles for the name Lea Johnson.”
Felix tilts the screen towards Adelaide; she leans to watch as he scrolls, searching every icon for the girl she remembers, with dark curly hair and a predilection for the stars.
“Wait, stop.” Felix stops scrolling. Onscreen is a profile with the name Lea “Twilight” Johnson. When Adelaide lays eyes upon the photograph, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle clicking together in her head. Her hair is dyed indigo at the tips, and the image itself is decorated by a frame of blue stars, but she would know that face from among a thousand.
Adelaide points at that icon. “That’s her. Lea Twilight.” Under her name is her city: San Francisco.
“Well, how serendipitous. How shall we proceed?” Felix stares at the profile. “I’d think it wise to question her, before we show our hand. Of course, that is assuming she even dignifies a stranger with a reply.”
Adelaide calculates for a minute, and then holds out her hand. “May I pretend to be you for a minute?”
Felix glances at her, and then hands the device over.
She taps Lea’s profile and then the speech bubble beside her icon. Beneath her name, her status currently appears to be “Offline.” All the better, then. She taps on the text field, and begins to draft a message.
Lea, how are you? I’m contacting you on the subject of Adelaide Moore, the recently escaped laboratory subject. I understand you were close friends with her in the past. As a private investigator entrusted with this matter, I have intelligence suggesting she may be seeking you out. May we discuss?
Felix is watching as Adelaide types the words. She hesitates over the send button for a minute, before closing her eyes and tapping it. The new message, framed in grey, sits out in the open. Her heart feels like it might burst.
“I couldn’t have done better,” whispers her companion over her shoulder.
Lea’s status flips to Online.
An animated speech bubble pops up at the bottom.
Adelaide shrieks. Felix lays a hand on her shoulder, but he, too, is leaning in, both pairs of eyes trained on the grey bubble as it is replaced with:
if this is some weird phisihing scam then get lost
why the hell would i wanna help you hunt her down anyway
fuck off
They glance at each other. Adelaide’s mind is racing faster than her heart, a hundred possibilities springing from this message, and a thousand possible replies. But most of those, she decides, can wait.
She simply writes:
Lea! Sorry for the weird intro—I couldn’t be sure.
Can we meet on Telegraph Hill tomorrow? The place where we went to stargaze when we were seven? You remember that place, right?
This time, the speech bubble doesn’t pop up. Adelaide goes breathless. The gas station lights and the bare concrete floor and the tire marks spin in her peripheral vision.
After five minutes, Lea is typing again.
oh my god. no way.
what time?
The glow of entrance spotlights at the BART station welcome them out of the dark. When she glimpses her reflection in the perspex signage, Adelaide sees a different face yet again. They pass the gantry with paper tickets—a holdover from a past era, but ever necessary—and ask around for directions until the Blue-N hisses into the station.
In the seat behind the door, Felix slides the luggage under the chairs, while Adelaide settles into the window seat. As the hum of the engine crescendos, lights flash over them, to the rhythm of the clattering wheels.
“I could sleep for days,” she whispers.
“You could catch a few winks here,” he replies, glancing again at his tablet phone screen, where the route is drawn, a blue line connecting circular nodes together. “It’s half an hour before we alight.”
She glances out the window and watches the pipes of the tunnel flash by. So much has happened so quickly, after years of silence. Scenes flash through her thoughts like a fast forward reel. She lets her head sink against his shoulder and closes her eyes.
“Ah, Addie, I don’t know if…”
“Huh?” Her eyes flutter open. “Sorry, I can move if…”
He shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”
“I have a question…where are we gonna stay tonight?”
“We’ll find a hotel. We can keep our cover for one night. I’ll make sure of it…”
Before he’s finished speaking, her eyelids have drooped shut again, and the quiet rattle of the train wheels, and the warmth of her companion, lull her to sleep.
*
The screech of the subway as it brakes at their destination station, and the strobing lights that it brings, throw Adelaide from her slumber.
The underground escalators are gray and tarnished, but the streets above are polished glass—not silent even at this hour, although the screens have dimmed to throbbing dark shades. Through the smoke-heavy air, hotel names gleam down at them, some advertising their rates from unlit shopfronts, others showing no more than a gilded logo.
“Fancy any of these for lodging?” says Felix as they pass in front of the polished facades.
She looks about. “They all look the same to me,” she replies, then points at the one to their left. A golden plaque declares its name: the Acropolis. “But I don’t feel like walking anymore. How about this one?”
She is alarmed, briefly, to hear the thoughtless demand in her own voice, before it is allayed by his equally unbothered reply— “Let us see if they have vacancies.” He waits by the automatic door for her to enter, before tailing her into the air conditioning with their blue luggage bag in tow.
It’s a slightly glitzier one than the last, one for the heart of the city. Dark marble reflects her false face back at her, Felix’s coat about her shoulders. She watches herself with suspicion while he handles the formalities at the counter. When she frowns, her reflection does not. The lobby is otherwise silent, not even muzak to fill the frigid gaps.
Their feet tap on the marble until they enter the carpeted elevator lobby. The perfumed lift closes its doors to engulf them in a kaleidoscopic vision of blue LED particles, rippling like water.
“What do you think of those?” asks Felix in a whisper, waving at the screen and its reflections.
“I wish they were brighter. I can barely see anything.”
He waves a hand, and they shift to green, and then to brilliant gold, and she can see that their patterns are warping around him, just a little. The way he does this—gives in to her demands—makes a lump appear in her throat.
Their room is halfway down a gray hallway on the fifteenth floor, and when Felix unlocks it with the keycard and pushes the door open, Adelaide studies it intently. It’s bigger than the lab’s penthouse apartment, and perfumed, with petals scattered on the king bed. A ceiling-high window looks over the sleepless city, lights studding the dark like gems in velvet.
For minutes, Adelaide wanders through the room and stares down at the streets, feeling the cold radiate off the glass. In the background, Felix’s reflection lays the luggage bag down and opens it like a clam shell.
Gradually, her eyes glaze over to the lights, and she begins to watch him instead—in the glass, then over her shoulder. He picks out a few articles of clothing, and fishes his jonquil Cel—now a couple of leaves balder than before—from his pocket. He drops a small bottle of shower gel and chases it halfway across the room. She laughs under her breath.
When he disappears into the bathroom, she finally wanders over to the bed. Sitting on the edge of the creaseless blanket, she tears off her sweater, tosses it onto the ornate armchair by the bed, and sinks onto the bedding. Her eyes droop shut to the gentle rustle of water in the next room.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
City of Smoke and Mirrors - Turning Point
Adelaide wakes to daylight and silence. Her feet hang off the bed, frigid in the morning chill. Everything is still around her.
As her eyes slowly focus on the bright hotel room and its furnishings, she begins to remember again. The escape. The fluorescent gas station. Her green sweater, hanging on the armchair beside her.
Then she notices Felix asleep in the three-seated leather couch, nestled against the diagonal wall across the room.
“Good morning?” she calls as she crawls out of the covers. Rose petals scatter on the carpet. No answer.
Inching closer on tiptoes, she discovers him lying on his side, one arm dangling off the couch and the other curled around a cushion. Her shadow falls across him. His eyes are shut, shoulders rising and falling with steady breaths.
He must be more tired than he lets on—sleeping in chairs and couches night after night. She has never seen his hair this unkempt before. His eyes move under his eyelids.
He clearly thinks it wrong to share a bed, for some reason or other. But she used to share beds with friends at sleepovers, and her mom and dad shared a bed, too—so why? Maybe he sees it in a different light. In his time, she's read, women did not wear dresses higher than their ankles. They must have different ideas of what is good, and what is right, and...
Adelaide is so deep in her pondering that she does not notice for many seconds that Felix’s eyes have opened.
“Oh, hello there—good morning.” It is only at his voice that she starts.
The sunlight glows through the window behind her, scattered in his grey irises. He stares, and she stares back, not a single thought seeming to pass across either gaze.
“Ah, I—I’m sorry, I didn't mean to be rude,” she stammers.
Felix props himself up on one elbow. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he replies. “Was I entertaining in my sleep?”
“No…you were very quiet.”
“Well, then, I hope to be more interesting awake.” He smiles, finally combing hair out of his eyes. “And might I say, you look like a proper deity with the sun behind you. Like your namesake, perhaps.”
“Oh…” At these words, Adelaide's vision starts to spin. All at once, her head feels feverish and light—she must be ill; she needs food, or water, or something, anything but to keep looking him in the eye.
“We ought to go looking for breakfast.” Heedlessly, Felix wanders over to the kitchenette, while Adelaide returns to the bed and lies down, waiting for the fever to subside.
The sun is hidden by clouds when they check out of the hotel and carry on away from the downtown. There are cameras on every wall, flocking like all-seeing flies.
They allow for one afternoon in the warmth, drifting from one shade to the next, giving the tourists a wide berth. Adelaide wears her disguise still. A popcorn stand chugs on the corner, its buttered honey wafting up around street corners. As they pass, Adelaide pleads with her eyes, and Felix buys a box that they share in the shadow of a skyscraper.
A flock of pigeons flutters by in the wake of two playing children, landing near their feet. Adelaide glances at her companion, while the shadows of wings pass over them in the burning sun. He is frowning. “It’s…comfortable here, too much so,” he says. “I worry for you, that you cannot simply be here.”
She twiddles her fingers. “Could there be another place in this world that would have me?”
“I know not the answer to that. The world is being engulfed slowly in flames, or so they say. This city is an oasis in a burgeoning desert.” The sunlight on her skin suddenly doesn’t feel so benign.
They linger for a while on the green, and for half an hour, Adelaide can fool herself into feeling like a part of the scene. But when a police car rumbles by, they take flight again.
“There's no way. No way. No way. No wa—”
Lea's mutter turns into a shriek as she swerves around a woman in heels, wheels and pedals clattering into the last intersection. She hears a shout while the lights cascade on behind her, and then she pedals onward.
Seven o'clock. Seven o'clock was the time she had been told to go to the foot of Coit Tower, to meet Adelaide. Or, the person she assumes to be Adelaide, though she went by the identity of “Felix Mercer.”
There's no way a private investigator would know—or care—for all the biographical details they discussed in that brief time: how “Felix” knew of her dream of writing for science magazines, of the library, the night on the hill, the disappointment that had permeated her mother’s backseat afterwards.
Yet Lea's knees tremble when she leaps off her bike at the bottom of the hill, and she cannot hear her thoughts over the boom of her heart, as she wheels the bicycle up the slopes, up and up past the straggly copses of trees, thinner and drier than a decade ago.
Adelaide, the prisoner. Adelaide, the friend I lost. Her name is a refrain sung by her thoughts. She feels like she's wading through a memory, as she glimpses the silhouette of someone—two someones—at the base of the tower, dim against the glow of the spotlights on the decaying building. She stumbles through gold and blue and green, and she sees one tapping the arm of the other, who calls out:
“Lea?”
She still says it the same way, a long E and a closed A. Timid, thoughtful, hyperliterate, withdrawing, wanted escapee Adelaide Moore.
“Ad—” Lea shuts her mouth halfway, glancing backward over her shoulder, and then holds down the power button of her phone in her pocket, until she hears the shutdown jingle. “Is that you?”
“Yes! Lea! Yes, it’s me!” She’s sprinting to meet her now.
The grass rustles underfoot and the thin trees sway. There are no eyes here, when she finally comes face to face with her friend of eleven years ago. They've both changed in many ways—Lea is half a head taller now, and Adelaide's hair is much lighter than she remembers—but it’s her voice, her face, her huge eyes that stare with such intense fright that one feels like she might flee at any moment.
“Oh…Ad…do you have a name I can use that won't ring alarms?”
“Artemis?” she offers.
“Art…Artemis…” She practices the syllables. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” Adelaide says haltingly. “But I’m scared.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Lea answers. “I’m happy to help you out. But I gotta ask…what’s the plan?”
“Do you have a home? Or a place we can stay, just for now?”
“Yeah, I sure do, but…”
Adelaide’s companion approaches from behind her. From afar, she couldn’t make much out, but now she begins to realise she recognises the silhouette: he wears a black jacket over a collared tee, and his light hair falls almost to his shoulders.
Her thoughts are only just clicking together when Adelaide says: “This is Felix.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Felix puts in with a smile, extending a hand for a shake, which she returns. “I’ve heard plenty about you—all good things, I assure you. A…Artemis trusts you with her life.”
His smile is perfectly practiced, and his accent is perfectly posh. He sounds like the protagonist of a moldy pre-secession English paperback novel.
“Are your phones turned off?” Lea asks. Felix nods. Adelaide pauses, reaching into her pocket, and then gives a thumbs up. And only then does she say: “I’m so, so relieved to see you again, Addie…it’s been horrible out here, everyone is trying to hunt you down, even your dad—”
“Wait…you know about that?”
Lea starts walking them back towards the station. “Yeah, it was in the news. He was talking about how you visited, and I just…couldn’t keep watching.”
Adelaide and Felix are silent, and she can feel the consternation passing between them.
“Yeah, that’s why we need to be out of here as soon as we can,” Adelaide finally says. “Out of San Francisco.”
“Seems wise,” Lea murmurs. “Maybe you wanna go to a different country? The US government probably can't reach you there. In the meantime…you can hang at mine, no problem. I don’t know if it’s weird to say, but I’m honoured you thought of me.”
Adelaide's voice lightens. “I mean, I wasn’t sure at first either, after my dad and everything…but when you said you’d never help the police hunt me down…”
At this, Lea laughs. “You’re unbelievable, pretending to be the police,” she says. “I almost deleted the message, you know. I was like, who the hell is this Felix Mercer with literally nothing on their profile. But nah, you won't catch me snitching to the SFPD. Anyway. Before we head back, I’ve gotta set some expectations.” She gestures with both hands as if laying a tablecloth. “I’m renting a unit at the Hexagon right now, and it’s not amazing. I’ve got a double bed and an inflatable mattress. I think I can fit you both in there if you really have no other options. It'll be a tight fit, buuuut…”
“You have my eternal gratitude,” Felix says, hand to heart. “But I needn’t stay with the two of you, if my doing so would inconvenience you.”
At this, Adelaide immediately says, “But…Felix…”
“Oh, Addie, you know I adore your company—I shall visit with you at the very least. And then we could decide our lodgings thereafter.”
“Okay…”
Lea purses her lips as she listens, trying to fit it in with the rest of the messy jigsaw puzzle that's coalescing in her head. Meeting Adelaide again has been a surprise—but the existence of Felix is another matter, a gaping hole in the fabric of events.
Considering Adelaide escaped less than two weeks ago, they can’t possibly have known each other longer. And yet they appear too close for that—especially for the likes of her. Did they meet in the lab? Is he a childhood friend she never mentioned? There was no mention of him in the news of her escape, not even in the reports of her visit to her father.
All of this mulling leaves her mouth as: “So, Felix, how did you end up getting involved in this…this situation?”
“Ah, well, when I first arrived here, little more than a month ago,” he begins, ringing the first of many alarm bells in her mind, “I learned of Adelaide from my forays in digital libraries. She being a prisoner of such extraordinary skills, taken captive so unjustly, I found I could not abide her situation. And so, I trespassed on the facility and left with her.”
“You make that sound like a walk in the park.”
“I assure you, it involved much preparation.”
“That lab has a lockdown system. You need an access card to even get past the lobby.”
“I have ways of bypassing that.”
She grimaces. “Fine then, keep your secrets,” she mutters. They fall silent as they approach the junction of the winding hill road and the arterial, the first of many cars soaring silently by.
*
When Lea turns to Adelaide at the station gate, she leaps. The person walking alongside her is Adelaide’s height, and wears the same dress, and yet she looks nothing like herself from the neck up: her nose is straight, her cheekbones sharp, and there is an indistinctness to her expression that gives off the impression of a mask.
“Uh, Artie?” she whispers, as a subway rumbles up to the platform. “Why do you look…different?”
Straightening, Adelaide glances in a train window, as if to confirm what Lea sees. “Oh, it’s a disguise. Felix does this sometimes to make sure I…”
“Felix does what?” Becoming aware of her volume, her voice drops. The doors creak open, and they step across the gap one after another. “He does what?” she snaps in a whisper. “He makes you wear hyperrealistic masks?”
“Yeah. I…don’t know if he wants me talking about it, so I think you’re better off asking him—”
Two passengers pass—Adelaide recoils, turning her face to the door until they’ve gone. Lea feels a twinge, and, wheeling her bike between her and the rest of the passengers, waves her to the chairs.
“This guy sure likes his secrets, huh,” she whispers, leaning towards Adelaide, whose unfamiliar face surprises her a little less this time. Felix has sat down on her other side. Their voices drop to a whisper.
“He is nothing but secrets,” Adelaide replies, matching her volume. “Sometimes, I feel like I don’t know anything about him at all. What he was doing before he got here, who he was. But he helped me, so…so I guess I have to believe he has good intentions.”
“There’s just something I don’t get. If he’s the one who got you out…then why is this my first time hearing about him? Why isn’t he in any of the reports as an accomplice or a suspicious figure on the scene, or, or something?”
“He…is really good at not being seen. It’s related to the…masks and everything.”
Lea sighs gently. “I don’t wanna question your judgment,” she goes on, “but this is what it sounds like to me, okay. This dude shows up in SF a month ago, and decides that the first thing he wants to do is break you out of the lab, and then he just does that. But he somehow doesn’t show up on any footage or eyewitness accounts or whatever, meaning if you get caught, he gets off scot free. So now you're depending on him in order not to get caught. Right?”
She freezes for a moment. “Yeah…well, but he’s been so friendly, I can’t imagine…”
“I know,” she replies. “Some people are really good at seeming nice on the surface. And I really don’t know what he’s playing at, and I’m glad someone with his talent for avoiding detection is on your side—or at least I hope he is—but, keep your wits about you, okay?”
“Okay—”
“Six car, two door Santa Rosa train now approaching Japantown.” The train screeches on its braking wheels to drown out the robot voice, and they are all flung forward by momentum.
“That’s us,” Lea announces, voice ascending above the scream of wheels as she rises from her seat.
The Hexagon is tall and surly, and as its name suggests, sits on a six-sided floorplan. Keeping her head down, Adelaide lets Lea drag them through the entrance gate and into the elevator, already awaiting them on the ground floor.
The circular chamber is a rusty far cry from the one in the Acropolis, laced with the musk of industrial metal and concrete. The doors clang shut, and the metal tank judders upwards, decelerating to a stop some unnameable time after. But its doors do not open. It begins rotating counterclockwise like a lazy susan, to face a touch left from centre.
The doors slide apart. They pile out of the lift—and straight into an apartment half the size of Adelaide’s lab penthouse. The lights wink on, revealing a lifetime’s worth of odds and ends. Piles of pots lounge in the sink, and clothes are scattered on the floor that Lea swoops off the carpet with a shout. A window at the far end looks out into the night, and by that window, a bed spans the entire width of the apartment, looking like just enough to fit two people. A linty blanket is draped across it.
The lift doors roll shut behind them, and Lea waves once around. “Welcome!” she declares, lunging for the panel at the head of the bed to jab a few buttons. Beneath the kitchen counter to the left, a matte plastic bench swings out of the wall with a thump. “Make yourselves at home, please.”
Dodging around a stepladder, Adelaide sits down on the pop-out bench. Felix opts to continue standing, occupied with inspecting the upper shelves, the pantries, and the crowded countertop. “Colour me impressed,” he says. “I have never seen space used this efficiently.”
“Thanks! I’ve been living here for like,” she counts on her fingers, “three years now. Cindy, the landlady, comes by to inspect it every month. But I’ll give you the heads-up if she ever schedules. So.” She catches her breath. “What do you think, Felix? Does my place meet your, uh, standards?”
He ponders the space for a moment, and his eyes come to rest on Adelaide. “I wouldn’t mind it,” he replies. “I’m loath to part ways, even so briefly. And we must plot our next venture, the sooner the better.”
“Cool, cool, no problem, then! Could you pass me the mattress?” She points at the shelves by his head. “It’s up near the ceiling.”
Felix plucks the rolled-up mattress off the shelf and hands it to Lea. Pulling on a tab cord, it begins to inflate itself with a hiss of air, and she lays it down parallel to her bed. “I’m just glad I finally have a reason to use this,” she mutters, hands on her hips. “What’s our arrangement here? Who’s on mattress duty tonight?”
“I shall take the mattress for all the nights we are here,” Felix says too quickly. “You two could share the bed.”
“Sure, that sounds fair to me,” Lea says.
At this, Adelaide frowns. “Now I’m confused.”
“About what?” Lea says, hands on her hips.
“I thought sharing beds wasn’t okay.”
Felix looks oddly at her. “Well, you are both women, and it is not improper for two women to share a bed.”
“Oh—oh! It’s,” Lea gestures, suddenly frantic, although Adelaide cannot fully understand why. “It depends on the person, and I’m totally fine with it.”
From that point, all goes silent in the room. Lea resumes her halfhearted tidying efforts, rolling a telescope under her bed. If there is a reason for her shift in demeanor, Adelaide cannot grasp it, let alone begin to try and diffuse it.
That night, Lea defrosts a noodle box and dines in the corner of the bed while Adelaide inspects the pile of belongings on the dresser. Her friend stretches past her to push a combination of buttons on the headboard, and the lights over the bed fade to a rosy hue.
“Hey, Lea,” Adelaide pipes up then, “I need you to explain the bed thing to me. And why Felix thinks it's okay for two women but not a man and a woman.”
Lea sighs, lowering her noodles. “Okay, okay. Right. Before that, I gotta be honest with you. The fact we’re meeting right now feels like such a surreal miracle to me, and I really, really want you to be safe. But I don’t exactly trust Felix right now. He’s…been nice, but some of the things he’s said are giving me weird energy, you know?”
“I’m glad you can sense things of that sort,” Adelaide replies, “because I don't think I could. I don't think I have the ability to.”
Lea chuckles. “You haven't changed one bit, huh? So, the bed thing. As chill and open as people are now, there’s still some people, usually the old-fashioned ones,” she casts a meaningful glance in Felix’s direction, “who think romance is something only a man and woman can have with each other. And, like, it’s really common for them to think a man and a woman sharing a bed implies that they’re banging, in a way that it doesn't for two women.”
“Banging?”
“Uh. Having intimate relations.”
“Do you mean copulating?”
Lea blinks several times at her, then bursts out laughing. “Yes, that’s what it means. My God, you’re unreal,” she wheezes. “Anyway, what I’m saying is, Felix seems like one of those people, with outdated ideas about that stuff—I don’t have much to go off of other than a couple of the things he’s said, but it’s a feeling, you know?” So, she can tell he is from the past without asking, too. “Now, in his defense, he seems…respectful. It’s like, the bare minimum, but he hasn’t tried anything weird with you. Right?”
“Nothing I can think of.”
“Good. Good, good.” Lea waves a hand about. “But, if he turns out to be an asshole, drop him, okay?”
“What if it’s not safe to just leave?”
“You’ve gotta be honest with yourself, then. It feels like there’s a power dynamic here. You’re relying on him to be safe, right?”
“Right.”
“And I'm not saying he will, but if he tries to use that to force you to do anything you don’t wanna…that’s your sign to hit the road.”
“Okay, got it.” Adelaide doesn’t like the way this new thought sits in her mind. Up till now, these fears have only been bubbling under the surface. But if she must live a life of hiding under Felix’s good graces, then…
“So, change of topic. How’s your life been since escaping?” Lea wears a softer smile now.
“Oh! It’s been…a lot. It’s like I’m relearning the world from the ground up.”
“Damn…that must be so much brain work. I don't envy you, the world moves so fast these days. But I can catch you up on everything. Did you hear? the Fortitude 3 finally reached Saturn. It was three years ago now.”
“Wow, I cant believe…they reached Saturn before I got out of the lab.”
*
Lea and Adelaide talk of the world. She explains all that has changed, and all that hasn’t: that self-driving cars now make up most road traffic, that cameras can read the moods of passers-by, and that half of Asia has closed its shipping lanes to the US. These days, not much passes between these continents other than humans, and even then, relations are fragmenting as they speak.
As evening segues into bedtime, Lea dims the lights to dying embers, and bundles in with her tablet phone to watch videos. “Come join me here whenever,” she calls out sleepily as she flops onto her side, hugging a plush comet close.
As Adelaide wanders to the kitchenette to brush her teeth, Felix waves from the pop-out bench. “May we talk?” he says.
Her pulse quickens. Lea’s words flash through her mind. “Sure.”
Taking a sip from his mug of tea, he gestures with his elbow at the bench seat beside him, and waits till she has sat. “Addie,” he says in an undertone, “we must decide what we’re doing next. I much appreciate Lea’s hospitality, but this cannot be our permanent arrangement. It is only a matter of time before they scent us out. There is no permanent arrangement to be had in this city.”
Her head spins. Running, running for her life—it's all that awaits her now.
“We?” she murmurs. “They still don't know you're involved, you know. You could leave without a trace.”
“And I shan't. I cannot leave you high and dry.”
“Why wouldn't you?”
“Well, believe it or not, I care for you. And if I must lose your company, then I'd have no reason remain in this world.”
“Oh, I…” She has never imagined someone liking her presence before. An odd, pleasant embarrassment flushes her face. “I thought you didn't have a choice but to be here.”
Felix stares over the plastic mug, at the cupboard panels opposite them. “Addie, may I be honest?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“I never mentioned it before, but home…home has been consuming my thoughts. More so the longer I spend here.” He massages the bridge of his nose. “I still entertain the fantasy of returning, and to that end, I’ve been scouring every repository of knowledge I can find for a sign of something, anything, that might resemble our Tunnel Machine. And there might be…”
She watches his face just long enough to recognise something there that she’s never seen before: a sadness in his gray eyes that he’s no longer trying to obscure.
“What was your home like?” she asks then. “You haven’t said much. But I always wonder, because you miss it so much, and I wish to know more. I mean,” she twiddles her fingers, “if you don't mind telling me about it—your London, the…transatlantic race, the…”
“The solar machinery?”
Her eyes widen. “Solar? Really?”
He allows himself a smile—a warm one, not like those all-knowing smirks she’s grown accustomed to. “That’s right. It was everywhere, on every house: glass for capturing the sun, the way leaves do. We discovered it almost a century before your world did.”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Phantasmagoria
Content warning (may contain spoilers)
This chapter contains depictions of physical abuse and intimate partner violence.
It was the dawn of discovery, the sunset of silence. It was the gilded decade, the godless decade, the decade when the world began to feel small. It was the Year 1892, and that was the year I fell in love.
Across the sea, cities were swept by revolution while in London, streets brightened and steam cars plummeted from favour. For a century we had sung the praises of coal and boiler, watching as it had eagerly reshaped the world—but today, something new had risen to overshadow it: the sun.
It was upon our soil that we learned to conjure electricity from light, and saw, in a flash of clarity, the endless possibility within it. Once the metropolitan railway inaugurated its first solar train, the rest of the city was quick to follow. Suncatchers sprouted on every eave, till we saw more glass than chimneys, and councillors now blustered about the peril of too many windows, the birds they slew.
On a placid day in the middle of all this turbulence, I sat at my desk and wrote an essay, gazing out across the manor grounds at the catcher glittering atop our greenhouse. From my study, I had a full view of the green, brushed by summer and bursting into bloom. It was all of a Baroque construction, the yield of wealth older than the house—older than the road beside it.
Today, a rare sun lit the land in gold. Light fell through my window, scattered by leaves. As the birds burst into a bright refrain, I thought about Lucille.
*
Lucille had been no one to me till two weeks ago. Then at once, she was the young lady on the balcony at the Herberts’ evening function, waving a violet fan to set her pale curls aflutter. If she came from money, I would have known her by now—my father made sure to mingle me among families of our ilk.
So I could not fathom how she had landed in the company of these preening swans. But I met her eye, and she met mine, and we drifted together on the landing, illuminated like a tableau.
As we danced and talked and laughed, I felt a keen adoration—perhaps for the way she sang of her dreams, or the dance of chandelier crystals in her eyes—perhaps the way she had quipped, “Lucille Mercer, it has a nice ring, doesn’t it?”
In truth, it was none of those things, but the glamour of the change that was sweeping this smoky city, leaving its glitter everywhere. We, the youth of 1892, hung on the cusp of change. Daughters wrote where their mothers never had. Children could point at moths and speak to how their colours had changed, for they had a word for it: Evolution. And families had begun to shed the old manner of love, whittling away the vagaries of courtship till only the beating core was left. Our fathers and mothers had long dreamt of living by the whims of our hearts: we were the children of that dream.
Adoration was enough, in this world, to pledge our love. So I did, two meetings later.
*
As I thought upon Lucy and dallied on my homework, I heard a knock on my open door that could only be my mother. She was as she always had been, gliding in in blue paisley, her long hair knotted tightly on her head—the vintage style that was fading from favour.
“Felix, dearest,” her voice woke me from my pondering. “Your father arrives in London this evening—he should wish to see you. Please come to the foyer at six on the clock.”
So that evening, in my summer best, I met her in the antechamber to await my father's car in the dusk. Mata was there, too—the kind, matronly maid preparing the polished tabletops with a feather-duster.
It would be my first time meeting my father in a month. We had all grown accustomed to the cycle of his visits, wondering at his adventures while we kept busy. But this was the first time we would receive him without my brother.
He had been informed already, of how Jasper had vanished to join some motley travelling crew, and he had doted upon me in letters, the only heir of this family left. He had spat poison at my brother's name, the boy I had grown up with. I was the good son, the one they were lucky to have.
Under the shadow of her lacy hat, I saw the crease in my mother's brow and, plain as sun through glass, the crumpling of the heart beneath. Theirs was a marriage forged in the furnace of the passing zeitgeist, and I knew how they loved each other. John Mercer was like an illusion—here for a blink, gone in the next.
“Are you excited to see Father?” I said.
“How could I not be?” she answered. “Every day I thank God to have been wed by a man like he. How I yearn for his smile! I see it in the glow of the paving stones every morn.” She waved her hand about—at the veined floors and the long mirrors mounted in ornate frames, their carvings telling tales of lands she would never see. They reflected the floor, and the floor reflected them, foggy in each other. “He gave us all of this, the roof over us, and the land that warms our soles! That is the utmost love one can show, and how lucky we are to receive it.”
And I suppose that is why Jasper ran away, I thought, but did not say.
It was not long: John Mercer appeared as he always did, a vision of gleaming brass and clattering wheels. But this time, there was no fanfare of steam. He soared up the boulevard in a carriage pulled by light, adorned by leaves of glass and not a horse nor chimney in sight.
“I am home, my love!” he declared with a flourish that was heard before it was seen, the maids parting the doors to invite the pink sky inside. The golden man swept into the hall like a summer wind and scooped my mother into a kiss, and she tittered and swooned. Even as he strode out of the embrace and into the hall in search of supper, Catherine Mercer wandered after, wanting only to see the shadow of his back.
Among the cohort at my school, it took no mean feat to be well-regarded. With this illustrious brood, friendship always lived at close quarters with jealousy. But I excelled in what I could: I was a student of the arts, physics, astronomy and French, and enrolled in the choir. I toiled to be loved, for I feared nothing more than hatred. And I must have succeeded: if any rivalry brewed against me, I never heard of it.
I had discovered in childhood my sorcerous control over light, though it was not something I would make known to my classmates, God-fearing as they were. But it did not need to be made known: I chose to perform my conjurings when I could pass them off as real. Tricks of the light could fool my friends into believing they had seen preposterous things, and here and there I stole a glance at the teachers’ reports.
On one occasion, I did so on a grudge—a Robert Hanlon had spread a story about my sordid relations, so I ruined his experiments and sent him home with a failing grade in Physics.
But aside from Hanlon, I had all one could wish to have, for my father had made it so. He was a man of such vision his body could barely contain it, always chasing a certainty that he could improve any life by his deeds and financing. So my youth was a phantasmagoria of dreaming, wanting, and receiving, though I never quite whetted my hopes to knife-point like he did.
*
Perhaps it was one of these things, or all of them, that began to change Lucy's affections. As the months flew on, I saw the first flecks of jealousy blooming through her adoration. She started to seek me at the school gate each afternoon to walk me home, unannounced and unyielding. The first time, I learned of it from my classmates, when they whispered about a woman at the foyer asking after me.
She was rosy with joy every time she met my eye, and eager and outspoken about her adoration. But once she showed her face at school, my classmates began calling her names I cannot repeat. As I listened to their crass utterances, I felt a kind of withering in me—a sorrow that had been there all my life.
“My love,” I finally said one evening, as we met for our promenade, “must you walk me home from school every day?”
Lucy was silent a minute while we passed wrought fences and summer trees. Then she said, “Why should I not? I love you too much to be parted from you for so long.”
“My friends are spreading rumours about you and I, and I find it…vexing.”
There was a flame in her bright blue eyes that I chose then not to heed. “Why should you be ashamed that they know of our union?”
I acceded, as I do, to Lucy's force—for it was what I loved in her, and I did love her, I was sure of it in my foolish young mind.
Supper was, like every supper, seasoned with a tale of my father’s escapades. Watched by the wall reliefs of angels in the banquet hall, he waxed lyrical about the Project he had returned for—this grand and wondrous new machine that would put all of France's efforts to shame.
He had whiled some weeks in Oxford with the President of the Travel Society, and written a grant to the bright minds who had convinced him that their machine would usher in the future. “A flying craft, L'Avion? Pah! If our head physicist is to be believed,” he declared over the roast, “then this marvellous contraption could transport the passenger thousands of miles in the time it would take to sign a letter! The Tunnel and Cage, they call it—it shall change transatlantic travel for good.”
“And will it be powered by the sun?” asked Mother.
“Of course! Sunlight, sunlight was always the answer. The engine that powers our world. We would accumulate its power in a stack, and then discharge it all at once. A suncatcher larger than the Big Ben, all glittering glass! It could repeat its feat ad infinitum. We are in talks with the County Council to begin constructing such a tower, the Society President and I—one grander than any you have ever seen. It is but a matter of time before our dream is realised. It must be done!”
As he spoke, my father's eyes lit up with madness. He was in love, and all of us knew it, though it was never said. My mother beamed and nodded, as she always had, dazzled and believing.
I hungered to comprehend every word, every excruciating detail of my father’s pursuits. While my mother attended to his whims for the rest of his stay, I whiled hours away in his library, toiling through a tower of books on space tunnelling. I lost myself in their pages, reliving a century of science, till I knew where the frontiers lay.
I could not claim to understand all of it, but it seemed my father’s project sought to achieve what had long been thought beyond the reach of mankind—a machine that demanded the horsepower of ten thousand steam cars, discharged in seconds. With the work of the sun and an immense series of electrical accumulators, such volumes of power could be amassed and fired at once. Mere seconds of blinding electricity, weeks of sunlight burning in a blink, and one would soar to the ends of the earth.
Three mornings we breakfasted together. Three evenings I spent in the company of those books. As the third night fell upon the library, I heard the wheels of the sun car churn gravel outside—and so my father was to leave again, this time for America—but he had left behind a curiosity that would thread itself through my days.
As the world changed, so did our hearts. With uncertainty came fear, and with fear came vigilance. It did not take long for Lucille's passions to tip in favour of that bottomless terror, as the withering days of Autumn fluttered by. I clearly perceived for the first time how she had changed when she handed me a locket of her hair.
She had watched me two days before, staring in wonder at the dancer busking on the market square. Red-haired and sharp-eyed, perhaps my eyes had rested on that woman’s too long, though she had clearly been of an age beyond either of us.
“Do you take me for a fool?” Lucy had cried that evening. “I saw you staring, I saw you!”
So today she brought a golden chain, one to keep me with. We walked together upon the manor grounds hand in hand, I with her locket on my neck.
Something about it sat strange, burning my skin. It was dawning on me that I knew not where we stood. What was infidelity? If our partnership had been made so cursorily—no word exchanged between our parents, no estate to lend it heft—then did it take something equally cursory to defile it?
But she had me under her thumb, and how I would bend to remain hers.
We wandered up the boulevard, my hand in her talon grip, my rabbit heart thumping. She wanted anchorage, some true solid ground to affix our souls to. Perhaps I should have, too. And only houses and oaths could be so sturdy, though the world had agreed to leave such promises behind.
The next time my father returned to London, it was to inaugurate the sun tower. This was the project he had dreamt up last Summer with Sarah Hughes, the very President of the Travel Society, which had furnished its connections to seeing it through. For months I had watched it grow over the rooftops, like a strange flower reflecting sunlight onto the streets of Hampstead.
“A glorious day, a glorious day for John,” my mother sighed as we boarded the chauffeur’s car. “He really did it. He said he would, and he did.”
We detoured to Bromley for Lucille, for I had thought this a good occasion to share with her. When we found her, she was gorgeous as a dream, silky golden tresses flowing in loose waves even as she frowned at the itinerary of the day. Together we milled among the crowd, awaiting the grand opening of my father's crowning achievement as it loomed over us all in its paradise hues.
Beneath its penumbra, John Mercer declared its opening with a flourishing wave on the rostrum. He shook hands vigorously with Sarah, who was as radiant as the tower, dressed in gold silk with her dark hair cut in a modern bob.
Lucy frowned. “Why are we here?”
“To witness a happy day,” I answered, waving a hand at my old man.
“He looks like you, but stouter. How come I am only seeing him now?” Her voice drowned his out.
“He's a terribly busy man,” I replied.
“Well, I would much rather be alone with you. We should have stolen the chance, your mother and father would not be home to see us—”
I felt pressure against my shoulder as Lucille began to lean towards me, lips puckered for a kiss. But it was when her hand crept down my leg that I became aware of too many things at once: of the eyes of my mother, and of strangers besides, and the creeping shame that I had nursed all my life.
I jolted away in a panic. She cried my name, but I could not look. I sprang from my seat, dashed through the crowd, and disappeared into thin air. That is what I appeared to do, to all who were watching. Lucille could not find me, and when she screamed my name, the president of the society fell silent.
I fled down the streets of Hampstead, wandering by the houses and inns and shops till my heart had ceased to race. Only then did the guilt rear up, clawing through me like a dragon from its egg.
It was only half an hour later, when the shudders had deserted me, that I slunk back to the square. By then, the function was over and the crowds were scattering into conversation. And my Lucille awaited me under a banner, glowering like a storm cloud.
She took me to a small green on Southend Road, wordless until we stood face to face in the shadow of a tree. Then she slapped me.
“How could you?” she growled. She pulled her hand back, and I could not so much as recoil as she slapped me again. “How dare you treat me as dirt?”
“I'm sorry, Lucy, I was afraid to be seen—”
“Why? Why should you be ashamed of your soon-betrothed?”
I could not find the words to answer, for now it became achingly plain, plain as the stinging of my cheek, that we were two pieces irreconcilably misaligned.
“Are we soon to be betrothed? I did not think we were quite that close.”
She pummelled me on the same cheek. Sparks flew. I tasted blood, and I knew it had left a mark. Wailing like a hound, she cried, “Then what are we?”
It drizzled as I called a cab home, for the family chauffeur had long left by the time I had gathered myself. Before I stepped through the door, I saw myself in a window, the bruise stark and blotchy. Before I entered, I lifted my hands and conjured, out of light, a covering for the wound.
Even without seeing the injury, my mother fussed over me like a hen who had lost a chick. “Felix, dearest, wherever have you been?” she sang like a lady from a nursery rhyme. “I feared you had gone the same way as Jasper…your father is dining with the Society tonight.”
I wore my mask to supper. Without Father, Mother was reticent and paltry in her offerings of conversation. She spoke of her most recent project: a novel, like any number of other novels she had begun and never finished, a tale of a rugged young street urchin. She barely acknowledged Mata when the maid came to take our dishes; I had never heard her speak the woman's name.
We conversed over dessert cakes, Mother and I, of the odd world we lived in, of the lobbyists seeking to bring coal back into vogue. Then she retired, leaving a perfect silence in her wake.
I sat with the quietude and stared at my empty plate for several minutes, until Mata wandered over again.
“I take it for you?” she said, timidly. I offered her my empty crockery.
“Mata,” I murmured then. “Do you have a family?”
She paused and blinked, seemingly startled, as she always was. Perhaps I was a fool for thinking every person had a story I wanted to know. “Yes, I have a son. Five years old. He talks a lot, like you.”
I chuckled at that, but as I met her mournful eye, the sorrow I'd come to know well roared in me again. “Thank you.”
She nodded mutely, and with a gentle smile, took my plate to the scullery with her.
I followed my mother’s lead and returned to my bedroom early for the night.
Lying on the silks, I tossed and turned like a stormy sea, the ache of my cheek igniting in perfect clarity the vision of Lucille’s rage—creasing her brow, moving her hand.
I burned with fear, for though I was infatuated, I saw that our joy had grown thorns. If I told her we were to part ways, she could not take well to it, but if I remained her partner, I could only see our misery compounding. And to marry—that was an idea that I could not stomach, though I could not say why.
So spun my thoughts, round and round, like a dog chasing its tail, until the lamps went out and the sliver under my door went dark.
Then, I finally crawled from my bed and opened my door. In the dark, I wandered down the hall. It was the forbidden part of the night, the one I had never been allowed to see as a child, on pain of punishment.
Everything was strange and blue in that light: the ornate drawers and vases, the antique masks on the walls, rendered ghost-like by the moon. I passed the dining hall, the empty chairs a spectral invitation. I halted at the top of the stairs.
I was not alone. In the stairwell, I heard voices whispering in the antechamber below. Heart booming, yet morbidly curious, I crept down the stairs, the carpet deadening my footsteps.
At the third lowest step, I glimpsed the silhouette of someone in the far corner, outlined against a window faintly reflected off a mirror. I sharpened the light to clarity in my eye, and saw a haircut I knew. But I did not fully understand, till I heard the voice.
“...but it is the forbidden fruit that tastes sweetest, no?” Sarah Hughes.
My father’s voice answered in a gravelly tone—his was the silhouette I saw next, tall and stocky and grasping the woman by the waist. They leaned together, and then they began to kiss.
I choked back a cry, ready to turn and fly. But instead I watched, breath shortening, as they leapt out of the kiss and turned to me.
“Felix?” said John flatly.
And then Sarah gasped, and stumbled backward, away from him, and flew to the door, disappearing like a moth into the night.
We stood for an endless minute, staring across the room at each other.
I had long adored my father, in the same way one does a hero—following his exploits, his daring, and his folly, wanting his victory through it all.
I had hoped to grow into him—to be his equal in all things. Where he had bought trade bonds, I had asked him to spare me the funds to do the same. Where he had begun travelling for work, I too had sought to travel, although never as far afield as he did.
Some of that adoration held me captive now, even as it splintered around me.
John Mercer strode steadily across the hall. In the dark, his blond hair glistened. I recoiled, but now he was close enough that I could smell the wine. He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Felix. My only son. You must say nothing of this.”
I saw, now, that in this secret, I towered over him.
“It would ruin the Project and the Society,” he went on. “It would ruin all that we have built. It would ruin me. And it would ruin you, too.”
“This isn't fair to Mother.”
He clenched a fist, and I remembered the sting of hands on my face all too well. “What she doesn't know cannot hurt her.”
I clenched my jaw and trembled as I thought upon it all—his name, his house, his reputation, and Mother. I had seen the trouble on her face at dinner, and some part of her must have known. But if she ever found out, I knew she would stay—here, in this house without compare.
I knew, for I would have done the same.
“Then I shan't speak,” I answered, “but only to save Mother the sorrow.”
“Good boy,” he answered, and I felt my heart war with itself. “You were raised well. Don't let your curiosity spoil it.”
That, I recall, was the first night in my life that I did not sleep a minute. I lay and stared out my window and its gilded frames, at the light gleaming off my dresser and felt, all at once, that it was all thinner than paper.
In the next room, my mother dozed soundly. I heard no whispering when my father shuffled up the hallway and opened their door.
The next day, I called upon Lucille in the midst of a gentle drizzle. It was a modest townhouse, her father's—two stories, grey rain-weathered shingles, crammed between two similar ones. Out of the rain, under the eaves of the doorway, I stood and waited.
The door clicked open. From within emerged Lucy, like a butterfly from silk, in a light lace gown—beautiful and alone. She met my eye with a face of terrified joy.
“My love,” she said.
“Lucy,” I replied. She must have seen the leaden weight in my eyes, for her face grew cold.
“Why are you here?”
I swallowed. We looked each other in the eye: the dying bird, the tattered husk. “I have loved you dearly, Lucy, but this cannot sustain. I am no longer willing. We must part ways.”
It took her a minute of silence, and then three minutes of screaming, weeping and clawing at her skin, to finally speak again.
“I knew—I knew you never meant to stay! I saw it in your eyes that you longed to be elsewhere, that you would rather be rid of me! But I cannot call you evil for it. You are like all men. They will all leave, they will, if they are not bound!”
And though I knew I had no cause to rue my choice, to think her accusation any more than heartbroken raving, I heard her words with full clarity today.
Of course she had always suspected me. Of course she’d had to cling. I could have been my father.
But now, I took a step backward, and she did not pursue, like I had thought she would. We weren't promised to each other, and so there was no thread that ran between us, and she simply let me go—back into the summer morning, into the summer rain.
To let our hearts decide the trajectories of our lives—that is dangerous, and wondrous, and foolish. But this was the dawn of discovery, the sunset of silence, and I seem to have a penchant for it—this sentimentality, this love for poetry.
So when the Tunnel Machine, the lovechild of my father and the President of the Travel Society, was opened for its inaugural passenger, I was the one who bought the ticket. They were all there—my father, my mother, the president, when their mysterious correspondent stepped up to the podium and beamed, like a magician before his act.
The public attendees all thought it a trick of my father's—to demonstrate his confidence in this invention by offering his son as its first subject. He could not so much as frown as they led me inside that tank of metal. Somehow, he knew, and I knew too, that I was about to be torn away from him, just like my brother had been.
*
It only took ten seconds, as they had said it would. It is the strangest thing, being torn from the fabric of the universe. I heard all the sounds from beyond the chamber vanish from knowing, and all at once, I began to miss him—the great man, the terrible man, the man who had given me all I had.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
City of Smoke and Mirrors - Overture
The room is silent, save for the whispered story that Felix is unfolding. As Adelaide follows its twists and turns, she feels as if some fog were clearing, which once obscured his person from view.
“I am one of the luckiest people alive,” he says. “And yet there were times I wished to trade my life for something…else.” He meets her eye again, then laughs, pressing his fingertips to his forehead. “I cannot believe I just told you all of that. I'm sorry.”
Whether because his story has made him easier to read, or because he has given up pretenses, she can suddenly see the chagrin in his eyes. “Don't be sorry about that. I wanted to hear it, and I'm glad you told me.” She’s vaguely aware of Lea dozing on her bed in the dark, swaddled in blankets, the phone beaming soundless images to her closed eyelids. “But if that’s what your family is like, then…why do you miss it?”
“That’s a mystery to me, too. The being there, perhaps. Or the knowledge of the terror I must have caused in my wake. I underestimated it, I truly did.”
His gaze is dim with trouble, and Adelaide feels as if she must do something. “Um…do you want a hug?” she murmurs, lowering her gaze as soon as the words have left her.
“Oh? I…wouldn’t mind, I suppose.”
Adelaide spares a second to be surprised, then leans over and wraps both arms tightly around him.
He exhales, shoulders sinking. “Er, I’m sorry I’ve been such a stickler for arbitrary rules of propriety,” he murmurs. “And for reacting so poorly to your kind gestures. I was the one who knew too little about the social conventions of this place.”
“It’s fine. I know there were a lot of rules where you're from.” She finally slackens her arms and lets him go, wringing her hands together.
He nods. “Indeed. All this embracing would never do there, not unless we were, well…”
“Banging?” she offers.
“What?” he answers, the brief confusion lingering on his face, until his eyes widen. She watches his face flush before he covers his discomposure with a laugh. “That’s not what I meant to say…but you’re not wrong—hah!”
Her vision sways; a familiar feverish haziness is blooming through her thoughts, brightening when he mutters her name with a sigh. It is sweeter this time, and she floats in it for a while, before admonishing herself.
For four days, Felix leaves the apartment in the early morning, before anyone else has woken. Then Lea does, the clatter of cutlery in the kitchen waking Adelaide. She departs for work with a hasty goodbye and an explanation of the fridge’s contents.
Adelaide does not leave—it suits her to be safe from eyes. She likes feeling the walls press in, just a little. She opens the windows to hear the birds. The scent of smoke and cooking wafts from next door. When she can, she sits with her PalmNote in Lea’s bed, and takes voice notes.
Japantown feels like a different place at night. I’ve smelled more new things in the past week than I have in the decade before, and I’m so happy we’re here, but I also know we need to go soon.
Even from Lea's window, I see more of the world in a day than I did in a year from my books.
The truth is that I do not enjoy pretending to be someone else just to stay alive. I don’t feel like a real person, like Felix and Lea are. What does the world want of me? Who does it want me to be?
Felix returns first. Once he’s home, Adelaide lays aside her preoccupations, be that her phone or one of Lea’s books. There is not much conversation between them, but he doesn't seem to mind. She knows he’s on some kind of mission, but he says little about where he’s going, or why, and again she finds her view of him clouded by doubt.
Then when Lea gets home, she brings dinner for three with her. Over food, they talk of mundane things, like the latest in tech news or the trials and tribulations of baristaing at Kiana’s Place. As they discuss her work over the offerings of each day—sandwiches, bento, café leftovers—Adelaide sees the world through her friend’s words, and imagines herself there at Lea's cafe, warm and watching the world fly by. But that is not the life she will live.
For these several days, Felix finds his thoughts too crowded for him to be more than shallowly present in the apartment. His mind is elsewhere. His greetings are brief, and he lies awake while his companions slumber.
But when the trio dine together on the fifth evening, all the possibilities have finally begun to narrow in on one—a single picture of the surest path forward.
“I swear, some customers think they’re royalty!” Lea mutters from the edge of her bed as they dig into their takeaway boxes. “Like I get it if it’s because I messed up an order. But sometimes they’ll take one sip and be all like, ‘this isn’t what I asked for,’ and then I've gotta remake their order and be chill about it. Like, excuse you, sir? You ordered a pumpkin spice latte with oat milk and double whipped cream?”
“What is pumpkin spice?” Felix asks, battling in vain to keep a noodle on a fork. “Surely you're not putting pumpkin in coffee?”
“No pumpkin in pumpkin spice, thank God,” she says. “It’s like this mix of cinnamon and nutmeg. Y’know, pumpkin pie vibes…without the pumpkin…” She stares pensively at the door. “So anyway, how much longer are you two staying?”
“Not long. We may need to depart soon. Your hospitality here has been much appreciated.”
“When?” Adelaide straightens.
“Perhaps tomorrow.”
“Really?”
“Oh, that’s good timing then,” Lea says, “‘Cause I’ve got news, too. The landlady’s coming over for an inspection the day after tomorrow.”
“Well, then, we shan't be here when she visits,” Felix replies.
“If that’s okay?”
“It suits me, too.”
Lea sighs. “One more day here, huh,” she murmurs. “Where are you off to next?”
“Hong Kong.”
“Hong Kong?” Adelaide turns to Felix. His heart aches at the shock plainly written on her face.
“Addie. I’ll explain in a minute.”
Lea’s face shifts between three different emotions. “Hey, Hong Kong sounds like a good idea, if you have a way to get there. It’s been hella nice having you here,” she says. “But if you ever come back…I’m always happy to have you again. Remember that, okay?”
“Of course,” Adelaide replies, attempting at a smile. “I’m so glad we got to talk again.”
Silence settles upon the room, which has grown homely in his heart. He points out a white tube with black joints peeking halfway out from under Lea’s bed. “Is that an astronomer’s telescope?”
“Oh, that!” Lea’s expression shifts at once. Abandoning her food, she bows to nudge the instrument out, and then its stand. “One of the best I have, this is a Dobson six inch… Hey, I can set it up here for you to try!” She is already piecing the stand together, screwing the telescoping beams in place.
“You stargaze from inside here?” Adelaide says.
“With the window open, but yeah, I don't always want to be out on the lawn. The light pollution makes it all the same anyway.”
Lea flops onto her bed and fiddles with the panel buttons. The room lights wink out in a cascade, and the panes of her window begin to grumble aside. The sky is already flushing deep purple as Lea fastens the telescope with her eyes on a gyroscopic star chart in her phone.
“Oh, look at that. We can see Jupiter from my window. And Neptune, too.” She presses one eye to the scope and twists the focus knobs. “There it is! Lookie here, my beautiful gas giant.”
While Adelaide and Lea take turns at the scope, Felix ponders it quietly. In his city, telescopes are jealously guarded, the exclusive property of scholars and universities.
“Did it cost much?” he asks.
“Kinda. I had to save for it—just cooked all my meals for a few weeks instead of getting takeout.” She laughs to herself, and he thinks, how fortunate of a world.
“May I?” He inches up beside the two. Adelaide vacates the spot, and he takes her place.
When Felix peers through the lens, he sees a disc of golden light, while Lea explains it—the conjunction of Neptune and Jupiter, and how he may notice some of the Galilean moons if he looks closely.
“Galilean? From Galileo?”
“Yeah, the guy who named them.”
“He was the first to name these moons in my world, too.”
“World? You an alien or something?”
“A universe hopper, actually.”
“Wait. Really?”
“Oh, I neglected to mention that, didn’t I? Just like I haven’t mentioned how I can manipulate light at will.”
Lea doesn’t respond. When he straightens up from the telescope, she’s gaping at him. Adelaide scurries away with alarming speed.
“Where do you come from?” she breathes.
Felix beams and shrugs. “I’m stranded, you could say, in the wrong world. Mine is similar to yours in some ways, and utterly different in others. It was the year 1894, the last I saw of it.”
“Oh. My. God. You can’t be saying you’re literally from the Victorian era.”
“Ah, yes—Queen Victoria, she is the current reigning monarch.”
Lea continues to glance between Felix and Adelaide, eyes growing rounder each time. “So…this is the secret you've been keeping this whole time? You both…have superpowers?”
“Well, I wouldn't think it wise to discuss it with abandon.”
“Okay, fair point.” She’s taken the spot by the telescope again. “So…the masks you put on Adelaide…the sneaking around the lab…the fact no one knows you’re part of all this…that’s all because you have light powers?”
“I make the most of them, if I do say so myself.”
“That is…that’s actually cool as hell,” she mutters. “If it’s true, I mean.”
“Shall I prove it?”
Lea turns to study him, then pats the barrel of her telescope. “Sure…can you make Neptune's rings visible for me?”
His eyebrows rise. “Oh—I can certainly try. How; should I brighten your view?”
She puts her left eye to the scope again, closing the other. “Yeah, and magnify it.”
“How far away is it?”
“Almost three billion miles.”
Felix places a hand on the plastic barrel, and pictures it. The stream of light resolving, from this planet floating out in the cosmos, farther than anything he could ever imagine. Farther than my home, perhaps.
Lea twists the focus knobs, back and forth in decreasing motions, and then…
“What the hell?” she breathes.
He looks up. “Do you see it?”
She pauses. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s massive. This is the clearest I've ever seen it. Rings, check. Triton, check. Dark spot, check. No way. How is this…oh my God.”
She doesn't stop fiddling with her telescope for a while, and he holds the light in its pattern, sighing.
In the waning hours of the evening, Adelaide halts Felix at the kitchenette chairs, her face still, all her thoughts flurrying.
“So, we’re definitely going to Hong Kong?” she says.
“Yes. But I shall not remain there for long. Not necessarily. The future is hazy, even to me.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
His eyes dart about, from her face, to Lea, and to his hands. “You might remember how I spoke of my search for a Tunnel Machine. Well, I’ve found a lead. There may be such a project in the works—a wormhole portal, they call it—in the very laboratory where you were imprisoned.”
Adelaide’s breath catches in her throat.
“However…one problem has hindered its completion. It requires a part—a capacitor of some kind—that would allow it to amass the power to tunnel between worlds. Such a part has been crafted in a laboratory in Hong Kong, where there is an embargo on trade with this country.”
How easily such secrets come to him, she thinks. If he were of this world, surely they would want him in the corporate offices, doing their dirty work. “And if they did complete the machine…if you brought the part back here…you could go home?”
Felix nods. “Perhaps. I think it would be within my abilities—to retrieve that part, to return it here, and to affix it to the machine,” he replies. “There are many caveats to this plan, but it could well be my ticket back.”
A chasm of despair opens in her, and she feels as if she were falling, falling, away from all she knows. “But what will I do when you go?” the words tear themselves from her.
At this, Felix’s gaze softens with—concern? Sorrow? “Well, that depends on you,” he replies. “You could start a new life in Hong Kong, away from this nation’s jurisdiction. Or, you could come with me, back to my world.”
Hearing the choice laid out, Adelaide chokes with the agony of being torn in two. She doesn’t understand why it should be so hard, to give up one or another.
But either way—no matter what she chooses—she must let this go. Her bond with this city, with Lea and her childhood and the streets of San Francisco. The burning air. The glittering screens. All of it must be severed.
But which blade will hurt less?
“I…I’m…I don’t know.” Her eyes are wild, resting on nothing for more than a second. Tears splash down her cheeks. “I don’t know! What should I do?”
“Addie, it’s a terrible lot to be saddled with,” Felix replies, eyes mirroring her distress back, in his own muted way. “But I want you to choose for yourself, for it is your life that will change for good. And whichever you prefer, I also prefer. We may discuss it anytime—between now and when the part is procured, if ever.” He laughs bitterly. “Perhaps I shall never find that capacitor, or never bring it back here. It’s all a grand gamble, in the end.”
She bows her head, wondering at how he can live with such unknowns. “You’re the only person who could win a gamble like that,” she replies.
Adelaide is lost in her dreams. The sky is indistinct—grey or blue—and all about her tower skyscrapers she doesn’t recognise. Her head turns about as she flies through the streets, left and right. Her face is reflected back to her from a thousand glass panes, and it is different in each one—different mouths, different eyes, all expressionless, even when she screams.
She keeps feeling like something—or someone—is brushing past her shoulder. But when she turns to look, she sees no one there.
She races up the street and the street grows longer. There are shopfronts here with no names, no people, glass doors open to reveal empty counters inside. Paper blows across the street. Solar panels sprout out like rectangular flowers from the walls.
“Where am I?” she wails as she stumbles. She spins about, in search of that shadow. “Someone! Please—where am I meant to go?”
Adelaide rolls off Lea’s bed, and awakens mid-fall.
The world spins as she lands with a thud. By then, she’s still gasping for breath, her body still burning from her dreams. Nothing resolves from the shadows, and for a while the vision of skyscrapers and reflections crowds the darkness out, so she is no longer sure where she is.
She draws a shaky breath, and blows it out. Her thoughts settle. She inhales again, steadier this time. She tries moving her limbs, and feels pins and needles ripple along her arm.
Flexing her fingers, she reaches for the floor to prop herself up—and grasps an arm.
With a gasp, Felix’s eyes fly open before her. Adelaide yelps, tears spilling out of her eyes.
“Addie,” he whispers. A gentle glow fills the space briefly, just long enough for her to see the worry in his eyes, then it winks out again. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I fell off the bed. I was having nightmares.” By the end of the sentence, she’s wracked with sobs. “I’m scared. About the future—and everything.”
“There, there,” he answers, patting her arm. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I hate to see you so upset, and I apologize for my part in it. Can I do anything to ease your mind?”
Of all the things that could enter her thoughts at that moment, the first is that they are lying in the same bed.
The guilt sweeps over her like a flame, moreso because she finds this not to be unpleasant.
“Um… Can I stay here?” she asks haltingly. “Just until I feel better?”
He blinks at her. She braces herself for a reprimand.
But he only says, “Well—if it’ll help.”
The mattress is not a large one, not made for two people. Adelaide has been lying halfway off its edge, the surface shifting with her off-centre weight. She shuffles inwards, inch by inch, until she fits atop the velvety mattress, pressing up against her companion.
“Is this all right?” he asks, and she can hear pitches in his voice that only touch transmits. Every tiny movement lights flares in her mind. For now, his presence crowds out the dread of tomorrow.
“Yeah…this is good, thank you.” She’s burning up again, but not from her dreams this time. “I’ll go back in a minute…I promise.”
:::
Lea is off work, so she has all the time in the world for goodbyes. “You take care, okay?” she says to Adelaide, squeezing her in her arms. “Be nice to yourself. You’re so strong, but it’s hard being strong all the time.”
“I don’t feel strong.” She tries for a smile, but it’s not enough to warm away the cold of the impending parting.
“And you,” says Lea to Felix, walking past him to call the elevator. “I didn’t trust you at first, but now I think you’re okay.”
“Why, thank you,” he answers.
“For real, it’s been nice getting to know you. Even if it was so short. I don’t know what your next plans are…but stay safe, okay? Both of you?”
“Yeah—we will, I promise,” Adelaide replies, knowing full well there is no way to keep promises like that.
The lift doors slide open, welcoming them to the other side with its perfume of steel and concrete. Felix boards first, and then Adelaide after him.
By virtue of serving ninety units, the elevator keeps strict time on its stops. It is almost too soon when they hear the hydraulics hiss and the doors start groaning shut.
“Wait, one more thing—” Lea cries out through the narrowing gap— “if you survive, come back and see me! Even just one more time—okay?”
“We’ll try!” is the last thing Lea hears, as the doors thud shut, and her friends disappear once more from her knowing, like stars passing behind a deep space object.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
The Recruits - Side I
On Liss and Lacar's strength combined, the painted rowboat, severed from its ship and now its own vessel, shot through the cloudy blue between one patrol boat and the next. Within fifteen minutes, they had pummelled past the patrol route, and the forest had shrunk to a green carpet in the distance.
The boat was painted to be visible from afar, so even then, Liss rowed despite the burning of her arms, shoulders heaving with panting.
“So you’re a smuggler,” her attempts at conversation were not potent. “Was business good?”
“It was worth the price it fetched,” Lacar answered between wheezing, “if only to feed my family.”
“Family. Where are they?”
“We'll talk about that later.”
Panic wound through every second, spurring every thought in a singular direction: the triplet of islands on their bow. At its speed, the rowboat sliced waves like a larger vessel. Liss’ vision flashed with pain, yet still she hammered at the oars.
Over her shoulder, the hills grew and grew into visibility, distant salvation at the end of this wet, burning purgatory.
“We’ll make it,” said Lacar between gasps, long before they had reached the island shores. “We’ll make it, we can slow.”
Liss did not ease up for minutes more; she worked down from the pace she had set, feeling the burn set in in earnest now that she was not too numb to feel it. As they caught their breaths, sensations rose back into awareness: the sweat rolling down her neck, the rustle of the leaves that leaned over the atoll.
“Round that way,” Lacar croaked as the rowboat slowed, pointing to starboard. They switched to one oar and then back to two, tracing the ivory arc of the coastline.
The far coast of the island gazed out into the open sea, the expanse greying to the edges. The pale glow of the sun hung higher in the sky, bleeding into the clouds. From the trees, there peered a large rocky inlet, opening into the heart of the atoll. Lacar pointed them through it.
As they passed under the overhang of leaves and into the embrace of the ring-shaped island, Liss finally let her arms slacken. Lacar did too, drawing a huge breath and releasing it in a groan. The boat floated onward into the sheltered circle, jungle trees towering on every side like a fortress, from which trills of birds echoed.
“Where is the den?” Noma whispered.
“Can’t be seen from here,” Lacar answered, then pointed at a rocky cliff to starboard. They now picked their way towards it, across the placid waves.
At the shore, they dragged the boat up the sand and tied its rope to a shrub. Into the shadow of criss-crossing canopies they tiptoed, down a vegetated slope, over bushes and roots of trees. Now the rumble of the waves had receded into obscurity, overtaken by the whisper of leaves.
“How did the authorities not see boats coming and going?” asked Liss.
“We operated at night, and only with single-handed vessels. There were strict rules on the comings and goings…everything rested on that. Its location was a well-guarded secret.”
They circumnavigated the hill, and the muffled roar of waves ascended again from ahead, though no sea peeked through the trees. Carved into the other side of the rise was a short cliff face. And nestled in the curve of the overhanging cliff, one end recessed into it, was a wooden storehouse, draped in vines and moss. Gaps striped the walls where old planks had caved in, but the structure itself stood tall. The door hung ajar, revealing dimness, as did two decrepit windows with their slats open.
Once it had risen into view, all three tracked a straight path through the rustling undergrowth. A bird fluttered off, its glossy green feathers rippling. Skinks scampered under the leaves.
“This is the storehouse?” Noma asked, voice dropping. “It's barely bigger than my parents’ hut…”
“This is only the front half,” Lacar answered.
It was about now, as they trudged through the thinning foliage to the doorway, that Liss began to feel an inkling that something was not right, although neither of her companions seemed to have the same intuition. She glanced about in the clearing. The place felt used, although she could not place why.
“What are you looking for?” Noma asked.
“Call me too vigilant…I don't think we're alone.”
“Can't be too vigilant,” Lacar answered, one hand shifting to his sash on his belt. Then he pushed the door open with a creak.
Sunlight streamed gently through the windows and illuminated the wooded floor, and a snaggle of vines that had ventured in. Out in the middle of the storehouse, more thin beams of light filtered through gaps left by fallen planks, illuminating shelves upon shelves, at least five rows on either side. Between them, they had line of sight to the inner wall, though no details pushed out of the dark. Metal gleamed on some of the shelves, and glazed ceramics on others.
In the wooden half, the ceiling was twice as high as the shelves, topped by a sloping roof. Then it became stone halfway in, and the ceiling descended, forming an alcove. At the other end, only dimly visible, lurked the faint shapes of tables and old barrels. The tables were empty, and chairs were tucked under them.
“I would have thought there might be some remains of the dead,” he murmured. “People preferring to hide here till death than to return to captivity. Lucky for us, we shan't dwell with their graves.” But these words only made Liss go tense, and she began to reach into her tunic pocket for a coin.
Lacar waved Liss and Noma inward. In the dim light, he wandered across the stone floor to the first of many metal scaffolds that held the place together. Tying a knot into his sash, he lit the first of several lamps in a hiss of gas. It burned golden and bright, and at once they could see the sparse rows of ceramic bottles on the shelves, in a variety of sizes and shapes. Lizards and spiders scampered away.
“I suppose oil doesn't spoil,” Liss heard him mutter, as he disappeared beyond a stack of shelves. Another hiss, then another, and each new light revealed more of this strange set: shelves of boxes, some of them misshapen, stepladders, a booth in the far right corner, where the floor and walls became stone, much like the one at the barter house on Henkor.
Henkor. What had become of the island since her deed? The only person she missed was Boka, the woman who had told the stories of old. Anger flared as she thought about her island and its forests and grave trees, then smouldered again.
“Liss,” whispered Noma, watching her with wide eyes. “Are you sure this is safe?”
“Noma,” Liss answered seriously. “We’re safe as long as I'm around.”
She seemed about to retort, but only glanced away. “Yeah, you're probably right. How are you feeling?”
The truth was that she would much rather be lying down than standing, but she considered the ways Noma might react if she knew her arms were still smarting with pain. So she said, “A little sore, but not much worse than whenever we went tree-climbing.”
“Do you need anything for it?”
“Atuis will help,” Lacar said, holding out a wooden string-tied box between them. Liss caught a cloying whiff of the herb. “I should probably not be offering it to children, but hey…”
“No, I'd much rather be alert,” Liss growled.
“More for me, then,” he said, already unravelling the twine.
*
It took a tenth of the day before Liss was finally convinced that they were not about to be ambushed. The comforts of this storehouse were meagre, but were more than she had enjoyed since they had left Henkor. By the lit fireplace in the stone alcove, she reclined in a misshapen hay sack and inhaled beef jerky, while Lacar’s atuis smoke diffused into the mustiness.
Liss flipped on the couch, taking care not to prop herself up on either arm.
Noma, who had been watching her with a frown, now said, “Liss. I can go forage for some herbs. It'll ease the aches.”
Had she made it so obvious? Noma is a trained physician, I can't hide that from her.
“I'll come with you,” she answered firmly. “Just in case. Not that you can't protect yourself, but two people will improve our chances.”
Noma blinked back, but eventually nodded. “I'd like your company.”
Leaned all the way back into his sack with the blunt between his teeth, Lacar lazily shifted. “Get me some.”
Together, the pair ventured into the forest outside, peering beyond the trunks. It was nothing but a tangle of vegetation, yet Noma seemed to read it like a book in a language Liss didn't know. Her friend glanced over her shoulder every now and then, as if to check if she was still following. Then she pushed on through the understory, following some invisible trail, until she slowed to a stop at a small mire that stank of sulphur.
“You're not about to scoop mud onto me, are you?” Liss laughed, but then Noma unravelled her leg wraps and plucked off her shoes. “Noma! I was joking.”
As Noma began to wade into the murky bog, Liss finally perceived the quarry of her search: a bundle of coin-shaped leaves, floating on the surface of the muck. She watched as her friend waded in to her shins, step by wide step, grimaced and leaned with fingers outstretched for the leaves, and then—
As she snatched the bundle, the splash of the viscous liquid gave way to a horrendous sucking as Noma toppled forward, shrieking, face first into the mud.
The sound spurred Liss, and before she even began to yell, she sprang for a vine and tossed it. It floated on the bog, the tip only just in Noma’s reach; she snatched it and wound a loop around her wrist while Liss began to drag her back to the bank. Noma gasped with fright as she toppled halfway onto the bank, trailing mud and dead leaves behind her, yet her left hand, grasping the bundle of leaves, she somehow kept above the surface.
“Noma, you scared me,” Liss muttered, grabbing her friend by the muddy shoulders and dragging her out of the mud’s grasp.
Noma did not speak for a minute. Her body heaved with her frightened panting, and Liss sat her down on a tree root, handing her shoes back. “Sorry,” she finally groaned. The girl began to wipe herself down with her hands. Liss, watching for a minute, finally wandered across the clearing till she found a shrub covered in a gauze of plant fibre, and returned with a handful.
Sitting amid the stench of sulphur, Liss began to wipe the boggy mud off Noma’s shins, upon which her friend halted in her own efforts. Liss worked away for a minute, until Noma gasped, “why are you doing that?”
Liss looked up. Noma's eyes were huge and cast down at her hands. “You just dove into a mire to get herbs for my sake. Why'd you do that? I could have recovered just fine with two nights’ rest.”
She returned to scrubbing mud off Noma, and the girl became very quiet, and looked away, seemingly unable to watch. “Why are you doing that?” she asked again. “You shouldn't be, you're not my servant!”
“Because I like you, and I am thankful for the effort you went to, is that a better answer?”
“No!” Noma cried, grabbing her cheeks with her hands and looking deeply ashamed. Liss chuckled. That was the end of her protests, and aside from a little indignant wiggling about, she let Liss assist her while she resumed scrubbing herself.
The pair returned to the storehouse after one detour in the wrong direction which took them to the inner coast. By then, Lacar had gathered up some old supplies in a pile, and was spinning a metallic object in his hand beneath the steady gold lamplight. He gave a lazy wave as they wandered in.
“Phew, where were you?”
“Noma went bog diving,” Liss said, watching as Noma picked out a mortar and pestle from below the counter and laid the herbs inside. “What's that you're holding?”
“A firestick, what else? Never seen one?” Lacar lifted the metal rod, and Liss saw that one end had a textured grip. “Imports from the northerly lands of Beghul, or so I was told.”
“You didn't say there were weapons here.”
“Why wouldn't there be weapons? We smuggled those, too.”
“You should have mentioned. We could use those.”
“You young ones think too much about violence. And you especially so, Liss.”
Noma wordlessly churned the leaves as they spoke.
It was ten minutes of effort on her part, then she tapped wine out of a barrel and mixed it in. Then she rejoined them before the fire, dipping her hand in the ceramic bowl. As Noma knelt beside Liss and began to smear the salve on her arms, she felt an odd sensation blossom on her skin: cooling, as if she had dipped her arm in water on a windy day.
Noma began to massage the paste in. As she did, Liss closed her eyes and sighed. “I don't know how you do these things. You knew those plants would do the trick, and then you found a bog in the middle of a forest. That amazes me.”
“Me? I’m—I—” Noma sputtered, then drew her mouth shut, continuing with the circular motions of salve application, albeit more erratically. Lacar chuckled.
The man did not enjoy the same special treatment. Noma simply left the mortar with the herb at his feet and said, “don't let the fire dry it out.”
“Alright, alright. I getcha.” He picked up the stone receptacle and dug a finger inside.
“How long do we plan on idling here?” Liss asked.
“You make the call on that,” he answered, looking up from the dollop of plant matter on his fingertip. “You're the one in a hurry.”
“Once we know what we intend to do,” she said, “we can move.”
“What's your goal?” Lacar muttered, lowering the mortar.
“To free the world of the Orsandin grip.”
“Well, tough luck, then. Their empire spans lands we do not even know the names of.”
“Madan is the biggest town here, no?”
“It is the Orsandin base of operations in Makor Kirikiri, yes.”
“Makor Kirikiri?” Noma murmured. “Is that what you call these islands?”
“‘s our name for the Greater Isles and Doganir combined, yes.”
“Then if we wrest back control of Madan, we take back our islands.”
“Only if they do not send more ships from their next base.”
“Where is that?”
“Malogo, a city on the other side of the Mouth of the World.”
“Then how do they send for help, if it's an ocean away?”
Lacar folded his arms, frowning. “You cannot be plotting to overthrow them.”
“Not alone. But with weapons, and more people…”
He shook his head. “I cannot tell if your bravado is greatness or folly. Well, Orsand sends a warden every moon to assess the state of its colony and report back—I reckon a moon is how long it takes to sail here and back. Meanwhile, we would have closer ships to worry about, too, not just the ones from Malogo. Orsand has at least fifty ships patrolling the archipelago.”
Liss chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Alright. What happens if the warden arrives and finds unrest?”
“Then they send a fresh fleet to take it back. Makor Kirikiri is where they farm aroca, they would not let it go without a fight.”
“I thought so.” Liss frowned, her brow knitting. Was there an answer? She could only explode coins and nails. There must be more she could do with it. She only had to learn…
“Would Madan answer if we call? Would they fight to be free?”
“If they have reason to… A leader of the cause, and some hope… We were proud warriors, long before Orsand…"
As she fell silent, the gentle chirp of insects rolled in through the far window, and she noticed the light glowing dim through the gaps in the walls. “I shall think upon it.”
“Well, don't think too hard. At least not before dinner.”
*
Lacar did the group the kindness of roasting their salted fish on the fire. They ate quietly as the light deserted the forest and the chill of the night seeped through the missing planks of the roof.
“What happens if it rains?” Noma muttered, peering up through the gaps.
“The wood shall continue to spoil,” Lacar answered, “and eventually this storehouse becomes a part of the forest again. All things return to the Being in the end.”
“Yeah…but what do we do? Wouldn't it get cold and damp in here?”
Lacar shrugged. “We could sleep around the hearth.”
Liss watched the other two mumble in conversation for a while, leaning back in her sack, while three years of tension, of living under the eye of Orsand, seeped out of her bones. This was a good troupe to be travelling with. Lacar had proven a worthy ally, despite her misgivings. And Noma was, well, Noma.
“So, your family…how are they doing?” said Noma.
A chuckle. “They're not ‘doing’ much these days.”
Noma was, in all her hapless compassion, everything Liss was not. Liss could destroy anything she pleased, could extinguish a life in a snap. But it was much easier to end lives than to save them. And you're so good at saving, you know.
She watched her friend meticulously undo the wraps on her wrists and shins, smiling to herself. Then her thoughts drifted again to Lacar's disclosures.
Orsand held the world in its iron grip. A world whose depths she, in her youth and with her insular childhood, knew nothing about. She had only ever waded in the shallows. But to end the reign of Orsand would require her to ply every last fathom, to dive deeper than even they.
Who could do that, short of a god? It was easy enough to boast about becoming a god, just as she had bragged to the kids about earning the right to princehood, all those hazy years ago. But this was not merely about jumping off the top of a waterfall. How did people become gods? Did the Being know? Does the Being exist?
If the Being exists, all-knowing and all-seeing, then how could it simply watch our world without intervening?
As they lay in their hay sacks that evening, waiting for sleep in the light of embers, Liss thought she heard an unusual rustle.
If it was a creature, it was too cautious. The sound ended at once, and did not recur.
She straightened, and Lacar’s eyes flew wide open, following hers.
In the dim glow, Liss signalled to Lacar with a hand over her lips, and he nodded back. She lay with eyes open, watching the doorway, one hand slipping into her pocket.
Something crept outside, silhouetted by the moonlight. Her muscles went rigid as the humanoid shape glided soundlessly to the door, and it clicked quietly open.
Liss’ hand wrapped around a rusty nail longer than her finger. She rose from her reclining posture. Her hand tightened.
“Che oni?”
At the first echo of that voice from the doorway, a few things happened at once. Liss sprang from her sack, hurling the nail up the corridor. Lacar struck a flame with his sash, throwing a ruddy light across everything. Noma screamed. The intruder bellowed in an incomprehensible tongue.
Then the nail stopped flying.
It hovered in the dark between them, motionless, unfalling. There was a ripple in the air around the doorway.
Liss lifted her hand and clenched a fist, and the screw began to explode, but not all at once. She watched, eyes widening, as it fragmented, slowly, pieces of shrapnel separating in slow motion from the blaze unfolding within.
The stranger stepped to a side, following the wall—and then the projectile left its brief suspension, completing its explosion with a boom that rocked the glass in the room.
The stranger flinched as shrapnel grazed them. “Che oni? Who is there?”
The last words, spoken in Orsandin, shook Liss out of her startlement. “Who are you? How did you do that?”
“I will speak if you swear not to explode more things in my face.”
“I can allow that.” No knot could do what this stranger had. No one had halted an explosion like that before. “Come forward.”
Silence hung over the storehouse as the stranger walked into their firelight. “I mean you no harm, my friends. I simply saw signs of newcomers and came to investigate. I am Korithamai, a priestess of the Undying Ring.”
As the light fell upon Korithamai, Liss saw that she was tall, dark and pale-haired, wearing rat-bitten robes. Her eyes were opalescent, stark against her dark skin.
“You've been raiding our stores,” Lacar muttered. “I thought a few things were missing.”
“Can you blame a woman for trying to survive?” Her eyes did not meet any of theirs.
“How long have you lived here?” Liss’ suspicion was thawing to curiosity.
“I was shipwrecked here three years ago, with the crew that hired me. We were fleeing the Orsand fleet—alas, it took entering a storm to achieve it. But the storm was the crew's demise.”
“Crew? They died during the voyage?” Liss had started to recognise the indistinctness of her gaze, never settling on anything important: she must be blind.
Kori shook her head. “We were forced to abandon ship, and we rowed here while she sank. Then a flock of bats found us one night—and, well, we all fell ill. Lucky I am that I only lost my sight. No one else survived. I have lived off the land since, and lit fires to ward off the bats. I suggest you do the same.”
Lacar mumbled, “Terribly sorry to hear it.”
“Do not be, we weren't friends. They were the only ones to answer my call for travel. I was travelling at the behest of my temple.”
“Temple. To what deity?” Liss interjected.
“The Being Xemself, if I must name one. But more than that, it is a temple to the Nomad, the messiah whose teachings we now safeguard against the ravages of time and thieves.”
Every word she spoke made Liss’ eyes widen further. By now, Noma had been fully shaken from her slumber. She rubbed her eyes and peered over.
“And why were you travelling?”
She spent a few seconds thinking. “I do not know the Orsand word for it. The temple has us travel the world every seven years, like our founder did. Alas, this journey was doomed. I shall have nothing to say to my superior when I return.”
“And your temple has not been captured?”
Kori shook her head. “We have a terse truce with them.”
“How do you know the Orsandin tongue, if your land was never captured?”
“I was a devotee to the largest, oldest library in the world and we always sought more priests. We learned the languages we could.”
“I’ve never heard of any such library.”
“I have,” Lacar replied, and both Liss and Noma glanced at him, but Kori did not. “Not much, but in old tales…they spoke of the temple of the ring. A relic, they called it…of the world before the cataclysm. Locked up there are secrets we can only imagine…perhaps secrets to do with the Being Xemself.”
“Yes, so we are taught,” Kori answered, and her voice took on a chanting tone. “But not all its secrets have been decoded yet. And yet more secrets are not held among its isles. We merely hold the keys to other doors…”
Liss found these words filling her mind with visions of wonder, in a way no tale had done since she had been seven. She stared as they talked of this old, peerless library, last of its time, and its priests who could alter the flow of time, the warp of space—whose power and importance was so known and so abstruse that even Orsand respected it…
“I know they shall return to us eventually, when their conquest has stalled,” said Kori. “But only because they hope to wield our knowledge as military might.”
“Could it be used that way?” asked Liss. She sat attentively and watched the priestess’ face tauten.
“Oh, that is a dangerous question, young woman, but there is one thing to know about knowledge…it can be put to use to any end. Your spellfolding arts were not discovered as a tool of conquest, and yet Orsand refashioned them for it. Decoded, our archives could teach you what spellfolding is…how it is that folded cloth invokes power, and how that power could be bent in other ways…and that knowledge has protectors, because the wrong knower could use it to terrible ends.”
She perked up. “Then it could tell me why I can make things burn and explode at will.”
Kori was silent. Now Liss became aware of the changed demeanour of her companions: Lacar’s fear, Noma’s cautious fascination. Then the priest said, “That was at your will? Without a spell?”
“It was.”
She deliberated for some seconds. “I have rarely heard of such a thing. Power that is not invoked… I cannot tell you for sure, but the temple may be the only place where your answers can be found.”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
The Recruits - Side II
Content warning (may contain spoilers)
This chapter contains depictions of emotional manipulation.
The wind roared by, bearing the sweetness of rain. Beneath the rumbling sky, Liss pulled Pala and Fen back behind the treeline while she watched the Orsandin camp rustle on the plains.
Her heart boomed at the alien colours of the landscape, the trees whose leaves grew in curling fronds. All at once, lands she could scarcely imagine were within her reach…
Fingers tightening around Pala’s wrist, she reined her voice in and said, “Now, do that again.”
“I don't know how I did that,” she stammered.
“You’re a Traveller, Pala,” Liss repeated. “You can hop from one universe to the next. Memories are the fuel.”
Pala stared back, as if not understanding. But she would understand in good time.
“I know all that is known about Travellers,” Liss went on. “And you will soon be a master of your skill under my guidance, too. Come—you got us here, and you can get us back.”
“O…okay. What do I do?” She would not meet Liss’ eye.
“Think of something you would like to forget.”
Her brow furrowed. “My mother’s name.”
It took Pala only four leaps, back and forth between her world and Liss’, to arrive where she had asked: a temple, taller than it was wide, in the heart of a ring of islands, with a spire that pierced the clouds.
As they landed gently upon its uppermost ring, the last platform beneath its crown, she marvelled down at the coastlines beneath, at the seven verdant islands circling the central one, and at the edgeless sea beyond.
For someone who had never seen the temple nor heard its name before, Liss had expected Pala to take longer.
She could not, however, congratulate the girl while she was sobbing and barely able to stand.
Now, she pulled from her tunic pocket a length of rope, and snatched the girl by the arm.
“You have done well so far,” she said, lashing her wrists together with the care of a weaver, once, twice, thrice. “And as long as you continue to do well, no harm will come to you, understood?”
Pala nodded mutely. Fen glowered, but said nothing.
They skirted the dizzying edge of the deck towards the stairway entrance. Around them, clouds glided close enough to touch. By the time they reached the doorway, Fen was supporting Pala by the shoulder, and her sobs intervened on the silence every few steps.
She sighed. “Fen, comfort your friend.”
When he had begged to come along, Liss had thought him deadweight: another dependent to keep alive, another mouth to feed. But now she saw that bringing a friend for Pala could only make her more agreeable.
“We’ll be fine,” she heard Fen whisper. “We’ll be back home soon.”
Oh, if only you knew, thought Liss, as they descended the towering spiral.
Liss led Pala and Fen to their holding room, where Lacar and Kori already waited.
“Is this the Traveller?” asked the man, stroking his chin. “Why are there two of them?”
“She's not exactly the slippery rogue I feared,” she answered. “Her name is Pala, and her friend Fen is here to keep her company. If you could see to it that they are secured and fed?”
As she handed the rope over to her lieutenants, a cry of her name made her head whip around. Noma barrelled through the commotion, launching herself into Liss’ arms with curls flying.
“I thought you would be back an hour sooner,” she cried.
Liss gasped at the pressure of her embrace, and then relaxed into it, her steely sense of purpose melting away. She smiled, rubbing her back.
“That was a frugal estimate,” she said. “Pala took a while to find the Temple, what with all the crying, but she did it in the end.”
“I bet she’s overwhelmed.” Noma haltingly stepped out of the embrace. “I think we should give her a bit of time to figure things out.”
“You're right. If it’s what must be done to have her cooperate.”
“Is she really…the answer to all this?” Noma waved around her. “The way to end Orsand’s reign?”
Liss glanced to check that the newcomers had been taken away. “Possibly. I can’t speak in absolutes,” Liss replied, voice dropping. “Pala is one in a billion—a person with skills I can't yet fathom the possibilities of. But I already know what we shall do with her. We are closer than we ever have been to turning the world around…”
She smiled, a moment's peace washing over her. All that toil, all that agony, and they were slowly but surely clawing their way towards destiny.
But teaching the girl about her powers meant opening loopholes: to her escape, to her exploiting Liss’ limits, stranding her in the wrong place. No, none of this could be left to chance.
“Then I’m glad, though I don’t know how this fits in with everything else,” said Noma. “Anyway, dinner’s in an hour—I’ll see you there?” She made to leave, but Liss caught her by the hand and she gasped, head turning. “Yes?”
“Just a token of appreciation,” she answered, squeezing her fingers.
Noma squeaked, clasped her cheek with her free hand, and then bolted, fingers slipping from her grip.
From the second their jailers locked the door on them, Pala and Fen did not leave each other’s reach. Tying them with care to the window grille, their escorts removed their bags, but permitted Pala her sketchbook and Fen is medication.
The room was modestly furnished: a large bed stood facing a table, and a crate of unused robes and towels lay beside it. Over the bed, a slatted wooden window let stripes of light fall through, only traces of leaves and a golden sky visible through the gaps.
As the shadows of leaves rustled over them, they began to trawl the room for cutting implements as far as their tethers allowed, but found nothing beyond the hinge of the crate, which was only sufficient to dent their ropes. Then they retired to the bed, and held each other while tears filled their eyes.
Their guardians arrived shortly after to leave the pair with a dinner of dry biscuits and unnameable salad—strange on the tongue, but filling. Pala choked them down, too scared to be hungry.
In the sunset glow, they fitfully slept off their exhaustion in turns, fingertips touching, though it made Pala more aware of the tether that ran from her wrist to the window. When they woke again—at what would be four in the morning, according to Pala’s dying phone—they finally sat up in a corner in the dark, and talked.
“Pala,” whispered Fen. “Do you remember your mother’s name?”
She sat expressionless. “No. I think it starts with a J…but…”
His brow wrinkled. “There has to be something else you can do. Some other source of memories. If she's going to keep making you travel.”
“Maybe I can make memories just to use them?” Pala said, eyes cast down, then breathed a sigh. “I’m sorry you got dragged along. I had no idea…I didn't know I could do this.”
“No, it's Liss who should be sorry, for forcing you into it.” Pala felt Fen's hand wrap around hers. “I couldn't just leave you to get taken away. I’d rather this than that.”
“How much of your meds do you have?”
“Two weeks’ supply, I think. And, at least they're feeding us…I guess.” He shook his head. “I’m guessing you can't just travel away right now?”
“No, I’ve been trying,” she whispered, frowning. “I think the rope is stopping me. Like it won’t let me warp the whole building away, or something. And even if I did, I’m scared she’d just…find us again. I don't know how she got us the first time.”
“Mm.” Eyes fixed on the wall opposite them, he paused. “She must need you, if she came all that way to find you. But, yeah, I’m scared too. Let's be safe for now. Once things start making sense…we can figure out what to do.”
Then they fell back asleep in the tangled sheets, and dreamt of too much at once, flashing skies and unknown seas and home.
Pala and Fen woke in the predawn blue to a knock on the door. When Liss marched into their room, she held a blade, a coddling smile plastered on her face.
“Pala,” she said, and at once the pair leapt apart, the girl shuddering, wide eyes trailing after the knife's curved edge.
Liss yanked on Pala's rope, and her arm was yanked forth with it, tearing a cry from her. “Shush already,” Liss murmured, lifting the knife to saw the bindings at the window frame. “I hope you've eaten and rested well. I'm going to need you for the next hour.”
“What are we doing?”
“It’s a surprise.” Liss’ words were ominous in a way she could not place. “Come with me. You’ll love the morning view.”
*
On the islands of Doganir, and indeed all across the islands of Makor Kirikiri, marriage was a laborious ritual, perhaps the lengthiest of them all—even more so than the inauguration of a sailing vessel, or a funeral rite.
Typically, a union would involve tying lengths of woven string around a part of each partner’s body, in what was known as a marriage knot. From the spinning of the rope to the binding itself, tying the knot was a singularly elaborate undertaking, taking days or even weeks from start to finish.
The strongest knot in the world, they called it: once tied, the marriage knot could never be cut again. The partners would live the rest of their lives with that loop of rope on their body, holding them fast to each other. The most curious property of the marriage knot was that when one partner tugged on their loop, they could always feel where the other was, through rain and hail and flood, to the opposite ends of the world.
“This is a very ancient magic, one discovered before the Cataclysm. It springs from the Being Xemself, from the very flow of energy through the universe. But, ah, it is not only lovers who take on such a happy binding. Friends do, too, if they would like never to lose each other. Some bind more than one at a time.”
Liss had learned, from many such conversations with the scholar priest Tomay, that the principle of the marriage knot was in how all sections of that same string entangled their wearers’ very being and intentions. Once linked in such a way, the spouses’ souls, like compass needles, would always find each other again.
“So, if a Traveller travels by intent,” said Liss, in her same nonchalant way, “then when they transit universes while wearing such a knot, they would always find their partner. No matter where, and how far away. And that's why it worked with the Nomad. Is that right?”
“Very likely yes. But I have only read so much on the matters of space and time and universes.”
Liss had asked, then, to learn the marriage knot so she may use it, and the old scholar had been startled, but acceding. “Who would you bind, being so young?” Tomay had mused as they had taught the girl: a painstaking layered pattern of stitches in rows that looped upon themselves.
“That is my business alone,” Liss had replied.
A week under the trees weaving with Tomay, and several arms of yarn later, Liss had thought she would never see the end of this labour. Her hands were not delicate; they did not take well to the rote motions of stitching and untangling. But talking with the scholar shortened the days until, at last, stitch by stitch, row by row, four arms of rope hung from the branch, each inch twined with one strand of her hair.
Now, only one thing was missing: the reciprocal material, two strands of hair off the lucky partner’s scalp.
But it was not her partner who would wear the other half of her cord. Liss had much grander plans. When it was complete, she hid the rope away in her room. It would not be several months until it would see the light of day again.
Now, in the blood red dawn, with the two strands of hair she had solicited through Lacar and Kori, she made the finishing stitches upon that singular fateful cord. Red, black, white, yellow, spun into itself—her focus was whetted by the clarity of the answer and the path she saw towards it. It was so simple, if only the rest of the world could see.
It was done, all too soon, the ritual she had begun months ago. She coiled the rope and pushed it into her tunic pocket. Returning to the halls, she went to retrieve the girl herself, and dragged her wide-eyed up the stairs, floor by floor, to the dizzying pinnacle. In the view of those billowing clouds and glistening waves, Pala was all but silent, save for her gasps of fright in the thinning air.
Liss was starting to resent her cowardice. But she was precious, more so than anyone she had ever met in her life, and she would have to be handled with care.
“Be still,” said Liss, and Pala did as told. “And keep silent, you’re doing well in that.”
She stood motionless as Liss strode over, stretching the loops of rope between her hands. It was thinner than a finger, colours woven together in leggy spirals. Pala made no verbal response as her captor began to tie one end of the rope around her wrist, then the other end around her own—one knot on Pala’s loop, one knot on Liss’, twist by twist, shortening the linkage every time.
Half an hour they watched the sun ascend as the knots thickened on their wrists. They stood facing each other in the red blaze of the sun, in the audience of the clouds—two silhouettes, two souls connected.
Then Liss lifted the knife between them, and slit the connecting rope down the middle, like a blade through the heart of a lamb.
“Pala,” she murmured then, as she lifted her gaze to the other. “You are bound now. As long as you do as told, you will be treated as a treasure. You and Fen. I shall feed and harbour you both, and you will do what I ask of you. Am I understood?”
Pala nodded.
“Good. Now, here is your first test. I want you to jump back to your universe. Anywhere at all, anywhere you like, exactly as I taught you. Think of something you would like to forget.”
Pala nodded again, swallowing loud enough to hear. Liss smiled.
“Now, go.”
Pala landed on the roof of a wintry turret. In the howl of the wind, she glanced about, wild-eyed, at the bleak tips of conifer trees.
She had only just begun to feel the cold bite into her fingers and to pull her arms around herself, when she heard a thud behind her—and a hand wrapped around her fingers, dragging her back. She screamed and whirled around, only to find the pink hair and the tattooed face of the girl who had only just bound her and then cut her loose.
“Fantastic!” Liss laughed, glancing at the knot on her wrist. “This will make things so much easier! Come on now, take us back—back to a city called Madan. It is a port city carved into the side of a mountain—the capital of the kingdom of Makor.”
“Okay. I'll—I’ll try.” Pala closed her eyes, clenching her fingers into trembling fists.
*
The universe flashed away into concentric circles, and they spun through the lights with everything humming past their ears, the way it had every time before.
But when the visions solidified again, they were not in a city.
They were in a room with a bed, a crate, and a table, and the red light streaked the floor in bloody lines. And in that bed lay Fen, stirring from slumber.
“This isn’t Madan,” Liss said.
Pala shrank towards the door. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“Hey, what’s going on here?” Flung from his dreaming, Fen scrambled from the bed.
“Keep out of it!” Liss held up a hand, and he halted in his tracks. Then she cornered Pala and snatched her arm, grimace melting into a smile. “Now, try that again.”
*
Pala and Liss plummeted into the roar of the sea, foam swallowing them in the burning noon sun. As the first swell of water swept over her head, Pala gasped and kicked, all her reflexes seizing her at once as she thrashed to stay afloat.
“Damn it!” Liss snarled, snatching her about the waist and kicking furiously against the currents. “What’s wrong with you? You were doing fine until—”
*
Pala and Liss crashed into the ground in front of Fen, and this time, he flew to place himself between Pala and their captor. “Liss! What are you doing to her?”
Pala shook wordlessly. Puddles soaked out onto the granite floor beneath them. “Saving her from drowning,” Liss answered, face unreadable as an overcast sky. She crawled out of the tangle, trailing drops of saltwater, and went to the door.
Pala did not rise from the floor. She lay where she had landed while tears clouded her eyes, arms curling around her legs. “Please,” she sobbed, “I can’t keep doing this. I’m sorry I can’t do it right. I’m just…”
Liss stopped and turned. “Alright, alright. I’m sorry. It probably wasn’t fair to expect you to do so much so soon.” She closed her eyes with her hand on the door handle. Rivulets trailed from her fingers to the floor. “It’s you, Fen. We keep coming back to you.”
“Me?”
Staring up through the dimness, vision frosted by tears, Pala found that every sound and sensation rang too loud, and all she could do was close her mind to it all.
“You might be important to Pala’s sense of direction, or something like that. You should come along the next time we jump.”
“Okay…” She could hear the frown in his voice. “If it helps Pala…I can come along.”
“I guess letting you join us was a good idea after all.”
She felt her friend’s hand squeeze her shoulder, and the pressure remained while the door clattered shut behind Liss. But only once the girl was gone did she reciprocate the touch, clasping her fingers around his arm.
“You okay?” he ventured quietly, as the darkness fell upon the room.
“I’m not injured,” she answered, voice quavering, then coughed the last drops of seawater out of her lungs. She crawled into a seated position, her back against the polished bedframe. “I'm just scared.”
“Do you need anything right now?”
Her face contorted with the sting of new tears. “I need—new clothes.”
“They left us some in the crate.” He sank to the floor beside her, gesturing with his elbow at the box.
Pala glanced at Fen as he lifted her wrist gently in one hand, scattering drops of seawater. Both pairs of eyes were pulled to the drenched multicoloured band wrapped in intricate knots around it, stark and strange against her skin. “Is this…from her?”
Pala nodded, mouth drawn into a line. “She tied that thing on my wrist, and she tied a matching one on hers…then, suddenly, she could jump to me. I think it’s…some kind of magical tracking.”
He stared at it like it was a wound, then turned to her with glistening eyes. “Oh, Pala…I’m sorry.” He wrapped his arms around her, and she briefly thought to warn him about the water, but he didn’t seem to care. The embrace was like a flame, melting her terror at the corners. “I don’t know why all this is happening. But I’ll be there next time. She let me be there.”
“Please… Please…” Her lower lip trembled. “If you’re there…I think I can face her.”
It was over dinner in the temple’s common hall that Noma noticed the band on Liss’ right wrist. It was impossible to miss, especially sitting at close quarters—the rainbow threads, meticulously woven, clinging to the skin of her arm.
When she glimpsed it, it took a few seconds for her confusion to morph to recognition, and then to something else—some bottomless, hungry dread that she had only ever felt about death before.
“Liss,” Noma said, almost against her will. “Is that…” She pointed at the band on her arm.
Liss glanced at the object, then ran her fingers along its stitches. “Yes, it’s a marriage knot,” she said. “But it was not made in marriage. I am simply using it to keep Pala in…”
The flavour drained from her dinner. A storm stirred in her head, drowning out all else that was said thereafter. She did not hear whatever Liss and Lacar were laughing at, nor Kori’s thoughts on the matter—and when she was done with her meal, she stood up wordlessly and left.
She raced, cold as stone, through empty corridors and out into the night, where the dark sea roared invisibly and the wind stirred the branches. The sky was as thick as the foliage, roiling along with it. She strayed off the pathway to the dock, out among the boulders and trees, to where the insects scuttled. She sat down heavily on a rock and let her legs dangle off the edge.
She noticed then, for the first time, the way her heart ached, and that ache rose to her throat, threatening to wring tears from her. “Stop, stop, stop,” she growled. “It doesn't matter. She can do what she wants.”
It wasn’t until ten minutes later that she heard the crunch of footsteps in the grass behind her, with Lacar’s trudging rhythm.
“Hey, Noma,” he called out, just loud enough over the wind. She turned. Windows glowed out of the temple’s lowest floors—the circumference of the island hill was a terrace of lights. “Are you all right? You seemed pretty sour about Liss’ new trinket.”
Noma pouted as Lacar sat down beside her. “It’s not a trinket. It’s a marriage knot.”
“And that’s a happy thing, no? Never mind the bizarre way that it was made.”
“Yeah.” She folded her arms and turned away. “I shouldn’t be upset. And I wish I weren’t. It shouldn't bother me in any way, that Liss is bound to someone else.”
He chuckled. “Someone ‘else’ is one way to see it.”
Indignation reared up, but resignation chased it on its heels. She sighed. “Maybe I did want it for myself.”
“Want…to tie the knot with Liss?”
Noma clutched her face. “Don't say it like that. It’s so embarrassing.”
“Nothing embarrassing about falling for your best friend, especially when she’s so…illustrious.” He folded his arms. “First time?”
She groaned. “Now you're just rubbing it in.”
“Well, if your people do it the same way as ours, she can tie the knot with more than one person.”
Noma turned away. “Yes, but I think…I hoped that our connection was…”
“Special? Unique?”
Noma grumbled her assent.
“Well, I think it is,” he said. “I don't know that you can see it, but she spares you more kindness than everyone else combined. And besides, you’re the only person who could possibly hold her in such a good light, too.”
Her eyes unfocused on the sky. “She could make anything happen. All she has to do is want it.”
“For better or worse.”
“So why should she care about me?”
“Maybe even a ruthless prodigy like Liss doesn’t understand her own feelings.”
“Then…what do I do?”
Lacar turned to Noma, meeting her gaze. “Anything,” he replied. “You could do anything, and she would smile at it.”
“I’m…I’m not sure about that.”
“Well, only one way to find out.” He dusted off his lap and began to rise. “Anyhow, I'm just here to check that you're fine and healthy. I ought to turn in for the night soon. Big things are about to start happening ‘round here, I can just feel it. And before even that, a storm will be upon us.”
“Sure. I'll see you tomorrow.”
Noma continued to sit in the wind while Lacar returned to the temple halls. She toyed at the blades of grass, and watched the stormclouds roll above her, pondering his words.
Standing on the rain-dampened stones of a temple terrace, Pala linked hands with Fen and Liss.
“You remember what I said of Madan, don’t you?” said the latter.
“It’s a port city carved from a mountainside,” Pala repeated. In the last trace of the pink of dawn, she closed her eyes, thinking of something easy—the taste of dinner from the night before—and willed herself home.
It was getting easier, as Liss had said it would. She watched the visions around her blur in radiant technicolor, then sharpen, and this time, the dizziness did not slam her quite so hard.
They stumbled on a pavement in the middle of Kaona Hema, before its famous watchtower, and saw it for merely seconds—then, focusing on the heat of the street, the way it warmed through her soles, she leapt again. Both grips tightened on hers, and she heard Fen cry out as the street began to bend away, along with the rest of the city.
Unnameable seconds of warped skies and placeless colours later, they snapped back onto the ground in a city she had never seen before. An obelisk threw its shadow across the symmetrical square, stolid merchant’s houses raising banners over its streets. By the obelisk, the stump of a statue stood with its fragments at its feet.
None of the trio spoke for a minute. Then, Liss said, “This is Madan. Congratulations!” she laid a hand on Pala’s shoulder. “I believe we have our procedure nailed down.”
Pala felt her heart leap. But from her relief crawled a new horror, like the first inkling of a monster beneath the waves—the planetary silhouette of all she did not know, about herself, and the universe.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
ĪRA DRACONIS - I
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter contains depictions of animal death, alcohol use, and graphic injury. It mentions violent human death and implied sexual activity.
The war drum rolls. Ba-dum, ba-dum, like the pounding of her heart, like the pounding of her feet on sand into the jaws of her fate.
The ground beneath her is a grave. Three days it has been since Cyrus died upon this oval—a friend once, in the same way that all comrades in the barracks are. Blood streaked across sand. Screams streaked across stone. Did his heart pound the way hers does, as the heat burns through her soles?
The beast opposite her could well have sprung full-formed from a myth, glossy eyes and tongue flicking in search of prey. There has never been a legged reptile in the colosseum before—pools of snakes hold no candle to this beast, one they call “dragon”—this creature of claw and scale, brought from far eastern kingdoms aboard so many ships.
Its scales ripple as it sizes up its foe, the shape of its jaw belying great teeth. Marcia watches carefully in kind. Every breathing beast can be read. Pain, rage, fear—as she stands, sweat and blood dripping on the sand, she watches it with narrowed eyes. Then it lurches towards her.
She can usually end fights quicker, but she chooses to draw them out. They like to watch her struggle, and then the beast, in turns; they scream louder when she does. So she lets the creature come almost as close as the toes of her sandals, to spread its jaws wide, and—
The teeth gash her leg, deep enough to draw blood, and she cries out as she shoves her blade between its jaws, wrestling with this beast that stretches longer than she is tall. Its weight is remarkable. From here she can see the wrinkling of its hide with every kick and toss of its head, its pillar of a neck wrenching her arms about as she clings to her sword.
Cyrus flashes in her eyes again: the hippopotamus stampeding over him, pounding his face to pulp. Where did Cyrus go, his smile, his sorrow?
Claws and sandal heels dig into sand, while the crowd surges like the surf. The fresh wound throbs with the heat, but with arms and hands slick with sweat, Marcia grinds her teeth and flexes her arms so the edge cuts in, the dragon’s bloodied maw struggling to dislodge the blade.
Marcia can feel the crescendo of the crowd’s vigour, rising and rising to a peak. As their excitement ripens, she grips the sword tight, and levers it with the strength of her arms. A gasp echoes across the terraces as her gladius cracks its jaw hinge and sends it writhing on its knees. It crumples and hisses, bleeding out on the sand.
And a special treat for you, she thinks. She has been practising this for some weeks now: with an easy flourish, she tosses the sword, spinning, into the air, scattering its blood. She leaps to snatch its handle mid-fall, and punches it straight through a gap in its ribcage.
The creature dies much like a python would die, with twitches and a rattling hiss. It bleeds red, like she does. The calf blood they rubbed on her mingles with the blood of the beast.
The sky darkens as fanfare lights the arena, to rousing rapturous applause. She has the audience in a chokehold, as she always does. The terraces ripple when she waves.
In the waiting hall, Marcia’s leg wound burns, telling her it will fester if she leaves it. Whatever grew on its teeth, it is like nothing she has felt in her blood before. She focuses her attention upon the pain as the serfs wash her, and feels the heat flare, almost unbearably, around its ragged edges.
Her coach Quintus grins as he marches towards her, and she raises her sword hilt in greeting. While serfs towel off the blood, he laughs and claps her forearm.
“Remarkable game,” he says. “That flawless sword toss shall be the talk of the town! A proper prize bull, that's what you are.”
“So you’ll ask them to throw more denarii my way, yes?” she answers with a grin.
“Well, since you ask so nicely,” he sighs with a grin. As she takes a proffered towel and scrubs her face, he points at her leg wound. “Is that going to take care of itself?”
Marcia glances at it. It is livid red, and the foreign contaminants from the beast’s teeth are doing their work, the wound trying to rot even as she fights it. This one is more aggressive than she is used to, but already she can tell it will heal by tomorrow.
“It will,” she says.
“Truly, you must be blessed by the gods, to heal so quickly.” He begins rummaging his waist satchel, and produces a roll of parchment. “By the way, you have been invited to the lord Gaian’ birthday banquet.”
“Surely not the birthday banquet.”
“The very one…”
“There will be a scandal about this. Me, at the feast?”
“There are scandals every year! Yours would be overshadowed. As you might think, most invitees will be senators and landowners.” He winks. “Be on your best behaviour, it could mean better business for us.”
“My best behaviour would be too crass for that lot.” She chuckles. “Where and how do I get in?”
“It will be in his villa on the slopes of Fourth Hill. Gaian has shared one fact about himself with every invitee, and you must speak it at his door to enter.” His voice drops. “Yours is: ‘Gaian would rather pet a horse than ride it.’”
“Some fact that is,” she mutters. “He sounds self-absorbed. But certainly, I can humour him. Odd that he should want the likes of me in his residence.”
“Of course he does! The emperor himself watches your matches, now and then. It is even less surprising that his son does. Besides,” he winks, “perhaps he enjoys ruthless women.”
“Well, I don't do candidates for the throne. If this invitation comes with ulterior motives, then he can kiss my arse.”
“I'm sure he would die for the chance to do so.”
“And he just might if he tries.”
Marcia has been doing well for herself lately. The matches line her pockets, but the customers after dark make her life cushy. It is the gladiator’s lot in life to be adored and desired by their followers, but only the wealthy can afford them for a night.
With those earnings, she has bought herself a flowing tunic as red as the cape she wears, with a dipping neckline and embroidered golden flowers. It is no matron’s stola, but then she is no matron, and she wears it proudly as she climbs Fourth Hill.
As the first roof shingles rises from the rolling swells, Marcia gazes up in wonder. The glowing walls of the villa crown the hill, girt by olive and orange trees in full bloom. In the golden sunset she enters the susurrus of leaves and the fragrance of blossoms, and reaches the portico, sheltered by a carved tympanum on grand red pillars.
As she passes between the columns, a bearded man with a chaplet of olive leaves in his salt-and-pepper hair lifts his head. His eyes flick to the book in his hand.
“May I hear your key phrase?”
She cannot help sighing as she says, “Gaian would rather pet a horse than ride it.”
The gatekeeper looks her in the eye, and then laughs barkingly. “How many of these has he come up with? Each one is better than the last. Welcome, Marcia, to the villa of Isicus Pollius Alexius Gaianus.”
She hears the festivities go before she sees them: chatter, laughter, the clatter of ceramics. The fores, carved with sinuous floral motifs, radiate stateliness older than the emperor’s son himself. As she wanders through between them, all questions and misgivings leave her mind in the face of what she sees. The lamplit atrium is bordered by colonnades of pale pillars, enclosing a lush garden thick with blossoms as with the trees outside, circling a small square pond. Never has she seen such well-kept verdure, nor some of the species on display, hanging in veils like a nymph’s curtain. She wanders up the hallways of woven banners, passing lords and ladies holding each other by the waists.
The strum of strings and the glow of golden firelight from the peristyle draw her. There she finds, lit in burning gold, the heart of the feast. In the middle of this courtyard, the ground descends to a square pool stirred by a fountain, around which senators and generals mingle—ones she knows and ones she doesn’t, some of them in furious lip-lock. Long past are the decades when women could not hold office—this is the modern empire, they say—and all kinds mix here, equal to each other in haughtiness.
Up along the left colonnade of the courtyard stands a banquet table bearing trays of food for twenty diners. A serf in one corner keeps the wine flowing, and plates of olives have already been spilled on the ground. Past the guests, upon a gilded couch by the pool, reclines the man of the house himself, with a golden chaplet, much like the doorman's, perched in his curly brown hair.
Marcia thinks to have a word with him, but the pull of the banquet—and the gnawing of her hunger—take her attention first.
Already a few recline in the couches by the table, and when Marcia leans between them to take some skewers of meats and fruit for herself, she is met with a menagerie of expressions—lascivious smiles, odd stares, a scowl. “Is that who I think it is?” asks one to another, but not to her.
“I thought she was only loved on the streets,” the other answers, popping a grape between his lips. “Not the strangest guest Gaian has had.”
Shrugging, Marcia turns in search of Gaian—but where there was no one before, a blonde woman now looms behind her.
Hers is a face both foreign and familiar, an echo of a hundred carved reliefs before her time. Her golden hair falls like spun silk over her shoulders, the black embroidery of her gem-draped golden dress depicting the swirling figures of scaled beasts—dragons, but in the eastern style.
As their eyes meet, the lady’s widen, gleaming gimlet grey. “The Brazen Bull? Surely not!” she gasps. “Strange to see you here.”
Her tone does not sit right. “Yes, strange even to me,” she replies. “I was invited on a whim of Gaian’s.”
“The man’s a fickle fool, to let you in here and cheapen this gathering.”
Marcia has been expecting an insult, but she is not expecting it undressed. “Do you have more of a claim to being here?” she answers.
Her lip curls. “Of course. I am a proper patrician, heir of an honourable general’s bloodline. You slay a few beasts, and now you dare carry yourself like one of us.”
“Whatever you say, lady…what’s your name?”
Her brow twitches. “My name is Lucia Publia Diana—and you will remember that.”
“I’ll remember you, alright,” Marcia answers with a cool smile. “One would hope an honourable man’s daughter would learn some of his honour.” Then she walks away, leaving her raving and snarling behind.
The one thing Marcia has heard of the lord Gaian’ birthday festivities is that the man has a penchant for a certain kind of guest. Among the people of Constantinople, he is both loved and scorned—a singularly outlandish man, whom Emperor Alexius will someday crown. His annual birthday banquet, however, is only ever derided from without, and already she can see it was not all talk.
She skirts the pool on her way to Gaian’ gilded couch, where a couple have already dived in and the red of wine mingles with its meek tides. As she passes, a man reaches from the poolside and clutches at her ankles, running fingers up her shins. “Beauteous one! Spare Acacius a kiss, won't you?” One crushing step upon his arm halts those efforts.
Gaian does not immediately notice Marcia as she arrives, but once she clears her throat, he turns at once, and a toothy grin spreads on his face. He lifts himself from the cushions to sit on his seat’s velvet edge.
“Oh, if it isn't Marcia, the Brazen Bull herself! I'm thrilled you could make it. How wonderful to have you in my home! How are you enjoying yourself?”
Though grinning and reeking of wine, the man has the stature of nobility about him, like gold dressed in tacky fabrics. He has some of Alexius’ traits: curly black hair, dark tan skin, and a strong nose, his eyes housing a complex mirth mingled with euphoria.
“I am enjoying myself well, thank you,” she answers. “Though I cannot help but wonder why you thought me a worthy guest. I am honoured, of course! Honoured but curious.”
“Oho! Well, that's simple.” He glances across the room, then back at her, grin unceasing. “I enjoy your matches, and admire your command of a crowd. I have beheld your deeds from afar, and have wanted to speak to you in the flesh!”
She chuckles. “Well, you needn't have gone to these lengths to speak to me. Just call on me at the barracks. Or send a messenger to find me, if that place is too lowly for you to set foot there yourself.”
Gaian smirks back, then bites from an olive. “Oh? Then the next time we speak, it can be elsewhere. Anyhow, my friend, come sit down.” Gaian pats the other end of his recliner, and she glances at the cushioning, then back at the crowd, before taking that place. “You fought an impressive match this week. I've never seen one of those creatures! A dragon!”
“I can never understand how the gamemakers keep finding these beasts,” she replied.
“The Colosseum of Constantinople has coffers rivalling mine,” he answers. “And I, too, would buy every manner of exotic beast, if I mixed well with them. Instead, I have a garden.”
By now, the sun has set upon the very gardens Gaian speaks of, and the merry lanterns paint the peristyle in gold and pink. There in the rousing bustle and the capricious tunes of the musicians, a wine goblet spills and guests prance with each other. They look in Marcia’s direction now and then, and the gazes are always furtive or conspiring—nothing like the raucous cheer she commands in the amphitheater.
“A garden won't attack you, that's for sure,” she says.
“You'd be surprised. It has broken my heart plenty a time…”
For a while they converse about nothing important, a casual duel of quips—and she finds he plays with words like game pieces, and she responds in kind, surprise mounting at how little he cares for the astronomic difference in their social standing.
Then as Marcia rises to take her leave, Gaian says, “Thank you for gracing me with your presence, Brazen Bull,” as if in dismissal, but a mirth sparkles in his eye. “This shan’t be the last time we talk.”
“I will allow it,” she answers with a grin of her own.
As Marcia picks up a couple more skewers, she casts an eye about. The dining has squarely turned to drinking. Passing the corner of the pool again, a tap on the arm draws her eye—and there is a woman, rosy-faced and all in blue, with her brown tresses combed into immaculate spirals.
“Marcia, you're more gorgeous up close,” she purrs, beckoning with her painted half-lidded eyes. The woman wears too much gold on her neck and wrists.
“Do you watch my matches?” Marcia answers, gliding towards her.
“All of them,” the woman whispers, running fingers down her waist. “Such power and poise…you are nothing if not mesmerising…”
Marcia allows the woman's beauty to lure her into a kiss, but she knows connecting herself to nobles can promise nothing but danger. So she does as she always does, and comes and goes like a shadow at night, playing her part but learning no more names.
“Lady Diana,” Quintus repeats the name to Marcia, before the next morning’s training bout. “Yes, she is known well among high society. Loved among the senate, hated by the tavern-goers. Her father was a general in China—they say his army slew an entire city, and their family took the likeness of their dragon as their trophy.”
Marcia frowns. “She is a piece of work, that one,” she says. “But of course she comes from a family of conquerors.”
“Be more charitable now,” he answers. “Most wealthy people are some kind of mess or other. Like Gaian himself. How did that go?”
“I was expecting much worse.” she answers.
*
With Quintus leading, the group jog in circles around the colosseum, spar on the sand, and talk under trees. The camaraderie, their coach often declares, is part of sharpening their minds. But among the cohort, Marcia enjoys talking only to dark-haired Lavinia and towering Canthus, whose banter is always a delight to partake in.
Drills completed, the gladiators gather for a debrief in the shadow of the armoury’s archway. “It must be known,” announces Quintus, “that the colosseum is seeing important changes. With new funding, we have been asked for a fresh roster of matches. You may see stranger foes, and possibly larger numbers of them. I will continue to advocate for your safety to the game makers, but I urge you to sharpen your skills.”
There is some glancing between the gladiators, and Marcia frowns—the words ring like a warning, though Quintus seems unable to phrase them as one.
*
When Marcia returns to her apartment in the barracks, she halts at the sight of a man waiting at the door. Her pace slows, and she watches quietly. He wears a poor man’s trousers, and she cannot say for sure if she has ever seen him. But as she approaches, he waves to draw her attention.
“I hope I find you well, Marcia!” he calls as she reaches earshot, raising a sealed scroll. “A delivery for you.”
“Thank you.” She takes the letter with a nod and makes to re-enter her home, but he holds an arm up before her and clears his throat.
“I cannot leave until I hear your answer to the missive,” he declares.
Either it is important, or it wants to be. Frowning, Marcia pries up the seal with her thumb and unrolls the letter.
Junia Paetina Marcia, I seek your audience tomorrow morning in my abode, shortly after dawn. There will be no festivities this time. I simply have an opportunity for your consideration, and hope to see you tomorrow. Let my messenger know your answer.
Gaian
She keeps her face steeled. What kind of job could this be? Marcia does not like mixing with the wealthy. And yet the manner of this invitation reels her in. She can feel his hand in it, and see his smirk, plotting a mystery she cannot turn away.
“Tell him I shall visit tomorrow,” she says then, and the messenger nods. “I’ll find out what it is he wants. But he must know I may refuse.”
Marcia wakes before dawn as promised, and walks for an hour among carriages, through stands of fragrant trees to the portico of the villa on Fourth Hill. There is no gatekeeper today, so she knocks and waits to enter.
Gaian himself opens the door. Without the revelry, the atrium is placid and gleaming, marble and gold, dusted by shadows between palm leaves. “Marcia!” he declares as she appears, all grins. “Thank you for coming, despite my vague directions. You must wonder why I called you here.”
“You always had a penchant for incomprehensible caprices,” she replies. “I did not question it so much as let the intrigue lure me.”
“I would like a champion,” he says.
“What?”
“I would like you to be my champion, and a guard at my right hand. If you are willing. I would have you walk before me in public, and take the spoils that come with it.”
Studying the wall reliefs of flowers and clouds until now, she whips around. “Why so suddenly? Does your endless roster of associates not include a warrior?”
At this, he frowns, folding his hands together. “I suspect ill intent against me. You must know I am intended as Alexius’ heir. But not all in the senate like me as his choice.”
“And I was the first person you considered?”
“Oh, you know,” he answers, “I am not just looking for combat prowess, which you have in plenty. I want someone not already entangled in the houses, too. And you are special, I can sense it. Special in the way you placate, then kill. I think you have something beyond what an ordinary warrior does.”
Marcia shudders under his piercing brown gaze, wondering if he knows of her abilities. Showing magic is showing an allegiance to the gods.
“And do I keep attending my matches? Or do I cut ties with the colosseum?”
“I have no intention of depriving you of your matches. Please attend them, and take your leave when you need.’’
“Well, you must name me a price I can't refuse, then,” she answers in steady measure. “I don't like mixing with politics.”
“Two silver denarii a day.”
“My wealthy customers pay me that much for a night. Surely you can do better than love-making rates.” Two silver denarii could feed and clothe her for a week.
Gaian chuckles. “Oh, so spoiled for choice, are you? Well, I am spoiled, too. I can make that four denarii a day.”
“If you can also guarantee I will be treated twice as well as any old nighttime client treats me…”
“I would have my house feed you, when you are here for mealtimes. It would be no object.”
“Then I am sold.”
They shake hands, clasping wrists, to seal the agreement. “Marcia, you are welcome in my house anytime. I shall see you tomorrow, then?”
“If tomorrow is as soon as you would like me to begin, then certainly.”
It is as she is making her winding way back to the barracks, drenched in the evening light, that Marcia hears a telltale crackle behind her. She whirls to look behind her, but sees no movement. She studies the surrounds—the walls, bushes and pillars—just long enough and with enough care to notice a few curls of hair jutting from behind a tree.
She frowns, but feigns ignorance and carries on homeward, ears pricked.
It is hard to miss the faraway footsteps that never grow softer now that she is seeking them. Though she briefly thinks to frighten the spy away, it piques her curiosity too much.
So she pretends she hears nothing, walking with nonchalant stride until they are headed up a straight stretch of road, where she can tell her tail is behind and to her right.
Then she turns again, and the spy finds herself caught out in the lamplight—a woman of short stature and black curls pulled into a bun. She yelps, hair flying askew, as Marcia pounces.
With all the strength of her warrior's training, she pins the woman against a retaining wall. “Why are you following me?” she growls, leaning over her.
Cowering, the stranger bites back a whimper. “I—I’m sorry! I am simply an enjoyer of your matches!”
Marcia feels the woman's pulse surge, easily as reading a letter. Adoration? Lying? Terror? “And why should you be following me home at this hour? Are you meaning to watch me?”
With a tremor, she breathes, “I am…curious. About you.”
“What is your name?”
“Olivia…” Her eyes hunger, and so does her blood.
“Alright, Olivia, tell me the truth,” Marcia draws out the syllables, leaning into the role it seems Olivia wants her to play. “Why were you following me?” Her grip tightens.
Inopportunely, she thinks upon the softness of Olivia’s skin.
The woman eyes her intently. “Are you trying to interrogate me or kiss me? I can barely tell.” Her pulse rises again.
“It could be both, couldn’t it,” she answers with a smirk, “if you enjoy—”
Marcia’s words are cut short as Olivia leans in to kiss her outright. There is nowhere else for her thoughts to turn now, so she returned the kiss, hands running down her back.
It is too sincere for a tactic of interrogation. They tumble onto the grass and shackle each other in lip-lock, occasionally coming up for breath. Her brown eyes glisten with startled longing.
“So who else are you, when you aren't following gladiators home?” Marcia asks then, brushing curls out of her eyes to see her better.
“I am a table server,” she answers. “I wipe and wait tables, polish crockery…”
The words plunge Marcia into a memory. “A grand and noble house it must be,” she murmurs.
“It is.” She sighs. “You’re as beautiful as I imagined.”
Those words are what pull Marcia briefly out of herself, to an impassive view of the scene. Look at me now, getting amorous with spies.
She slips away, and dusts herself as she rises. Then she extends a hand to help the other woman up.
“If you do mean what you say,” she says then, “come back again another day.”
Watching Olivia scurry away into the dark, Marcia feels a steely certainty that she was sent, letting slip her allegiance to a wealthy house. As to which house, she thinks as she re-enters her dormitory, the possibilities are few. The ghost of Olivia’s touch lingers on her arms.
From her first day walking before Gaian through the forum, Marcia already senses her place on the streets changing. All at once, merchants speak to her properly as they cross the bustling square, though with a quirk of the eyebrows, and beggars glare from the corners of their eyes.
“Ah, the brazen bull dresses herself in gold! A golden calf is she!” declares a man in the market, before his friend shoos him away.
“Oh, don't mind them,” Gaian murmurs in the shade. “They only envy you.”
Marcia often forgets that the average citizen of Constantinople laps up scandal like parched cows at a river. The news propagates through the barracks, and then she finds that her comrades eye her as if her face has changed, during bouts and after. Only Quintus still looks at her like a friend, as if he foresaw this from the start.
“It was I,” he admits then, “who gave the messenger the directions to your dormitory.”
She cannot help a laugh. “Sorry to bother you with a host of pesky messengers.”
“Not at all. If the upper echelons want you, then that is your business.” Then he grins. “So long as you don't mean to abandon this post for your new one.”
*
Not two nights later, Olivia returns, knocking on Marcia’s door with two sharp raps.
She wears a tunic the colour of jasmines, trimmed in golden ochre. Once she is inside Marcia’s room, they fly into an embrace, kissing and whispering into each other's ears.
“I'm glad you kept your word,” Marcia says.
“What can I say? You are impossible to resist.”
As they caress each other upon the wrinkles of her bed, Marcia finds herself pondering. Olivia is withholding herself, strung out by some trouble that she can sense in her skin.
“Tell me more about your house,” she whispers. “And how it is to serve in such luxury.”
Olivia smiles distantly. “My mistress is of a grand bloodline, and her house is equally grand. Armour stands in the hallways. Trophies of distant lands. She has the aspect of royalty, and aspires…higher than her station. And no matter her rage, the floggings, the house still dazzles me so…”
“Let me tell you a secret,” Marcia says, then, calculating. “I once lived in such a house, too. And all that gold and polish…it is but a veneer.”
Olivia studies her face with wide eyes. “Have you?”
“Yes. A peerless house, with marigolds in the garden, and feasts aplenty. But every stone was hewn by the blood of those they slew and enslaved.”
They lie facing each other a minute, each gazing so deep into the other’s eyes that it seems such intensity could burn any lie away.
Then Olivia whispers, “I am afraid. That I will never find what she's looking for.”
Marcia’s brow furrows. She recognises that masked agony, in a small, lost part of herself. “And what is she looking for?”
“You are friendly with the emperor’s son. And she is jealous. Not of you, but of the alliance.” Once the words have left Olivia’s lips, she curls up to shield her face. “I am ruined! I have spoken too much.”
“No, no.” Marcia lays a hand on Olivia's arm. “I wish no ill on you. And I can help you. Why have you truly come here?”
“My lady seeks to know you. And to know what Lord Gaian seeks from you. She suspects you of some secret, something you have told no one, that has bewitched all of Constantinople and the Emperor and his son…”
“Secret?” she laughs. “Then tell her you watched me bathing, and saw a scar on my back, from a slaver’s lash.”
Her eyes widen, glistening in the candlelight. “Do you really…”
Wordlessly, Marcia lifts the back folds of her tunic, until the scar peeks from under its hem. It only happened once—a lashing meted out in a fit of drunken rage. But she still feels the ridge along the small of her back every time she bathes, and takes pains to hide it from the public.
She feels Olivia’s fingers run along the scars. “Then you have truly lived in a patrician’s house before. But not in the way I thought.”
She smiles. “Do I look like a noble to you?”
The woman’s voice regains its verve. “You treat a woman with a noble’s manners,” she answers. And Marcia returns the passion in kind, but not with words.
*
As she watches Olivia’s back disappear down the street, Marcia feels an old foreboding resurface that she has not felt in years. She has tripped into some plot by her own chain of decisions. But Olivia, who asked for none of this, for whom no barrier stands between her and her master’s wrath, is endangered by her, too.
She has no more hours to ponder it than the ones spends laying awake, for in the morning, she turns herself in for training only to be confronted by a cloudy-faced Quintus, who says:
“Marcia. The masters have called a game in three days—a special game that will draw every man, woman, and child to the terraces. And you will be its centrepiece.”
“You don’t seem very keen,” Marcia mutters.
“None of us are, not after…” He does not have to speak Cyrus’ name for her to hear it.
“But any word on what the game will be?” she asks then.
Levering his wooden gladius over his shoulder, Quintus bows his head. “I do not. But I can only pray they took heed of Cyrus's fate. Surely the people of this city have left the bloodthirsty appetite of Rome behind…”
Marcia feels, in his words, the chill of what he implies. The game is the noble sport, war without war, borne by the threat of death. But for the fighter, there is no glory in it.
It is her turn to be laid on the chopping block, and she has only glimpsed an inkling of what is to come.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
ĪRA DRACONIS - II
Hong Yi’s fingers pause over his phone screen. “Okay, okay. Pause right there. This is…a lot. And I have questions.”
Bathed in the gleam of the morning sun reflected off skyscrapers, he looks each of his new travelling companions in the eye, seated around him in varying states of attention. “Well?” says Orobelle from the edge of the bed.
He taps his temple with his fingers. “So. I’m a Core. A Core as in, a person with powers and some sort of prophecy we’re meant to be fulfilling. And Dorian and Vesper are also…Cores.”
“Yes. That is the entire reason I have come seeking you.”
“But Honourless is a…a ghost, AKA she can universe-hop. And you've been using her to leap from one universe to the next on some sort of epic quest to collect all the Cores.”
“Yes? Which part of that doesn't make sense?”
“It makes sense, it's just kind of, I don't know, completely rewriting my understanding of reality?”
Orobelle sighs. “Take your time. But not too much time.”
“Okay. So, you don't actually know who the next Core is, or if there even is one living in the next universe. Just like you didn't know who I was, or where I was. But you have a magic compass—”
“Corefinder.”
“—a magic corefinder that will show us which direction to go looking for the next Core. But we don’t know what the next universe looks like, what year it might be, what tech they have, bla bla bla.”
“That's right.”
“Really? You have no clue at all?” Hong Yi lowers his phone again. “Can we at least…check? It would be nice to know if I can use my phone there.”
At this, Orobelle fixes her stare on Honourless. “Well, can you check what the next world looks like? Whether Hong Yi can use his,” she waves vaguely in his direction, “smart transmitter?”
Honourless grumbles under her breath, propping herself up off the ground.
“You have five minutes,” the duchess snaps.
With a sigh, the woman closes her eyes and scrunches up her face, scars rippling. Hong Yi is swept by a brief wiggliness that he thinks must be the warping of spacetime—not unlike how he feels when using his powers on himself. Then he stumbles back as Honourless’ form warps and thins, space pulling close around her—
—and disappears. At once, space snaps back into form, as if she has been plucked from the world.
“That was quick,” he breathes.
“I certainly wish it were that quick every time,” Orobelle mutters, as flippantly as if she saw this occur every day.
For a while, the room is motionless, but the moment reverberates in his head. His eyes search for any sign of a trapdoor, a magician's gimmick that could offer any explanation more plausible than the one right in front of him—that everything Orobelle has said is true.
“So. We are living in a real, actual multiverse. And you don't actually know how many universes there are.”
Orobelle nods. “Wonderland only ever documented three universes, over millennia of searching. But now, we have found two more. And it seems the gap between three and four is uncrossable even to ghosts. Instead, we found a Tunnel and passed through it.”
“So…there could be a hundred more worlds other than these. A million. Maybe one universe for every possible reality that could—”
“Stop! Do not talk in infinites. I do not like them.”
“Okay, okay. But, you are the Knot of Worlds, and you're like…the thing holding this whole multiverse together.”
“Yes.”
“Damn.” He draws in a deep breath. “I hope you don't mind that this is gonna take me a hot minute to wrap my head around.”
Honourless pops back into existence right then, tumbling halfway from the air, banging her knee on the bedframe and landing again on the floor. Rolling over, she begins to speak, and Orobelle glares, but does not reply.
Then the duchess turns to Hong Yi in a flash of platinum hair. “Alright, Honourless thinks the next world is less advanced than Wonderland. There is no clockwork, there are no engines, and she saw only wheeled carriages pulled by beasts of burden.”
Hong Yi draws his mouth into a line. “Great. That means no power outlets, and definitely no Wi-Fi. Okay. Sure.” There's no surviving this trip. Nevertheless, he looks at his notes again. “So, you found me with your corefinder by triangulating my location from three other points. But I have to ask, uh…what did you use to do that? The triangulating?”
“This.” Watching the proceedings till now, Vesper finally speaks, picking up the rolled map from the desk and unfurling it for his benefit. The map is colourful and faded, and scrawled across its face are a dozen arcing pencil lines.
“Whoa. And you just…guessed the great circle routes by eyeballing the curvature of the Earth?”
“It was not guesswork. I was trained in finding Great Circles. Still…it can be…imprecise.”
He frowns. “Okay, better idea. How about I download an app for that?”
“Down load?”
“Oh, uh, get a virtual map with arc-plotting features on this.” He pulls out his smartphone.
“Didn't you just suggest you could not use your device in the next world?”
“Oh, these apps won't need internet. I only need charge for my phone,” he says. “And for that, I have an idea.”
*
The wonders of the smartphone are not lost on Hong Yi as he looks up the voltage of the average American power outlet. Nor are the wonders of standard units of measurements as he asks Vesper if she is able to generate a hundred and twenty volts.
“A hundred and twenty volts?” She grins as they convene by the desk. “That's all you need?”
He laughs. “Okay, show-off, the hard part is not going over that. You could fry my charger.”
He places the plug in her hand, gesturing out the two parallel pins, and plugs his phone into the micro-USB end of the cable while she is studying it. “Ready when you are,” he says with a thumbs-up. “If you start feeling the plug heat up, ease off a little.” She nods, placing a finger on each pin.
Almost as soon as she does, his phone screen lights up. The charging icon flickers, flickers, and stays.
“No way.” Both pairs of eyes are glued to the battery icon.
“How long do I hold the voltage?” she asks.
“A couple of hours should do it.”
She squints. “All right…well, I can’t repeat this every day, if only because I’d rather be doing something less…dull. But if your phone can plot routes with such precision, then it’d be worth the time. ‘Specially after the debacle of finding you.”
He laughs, prying the plug out of her fingers, feeling the hairs on his fingers stand. “Hey, you don't have to stand around for two hours a day being my charging port. Thanks for being cool with testing it out. But I'll try and conserve my battery anyway.” He shoves it back into the top of his trolley bag. “And can I just say…I’m so glad someone here has their entire head on their shoulder. You’re generally quite cool.”
“Why, thank you.” She smiles. “And likewise. I reckon this journey will be more bearable just with you around.”
“Aw, shucks. Speaking of the journey, Little Miss Diamonds is probably about to kick us out of the hotel. Let’s go get showered and changed.”
Vesper frowns. “About that…”
Hong Yi soon learns the most startling fact of the morning: Vesper owns two paltry changes of clothes, and Honourless has no luggage whatsoever.
With a grimace, he insists at once on a shopping trip.
All at once, he is playing audience to a bout of impromptu theater as the two proceed to harangue Orobelle for funds. There is a crossfire of complaints and insults, until Vesper says, “You have a minor fortune, no thanks to Honourless!And it will all be worthless in the next world.”
Groaning, Orobelle gestures to Dorian, who fetches from her luggage a wad of US dollars. Ten, twenty, thirty, he watches her produce two hundred dollars and shove them in Vesper’s face.
And they just have that sitting in there? he thinks as they exit the room with a keycard. What else does she have in her bags?
Hong Yi has not gotten so far as contemplating how he will explain the purpose of their trip to Honourless yet, let alone how the woman will conduct business with anyone. But it quickly grows clear, as they wander out of the sunlight and into a thrift shop, that she catches on quickly. Two minutes of watching shoppers later, she is the first into a fitting room.
Vesper lingers by the entrance. “I know little about fashion,” she mutters. “If I come out looking a right clown…don't make fun of me, all right?”
Hong Yi laughs, patting her shoulder. “You think I have a fashion sense? Relax, just wear what you wanna wear, and that's cool to me.”
All said, he finds that neither of his companions dresses anything like what he would call “a clown.” Honourless favors t-shirts and big shorts, some with abstract print and some with none at all, although she concedes a pair of cargo pants. “A fellow connoisseur, I see,” he says, leaning on the thrift store counter, and she grins back, perhaps understanding his demeanour.
“Nikain a soneth,” she answers, fanning out a handful of cash. He glances at the register and pulls out thirty dollars.
Hong Yi knew Vesper would like button shirts—the nondescript patterned kind, no less. And the moment she unearths a brown lapeled coat from the bargain rack, she seemingly cannot resist its pull. At once she disappears into a fitting room, and emerges a minute later in a grey plaid work shirt and canvas trousers. “How’s this?” she calls out.
“Looking good!” he says. “You’d look right at home at a truck convention.”
She chuckles. “Can’t say I wouldn’t attend one, either.”
With the severity of a seamstress’ blade, Orobelle declares their hotel stay over the minute they set foot back in the room.
She shoos them back out, and with only a little protesting, they are soon roll their luggage out of the hotel lobby. Down the streets and around junctions, they quickly locate a secluded alley, Dorian waving them into its shade. With their bags between them, the crew gathers in a circle.
Hong Yi watches as his companions link their hands. “Is this some sort of ritual?” he whispers.
“Do you want to come along or not?” Orobelle hisses. Honourless, wearing a new t-shirt with a nondescript eagle print, growls at her. “Well, save that bad feeling for after you've tried!”
“We can do this in two jumps, can't we?” Vesper snaps back.
The duchess peers around, then curtly answers, “Dorian, come with me. You two,” she glares at Vesper and then at Hong Yi, “Stay put. Especially you, Hong Yi.”
Sitting down on the edge of his trolley bag, Hong Yi lifts his hands. “Look, if I wanted to run off, I'd have done that already.”
He feels a hand on his shoulder as Vesper urges him backwards. Both dart back just as Honourless begins to groan and roar as if lifting an invisible weight. Vision of the trio warps, unwarps, and warps again.
Then a snap—and they are gone.
“Is Honourless gonna be doing this every single time?” he murmurs.
Vesper nods. “I feel sorry for her, to be honest, getting dragged along by the little princess.”
“What is Honourless’ deal in all this, anyway?”
Vesper shrugs. “From the sounds of it, she has a crime on the books, and Orobelle is offering to scratch it out in exchange for, erm, being the group mule for a time.”
“Daaamn. I can't blame her for it.” Hong Yi turns. “And you? What's your stake in it?”
She smirks. “It's easier than the frontlines. I’ll never fire a gun again…or I should hope—”
The air wiggles again, and out pops Honourless from the disturbance, grabbing both forearms with a shout of “Ey!”
“Whoa, you're in a hurr—y!”
Hong Yi’s last syllable tears into a shout as gravity oscillates, weakening and strengthening, and as if by a reflex he has never known he has, he strains against it. The world briefly stabilises—then the storefronts are streaks and the lampposts are lengthening—like crossing the event horizon of a black hole, all is in disarray, and yet too quiet—the honk of car horns, the chatter of pedestrians, the rumble of engines, all slipping away.
As they snap from the world, he hears Honourless shout, and that shout deepens and deepens until it descends out of audibility.
They land on the plaza of a market, surrounded by sunbaked walls that soar in square terraces.
Hong Yi only has several seconds to feel the first chill of amazement rake over him, gaping about at this new city, so rough and textured and real that it cannot possibly be a vision.
Then the heat pounces, and an uproar of voices drags his attention in, and he spots Orobelle and Dorian, holding back a tide of milling onlookers.
“We’re not gods! Or ghosts!” the duchess shouts. “Most of us aren't, anyway! We just need directions, a map…argh!”
Amid all her screeching and foot stomping, a man is shoved out of the throng to face her—small, robed in colours, with a sack of tubers cradled in his arm. His short dark hair sits in tight curls, and he speaks timidly—Hong Yi cannot understand a lick of what he says, though the combination of syllables, the crowd’s sense of dress and the arid air tell him they must be near the Sahara Desert.
With the stranger’s words, Orobelle retracts her hackles, and slips back into her imperious bearing. “Sir, take us to a navigator,” she declares. “Someone who can tell us about the cities of the world.”
At once, the commotion begins to take a new bent, inquiring, eager even—and amid this all, the man waves them after himself, pointing down a street away from the square.
Orobelle glances over her shoulder at the straggling band. “Well, don't dally already.”
*
The establishment that the man takes them to—hefting his sack of yams, no less—is half a mile on foot in the direction of the hills. Between mud and drystack walls they thread their route, trailed by the rattle of Hong Yi’s wheeled bag over rocks and gravel. Strangers stare at the entourage with their own produce on the backs of camels and mules. Orobelle grimaces in the sunlight. The few times they pass under woven canopies, they linger a little longer than they have to.
As they cross the town, a tower starts to rise over the roofs ahead, its red columns topped by wood protrusions, tapering to a pinnacle. It gazes down upon the streets in the noon sun, casting no shadow.
“What's your name?” Orobelle asks the man, through her panting. She has concluded that he must be an apprentice to the tower they are approaching.
“You may call me Komlã,” he answers.
“Komlã, what is the name of this city?”
“Kumbi Saleh, the heart of Wagadu. You have chosen the right place to seek directions—Master Raheem is the finest geographer in the kingdom.”
Their guide ushers them inside through a foot door, and the heat lifts from their backs as they pass into the grand hall. The interior, too, is molded from mud and stone, decked in colourful weavings and tiles and sloping inward. Through minuscule triangular windows, light streams into the interior, illuminating concave tables that stand upon intricate legs. Komlã leads them down the aisle between them, to the door at the end.
“Master Raheem, sir, it's Komlã,” he calls. “I bring guests—a band of travellers seeking directions!”
A muffled voice answers: “Travellers from where?”
At this, Komlã turns to look at them.
“We are from—” Orobelle begins, then halts. Where are they from?
“—Rome,” Hong Yi cuts in.
Komlã’s eyes dart to him, and he considers his answer for a second. “Roma!” he shouts then.
“Roma? Not a conquest, is this? Do they speak Latin?”
“One of them speaks our tongue, though she is white as a bone.”
“My complexion is perfectly normal!”
“It is a strange travelling band indeed,” Komlã continues. “All look to be from different lands, and all dress like no people I have ever seen.”
“They sound like Romans, alright. Their emperor calls captured peoples his own! I shudder for the day their armies learn to cross the desert. If they want directions, they must be polite about it!”
With that, their guide pushes open the door with the flat of his forearm, and they enter the astronomer's study.
The lamplight gleams off a hundred different instruments, and that is the first thing Orobelle notices. Then she sees the rest of it—a lived-in office, the pigeonhole shelves barely enough to contain all his scrolls, which also lie in stacks among telescopes and orreries. A single triangular window peers out into the day.
At his desk is seated the owner of the documents and instruments himself. Raheem lifts his head from a scroll, and Orobelle sees that his greying beard hangs to his belt. A circular gold and green cap sits in his curls, and his face is pulled into a frown.
The duchess braces herself. She can put on airs for ten minutes.
“Good afternoon, sir,” she says, striding up to the desk. “My name is Orobelle.”
His startled eyes dart to meet hers. “And good afternoon to you, child,” he answers. “I am Raheem. You are the one I am to speak to?”
She seethes at being called a child again, but this time, she withholds her vociferations. “I am their leader.”
“I see. Orobelle—lucky that you have come to the right place for help. My protege was in the right place at the right time. How may I assist you?”
“I would like to know,” Orobelle says, with a quick beckoning gesture at Hong Yi, “of the great cities of the world, as many as you can name. We have travelled far, and are seeking out an unknown person in one of these many cities, at the behest of a…prophecy.”
“A prophecy! I do not dabble in such mysteries,” says Raheem, “but I can tell you of the cities documented in the known world, if you have the means to record them.”
“Will you want payment for your help?”
“Payment? No, no, this is but a favour, and a chance to share the fruits of my study with those needing it. I have plenty enough from the king.” The man turns in his seat to sort through his scrolls, muttering to himself now and then about the possible locations of the item.
He returns a minute later, unrolling a parchment on his desk with a flourish. All peer over it. “This, my friends, is one of my crowning works, itself an extension of the seminal work of the scholar al-Khwarizmi.” He waves his hand over the northwestern coastline of the southern continent. “All of this, from Qartaj to Jenne, was mapped by me.”
It is as intricate a map as any the Queendom has produced, rivers and cities sketched among snaking coastlines. “That looks like Arabic,” whispers Hong Yi over her shoulder. “I wish I hadn't procrastinated on learning it.”
“I wish I could call my Grandma,” Vesper replies.
“This is impressive,” Orobelle says, and it is no lie. “I congratulate you on your superior work.”
The man seems to puff up at the acknowledgment. By now, Hong Yi has taken his “phone” from his pocket, and as he does, Orobelle notes Raheem eyeing it oddly, though more out of confusion than of suspicion. The duchess extends a hand towards Dorian, who already has her translation glass ready for her use.
“Strange devices you have,” says the astronomer.
“They are navigational tools we bring from our lands,” she answers.
“Well, on the matter of navigation—here is Kumbi Saleh, where we are,” says the astronomer, pointing out a city in the western half of the map. Orobelle traces the northern coastline with her glass, dotted with the names of cities: Tarãbulus, al-Jazãʾïr, Qãhirat al-Muʾizz…
“I got a photo,” says Hong Yi. “We can go study it on our own, and not bother our good scientist more than we need to.”
Orobelle turns to question him, but finds, lifted before her eyes, the display surface of his phone. As her eyes focus, she finds glowing upon that surface a perfect replica of Raheem's map.
“Impossible,” she breathes, but she obscures her amazement by turning to Raheem again, and taking her journal from Dorian to note prominent points he has raised. “This is excellent, sir. The clarity of your work may just have saved us months of aimless wandering—I believe we may know where we are headed next. We shall have to discuss it, of course. But I offer you my deepest thanks.”
“It is my pleasure,” he answers, stateliness masking relief of his own. “Is that all? Do you need anything else?”
“Not at all, besides a spare table, if you have one?”
“Ah, Komlã!” He waves at the younger man. “Show these good travellers to the desks. A good day to you and fortune in your travels!”
She nods. “I wish you the best of luck in your studies, likewise.”
As they follow Komlã away from Raheem's study, Orobelle hears a chuckle of, “that wasn't so hard,” from the astronomer. That sentiment, she decides, is mutual.
Orobelle lays her translation glass and corefinder atop the stone table. Four needles settle, as before.
Then, it is merely a matter of solving a puzzle.
The settlements of this world, Hong Yi reasons, are fewer than those in his own. “And I reckon we could find a pretty good list of inhabited settlements if we can work out what era it is. The key to that…will be the map.”
Here in the study hall, there is only one other occupant, but that is enough for them to speak in a hush. As the duchess names each city, they locate its modern counterpart. Each discovery about Hong Yi’s device startles her even more, and it is when he begins placing illusory pins upon its luminescent cartography that she concedes, “Perhaps I was hasty in calling your world a poor one.”
Hong Yi snorts, sweeping hills and coasts aside with his thumb. “Hey, no offence taken. I’m not patriotic about it or anything.” His eyes dart to the map. “Murrakus, was it? That looks like Marrakesh, the name matches…aaand, pinned.” He hands the phone back to Orobelle, who runs her glass over the photographed map. “I'm almost positive this is, like, late first millennium. God damn…we really are here, huh? I wasn't expecting time travel on day two.”
“You will get used to it,” Orobelle answers without looking up. “What's Tanjah?”
“That's Tangier,” Vesper says.
“And…Qartaj?”
“Oh, Carthage, which is modern day Tunis,” Hong Yi answers as Orobelle hands the phone back to him. “This is like a fun trivia game. Out here on the edge of the Sahel, solving geographical riddles…”
“This is no game.”
He lifts his hands in mock surrender. “I know, I know! Just coping with light humour…”
In this way, they pick away at the map, city by city across the Mediterranean, finding each modern twin from names and coastlines. At last, Hong Yi’s map is peppered with pins, all naming the known cities on Raheem’s. Then Orobelle lays the corefinder beside his phone, and Vesper adds her compass to the table.
Hong Yi peers down at it. “Our mystery person is forty-five degrees from here, almost spot-on,” he says, already tapping figures into his phone. “Okay, we have…a line.”
He lays the phone map on the table, where a red line has appeared, bisecting the map. Orobelle watches as he flicks the image about, then she points. “Stop. This region here.” She points at a peninsula southeast of the line’s midpoint. “Somewhere here can be our triangulation point. Find us a city.”
“On it, boss,” he says, and with a few button taps, the city pins return. “Okay, how about Aden? Pretty sure that one has the same name in this era.”
She glances at Dorian and Honourless, conversing one table over. “A name is enough to find it by,” she answers. “Let’s get moving.”
According to Hong Yi, Aden is a city almost as old as the peoples of the Arabian peninsula. Indeed the name alone, around which ages of story and song orbit, is enough to take Honourless to its heart.
From there, it is easy as counting to three. Orobelle plots a second arc. The two lines cross almost precisely at a single city: Istanbul. Upon the old map, its name is Qusṭanṭinīyya.
While the group contemplates the findings, Hong Yi lifts his head with a sigh. “Constantinople. Of course our person lives in one of the most populous cities in the world.”
“You did, too,” Orobelle answers curtly. “It won't stop us. Let’s go.”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
ĪRA DRACONIS - III
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts animal death and deadly infectious diseases.
Laying her sword in the atrium, Marcia wanders to the edge of Gaian’s courtyard pool. The burble of water weaves through the rustle of leaves, the man himself already waiting amid their music. A servant arrives with a tray of fruit and meats, laying it soundlessly at Gaian's side. She fills his goblet, which he wastes no time in drinking from.
“Tell me about yourself,” says the emperor’s son as she appears, “and how someone of your talents and beauty came to do such perilous work.”
Marcia laughs, descending to the pond-side. “What more is there to say that you cannot tell by looking upon me?” Since she began her new assignment, she has spent many an evening like this, whiling an hour away in the villa of her new employer.
“Keep being an enigma, then,” he answers with a grin. “I enjoy those. But don't mind me if I keep inquiring.”
They sit with the sounds for a while, and he drinks meditatively. Marcia hitches her tunic over her knee and dips a foot in the water. “I was born on the other side of the Mediterranean,” she says, staring at the water, “and I was many things, before I was a gladiator.”
Gaian props his chin up on his knee. “You were a queen, I reckon.”
She chuckles. “I have never been an aristocrat, nor ever will be.”
“And yet you have climbed to the upper echelons by your own prowess and grit. A true icon of the modern Empire…”
Marcia turns away, splashing at the water with her toe, so the reflections of ceiling frescoes are shattered. “I can’t say I have climbed much at all. Some still don't like that I mingle among your kind.”
“A shame, then, that they cannot see past your birth. If you were the heir, if the fluke of your birth had been kinder…you would be adored.” Gaian sighs heavily. “These are warring times, Marcia! They love generals like my father. But not poor me…a man more flattered by peace and festivity. Alas, there are many among the senate who can see that, too.”
“And do you think I can help you with that?” Marcia teases. “Do you think you look more warlike by association?”
“That’s not all of it. I do fear for my life, you know. I do not think all my colleagues above sabotage, or, “ he shudders visibly, “assassination. And so your current post serves a double function. Now, if you were the heir, and I, the warrior…I would have been picked to shreds long ago.”
As he chuckles, she leans to pick a slice of ham out of the tray and nibbles on it. “I reckon I would make an effective noble. Eating olives and throwing feasts all year.” She grins. “But that will never be my life, short of marrying into wealth.”
“Marrying, you say? I can help with that.” Gaian grins, but Marcia knows there is nothing but strife to be found at the end of this line of thought.
“I’m afraid I do not want such a life, even if it were within my reach. I am a free spirit…a villa cannot hold me.”
“Oh, you wound me,” he sighs, clutching his heart in mock agony. “Not even a second’s hesitation in rejecting.”
She watches him closely, and catches the trace of a longing glint in his eye, drawn into stark relief by the wine. “I may be a gladiator, but some games are too dangerous even for me to play,” she answers, withdrawing her hand before he can reach and take it.
In that same moment, Marcia hears a sound that is ill at home in the scene: the gentle scrape of her scabbard on stone, echoing through the villa halls.
Once she hears it, her heart thumps louder, and she pricks her ears. Now, there is only the rustling of leaves across the peristyle, and the gentle lap of water. But Marcia knows she cannot be mistaken.
She rises abruptly from her seat by the pool, water scattering in her wake. “Excuse me for a moment,” she says, stepping backward. Before Gaian can protest, she strides away, and back to the atrium.
*
Marcia’s gladius lies in the same position, but its tip points in the opposite direction from how it was left—inwards towards the hall, like an ominous compass.
She picks it up to inspect, and draws the steel blade to find it has not been altered—but as she does, a small scrap of parchment flutters out from inside.
Marcia swoops the pale scrap from the ground. Upon its face, a note is written in rough, untrained minuscule.
As her eyes take in the words, her insides are eaten by frost. Her hand drops to her side.
beware your next match, she wants you dead - o
*
Gaian finds Marcia leaning against an atrium pillar, the note crushed in her fist.
“I am so very sorry!” is the first thing he gasps, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. “Oh, Marcia, I must have had more wine than I realised. I did not mean to be so forward. I swear upon my very house that I have no designs upon you.”
“Relax, Gaian!” she sighs. “You really are too dramatic. Even if you did, I would take no offence.”
“If ever I dared cross you, you could murder me in cold blood.”
“In a bad mood, perhaps,” she says, then her face hardens. “But, if I may…” She bows her head. “I must confess, I fear my association with you has brought me ill attention.”
At this, Gaian is unusually silent. Then his shoulders sag. “Ah…and for that, I am even sorrier…that was never my intent,” he answers, a mournful look taking hold of his features.
“It is not your fault that your father’s choices have made you enemies. But they may now be my enemies, too.”
He sighs, then eyes her seriously. “Oh, Marcia…now I have brought this upon you, I can only work to fix it. You must know—if there is anything I can buy you to keep you safe—a better home, a better sword—consider it yours.”
Marcia ponders his offer briefly. “If you can buy me the safety of a friend,” she answers, “then that is all I need. Her name is Olivia. She works for the house of Lucia Pollia Diana.”
“Diana.”
“Yes. Lady Diana is where the danger lies.”
There is little need to explain what the danger is. Gaian has already suspected it, and Marcia only leaves the villa once he has pledged his help.
For two dimming days, she awaits her match, casting glances over her shoulder on the streets, watching every passer-by for signs of subterfuge. Olivia does not return. She can only guess what her absence means.
Then the glorious day dawns, all decked in red banners, and the streets are full long before the gates open. There are no clouds in the sky to soften the light upon the colosseum as she turns herself in for match preparations.
“You will be grand today,” Quintus says with a firm hand on her shoulder. He buckles her sword as she rubs oil on her arms with cold fingers. “You are our best fighter. You are better than the odds.”
She smiles at the wrinkled face of her coach. “You know skill alone cannot defeat an unknown beast,” she says. “I will need luck, too. Especially given there may be…interfering circumstances.”
Preparations complete, hands trembling, she turns to the exit arch, swallowing to quell her fright.
“Then may the gods bless your step today!” Quintus calls after her, as she strides into the light of the glowing archway, step by momentous step. “For you will need it… The dragon’s ire is not easily quenched.”
The strange words strike a sour chord as the gate clangs shut between them.
In that moment, Marcia senses some deep, rank wrongness about the scene. Her coach's voice has turned alien. The weight of her gladius instills no certainty.
Fear begins to grip her as she walks into the screams of her spectators and the light that burns the colosseum sand. She marches into their midst with her chin lifted high, and as the sun hits her, she draws—
—Quintus’ wooden sword.
*
Then, at the other end of the arena, she sees the wolves.
These wolves do not howl. They snap and snarl and gnash their frothing teeth. They strain on the ropes, trying to walk like men.
She sees in their eyes the hollowing madness that takes dogs, that infects the humans they bite with the same. She has heard many names, but Tadla called it rabies, the terminal rage. None she saw with it ever survived.
All of the wolves are sick, sick to the brain.
Standing alone on the sand, wielding a blade of blunted wood, Marcia has never quite seen death this close. The gamemakers must have been bought. And so was Quintus, old Quintus, the only man she would trust to hand her her sword.
But the sun is harsh, and this is no dream. Her attention snaps back to the roaring amphitheatre. She marches forth anyway, head pridefully high as if this were not her execution. On the other side of the fence, the blade descends through the thick air, the air of the Bosphorus strait, and slices the wolves’ ropes.
The pack, loosened from their strangling bonds, tear across the sand. The screams rise like a crimson tide, but they cannot drown out the rattle of the rabid wolves.
There is nothing now, nothing between Marcia and the dragon’s ire. Diana’s ire. The ire of centuries of conquest and greed.
She looks up at the audience, turns, and runs.
From the day Orobelle and company make landing in Constantinople, there is an assault of red painted banners declaring, on this very day, a gladiator match for the eons. Upon each banner is a painting of an armed warrior facing a nondescript toothed beast, without enough detail to identify as one species or another. By then, crowds are already thickening on the roads into the arena, stifling their advance through the city.
“Is the match happening now?” Hong Yi exclaims. “No way, can we watch?”
“We don't have time to waste on a tacky blood sport,” Orobelle growls.
But luck has other plans—for as they approach the grand arena of stone and its thousand terraced archways, the corefinder’s needle cleaves to it, and resolutely points into the oval building.
With a loud groan, Orobelle turns to squint at the arena’s curved facade, glancing between the structure and the corefinder’s traitorous needle.
“Our target is inside,” she says. “I guess we’ll watch one fight.”
“‘fraid that's no surprise,” Vesper replies. “Looks like the whole city is here to watch.”
Honourless has stowed in her pocket a small cache of stolen denarii; these, she hands out to her companions as they are ushered through the vaulting arena portal by stone-faced men.
The teeming, muttering crowds flow like molasses through hallways and up the steps, at times so dim that they almost lose each other in the sluggish torrent. As the archway approaches, Orobelle shrills for her companions. They exit between red pillars into the blinding sun, and she turns to see a few dozen concentric tiers of stands rising like a bowl from the sandy oval in the middle. The lowermost are filled with spectators by now, and the higher seats are getting packed as she watches.
A passer bumps her elbow, then another. “Hey!” she spits at their back. Dusting out her rumpled dress, the duchess glances at the corefinder again. The needle points towards the lowest terrace.
She begins to push through the throng, and Dorian pursues with a shout, the rest of the party tailing him. A human chain, they snake through gaps between other visitors.
Then a horn fanfare rips across the arena. The stands explode with a scramble for places, and again they are bounced about into disarray.
Orobelle does not know how many whacked elbows and bruised toes she endures before the lowest bulwark of the arena surfaces from the mass of bodies, and she does not stop pushing till her palm meets its rough concrete. “Here!” she shouts then, turning to wave a hand over the crowd. Dorian shoulders his way between two shorter men to reach her, Honourless’ arm in his grip.
Her companions gather around her, mopping sweat from their brows. “You could not convince me to return here if you paid me,” Honourless mutters, but Orobelle’s eyes have returned to the instrument cradled in her palms.
It points across the oval, at the other end of the arena. She groans. “You cannot be serious.”
The horns die down, and a voice replaces them. “Welcome, welcome all! Are you ready, to witness a game for the ages, a challenge never seen before?” A tidal wave of whistles and screams answers, louder than a storm. “On one end of the arena…a horror beyond your wildest imagination! Behold!”
A gate clangs open beneath them. It emits a splash of water—and then comes the baying, so strangled and ghostly that the crowd falls silent at once.
“What in the Light’s name is that?” Orobelle breathes.
A bristling pack of wolves has scrambled out of the portico, each attached by a rope at the neck to their keeper within. They do not walk like wolves, but like puppets: teetering on their hind legs, jolting across the ground in zigzags, their claws scrabbling as if clinging for their lives. Their mouths pour foaming spittle onto the sand. The person holding their leashes never exits the gate—it crashes shut, louder than a temple bell, separating the keeper from the beasts.
Orobelle has never seen anything resembling the bizarre condition of these wolves. From the way that Vesper and Hong Yi turn to each other, she senses there is something unprecedented about it to them, too.
At the far end, the other gate closes. Out of the shadow marches their vaunted gladiator, answered by a surge of screams. The blood-red flash of their cape is visible even from here, their helmet topped by sinuous horns.
“Who will face them but Marcia, the Brazen Bull? Our finest gladiator, she has bested lions, bulls, and even dragons! But can she best a pack of demon wolves? Or has she met her match today?” The voice pauses. “And what's this? Her weapon! It is not her gladius today, but a dummy sword! The odds are enormous! How will she weasel her way out this time?”
Orobelle hears shrieks around her. “Not Marcia!” cries a woman. “Not she! This is certain death! Can't they end the fight?”
The war drum rolls, like the beating of a heart. The rope is sliced. The wolves tear forth. The gladiator halts, turns, and begins to sprint—away from the pack, towards the banners.
The corefinder needle swings.
Leaning forward, Orobelle grips the device with white knuckles, eyes flicking between its golden face and the warrior. “This can't be,” she breathes, pointing a shaky finger at the woman in red, watching as the needle spins to follow her.
The moment the wolves make their appearance, Vesper and Hong Yi curse in unison. They can hear their hoarse snarling, a scraping noise that throats aren't meant to make.
“You’re seeing this, right?” Hong Yi shouts to Vesper as the gladiator marches into the open. “It can't be right. They can't expect her to win unless she has backup. Right?”
Vesper only concedes a clenching of her jaw. “This is an execution,” she growls. “One rabid wolf, she might be able to take. But fifteen? Oh, and they gave her a bloody wooden sword, too!”
“What?” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “No! No.”
The drums roll. The ropes are cut. The wolves clump in a pack and tide out towards the moving figure.
Sparing only a moment’s hesitation, the gladiator spins, and runs for the gate. The crowd gasps as the red cloak streaks across the arena, the rabid pack closing in upon her from every side.
Vesper can see that the warrior has no interest in some valiant final stand. Every move betrays her shrewdness. She has realised what they have—that there is no winning if she faces them. There is no winning if even one speck of spittle lands in her eye.
It is then that Orobelle flies to the baluster, and raises a shaky hand to point at the gladiator. And when she cries, “It's her! Marcia, the warrior—she's our mark!” a thousand thoughts crash together.
Vesper casts Hong Yi a stricken glance. “We must go help her!” she shouts, tugging on his arm.
“Are you serious?” He frowns, but she can see the fatalistic agreement in his eyes. “We just settled that it's certain death down there!”
Again she watches the gladiator, fleeing for her life across the sand. “How else are we taking her out of there alive? Any bright ideas?”
With both hands on the baluster, Vesper boosts herself onto the barrier. A frantic chorus of panic explodes from the spectators around her, amid which Hong Yi bursts out, “Okay! Okay! I'll help you land, but you're on your own once you hit the ground!”
“That's all I need, thank you!”
“You’re mad, you know that?” He taps her arm, and she feels herself lighten.
With a single dizzying leap, she launches herself right off the barrier.
It feels like sinking through water with her backpack, the way she descends too slowly through the air, among a thousand gazes. But this is no river: the air burns around her as she falls, a wave of cries following her down. She cannot understand much beyond the crackle of fear and awe in their voices, and as her feet meet the sand, she can suddenly hear the whole colosseum—the bellows and whistles and coughs and snarls.
She spends a second sizing up the ring. She can make it across in less than a minute. Then, in full view of the terraces, she takes off after the wolf pack, dodging their trail of spit. By now, Marcia is scrambling up the rungs of the entrance gate. Beneath her, the beasts rear up on their hind legs, piling over each other with fangs flashing at her shins.
The walls blur by, and the cracks in the walls, and the dark pawprints where the wolves pounded their saliva into the sand. As air rubs past, static builds on Vesper’s hands.
She races, eyes narrowing, till there is nothing between her and the gladiator but a roiling pack of wolves. She snatches a rock and hurls it at the pack. As it clangs on the gate, her heart booms louder than their godless snarling.
“Oi! You fiends, over here!”
Sixteen pairs of eyes turn, wolf and human. Vesper’s gaze meets the gladiator’s, three rungs up the gate. Her red cloak billows like a war flag, her stance proud despite the surrender in her gaze. Her eyes widen.
Then the tide of wolves turns upon her.
Stupid bravado has landed Vesper in many a bind, and it still startles her how fast that fire drains away in the face of death. She has watched bombs explode, has gazed down the barrels of cannons. And as she looks these walking corpses in the eye, her blood freezes in the same way.
But this is the nature of her training: the terror has to be separated from the rote actions of her body. The terror can be nursed later. Death is forever.
By now, the wolves have shrunk the gap to metres before her, when that elusive window appears—when they are closer to her than to Marcia.
This is the only moment when she can act. The current is already thrashing to be reunited with the ground, and it needs no telling where to go.
Vesper hears the gladiator scream, a wordless protest.
And then she thrusts a hand forward, and the lightning strikes.
Marcia can barely make sense of what her eyes are seeing, when the rock clangs on the gate, reverberating in her teeth and she turns to see a person, with wild brown hair and nothing but rage in their posture. Perhaps in her terror she is finally hallucinating, three arms above the ground, hands burning on iron.
But there they stand, their hands spitting sparks into the ground as the world blows by. And like a stormcloud, the pack whirls around to close in on the newcomer, and all Marcia can do is cry out—
Lightning booms, not from the sky, but from the stranger's hands. It arcs through the wolf pack, one beast at a time, illuminating everything. She can smell the singed flesh, see the blinding white, feel the hairs on her neck stand.
For three seconds, she watches the wolves twitch and convulse, their last puppet dance before they all crumple to the ground. Fifteen wolves are now fifteen corpses.
Over them, the lightning winks out as fast as it appeared. The arena is too silent. Now, Marcia can hear herself panting, the air like hot coals in her lungs. Beneath her, the person—a woman perhaps, but she isn't sure—towers over the dead wolves with bolts crackling off her palms, and meets Marcia’s eye again.
Amid the first rousing whistles and whoops of the audience, she begins to descend the lattice of the gate, a tremor in her step.
“Who…who are you?” she calls.
“Ah… Vesper!” the stranger answers.
“Vesper? Never have I been so happy to see the evening star,” Marcia cries, dodging around the corpses and stumbling as her knees wobble. She is all too aware of the crowd watching, yet as Vesper offers her arm, she could imagine they are alone in the world.
“You…are…Marcia?” asks Vesper.
“Yes,” Marcia says, eloquence evaporating. She takes Vesper’s arm, the relief almost bowling her over. “How did you do that? With the lightning?”
Vesper seems briefly confused. “How… Fulgur…fuego? O, el rayo! Ah…” She laughs awkwardly. “I don't…Latin.”
“But—”
They are awakened then to the thud, thud, thud of armoured footsteps, as the gate begins to creak upward again. Over their heads, a voice bellows, “Halt, intruder!”
All at once, they crash back into the world. Marcia yanks on Vesper’s arm. “Run!” she screams, and Vesper seems to understand, for they both take off into the arena at the same time—only to find another rank of guards closing in from the other gate. Without a word, they swerve in a perpendicular direction, and the two bands arc towards them, swords flashing. She can feel the surge of lightning in the air as her companion begins to gather another strike…
A flash of a face. A third person blinks into existence—tall, pale, scarred–muttering in a language she doesn't know. Vesper cries, honour—, voice edged with relief. Before Marcia can even comprehend what she is seeing, nor the infinity of other sounds beyond their voices, the new stranger seizes their arms with talonlike fingers, and the world turns inside out.
They are in a forest. Vesper barely reacts, so Marcia steels herself too. The stranger cries out, a roar without words, agony comprehensible.
The world turns inside out again.
When they land, they are gazing over the arena from which they just fled, from an overlooking baluster. At once, the watchers in the stands scatter and point and scream her name, and a girl with pale hair and an extravagant pink tunic steps in front of her. “Marcia!” she shouts. “I am Orobelle, Duchess of Diamonds, Knot of Worlds. We are about to take you elsewhere. Any objections?”
“Not at all, I’m in danger—we must go!” Marcia answers as the shouting crescendos around them.
Orobelle turns back to the stranger. “Honourless, let's go. You can do this, right?”
Honourless—ah, that's what Vesper said—shouts something whose warlike spirit carries across the language barrier. She feels Vesper snatch her right hand, and a man she doesn't know, her left. Then the world begins to warp and ripple, and Orobelle says, “Hong Yi! Whatever you did when she ghosted with you—it helped.”
Hong Yi—the one holding her left hand—nods once, and as he does, everything around them, every seam between the blocks, every frightened bystander, lengthens into stripes, like threads in a loom, no picture or design discernible in them.
The world ripples, and her stomach lurches, but her discomfort cannot compare to that of Honourless, whose scream fills every gap of this incomprehensible weaving.
In what feels at once like a second and an hour, the colours snap back in place different.
It is silent here. The echo of the colosseum still crowds Marcia’s head, but they are not in the colosseum anymore.
They are standing atop a small hill. A lake shines blue by a town of cuboid buildings, plains rolling away in every direction. The wind blows by, carrying a gentle chill.
Thud. Beside Orobelle, Honourless tumbles onto her side, motionless.
”Honourless.” Orobelle stares down at her, crouches, and shakes her shoulder. Honourless does not so much as twitch. The girl rises again. “She's out cold. Dorian—”
Before she has completed her request, Dorian has already knelt to scoop her up. The duchess waves for her companions, and points down the hill at a cluster of buildings. “We must lodge somewhere, and catch Marcia up.”
Without another word, they begin their trek towards the buildings. She becomes aware of Vesper strolling up beside her, a strident worry in her gaze. “What is it?” asks Marcia, trying not to feel as if those eyes were burning into her.
“Lobos— wolf teeth,” she says simply, pointing at Marcia’s leg.
She glances at her shins for the first time since the battle, and sees a gash where one of the beasts’ fangs raked her skin, blood staining her sandal straps.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Forged in Fire - I
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts deadly infectious diseases.
As Marcia’s eyes come to rest on the wound, dread rakes down her back. Now she starts to feel it: a gnawing at her flesh, a smouldering decay. It is different from any other she has known. Different from the sickness on lions’ teeth. She is a sack of skin enclosing muscle and bones, so vulnerable to rot.
“No,” she breathes, vision drifting away from her body.
At that gentle utterance, Vesper tugs on her wrist. Both pairs of feet stop on the grass, and Marcia’s startled eyes rise to meet hers—there is enough force there to hold her fast to the ground.
Her companion murmurs something in that rolling tongue of hers; the fear straining her voice and the wrinkling of her brow are the only things Marcia can understand. Then she lets go, and swings the pack off her shoulder. She kneels in the grass, pulling a large metal flask and a bandage from the pockets.
Marcia can barely look as Vesper steadies her leg with a hand behind her knee. She grips the end of the bandage between her teeth and pours water from the flask, coolness trickling over the tear in her skin. The wound lights up with sensation, and so does her face.
“Please,” she gasps, vision throbbing again. “This is too much.” Vesper doesn't seem to understand, unbuckling Marcia’s sandal and wrapping the bandage once, twice, around her shin.
By now, the rest have halted several arms’ lengths away. “Hurry already!” Orobelle shouts. “We're two worlds away from where we should be!”
Rising back to her feet, Vesper nods to Marcia. Her next words are gentle, and afraid, spoken as much by her eyes as her voice. With a nod at each other, they hasten to rejoin the party.
On the first grey road of the city, Vesper and Hong Yi fall into a murmured conversation. Marcia watches as he reaches into a pocket of his trousers and pulls out a small rectangular slab of glass and metal, tapping on its surface so that it lights up. Colours fleet across the glowing surface, and he continues tapping for a while, looking away from the road.
Then, slowing to her side, he says over his shoulder, in stilted syllables, “Hoc vulnus te occidere.” This wound will kill you.
Marcia’s eyes widen. “You know Latin?” He looks like someone from the other end of the continent where Constantinople sits, from Mongolia or Sina, but he dresses nothing like what she hears they do, wearing a metal-framed eyepiece on his nose.
Instead of replying, he turns the gleaming tablet around to show it to her.
On the luminescent glass are printed two blocks of words—one labelled “Latin,” the other, “English.” And there, written in the light, are the words he has just spoken, inscribed in majuscule.
She watches, eyes round, as he wipes the glass clear of text, then begins to tap out a new message on a mosaic of white lettered tiles.
She reads the words before he voices them: “This tool translates both ways. You may use it.” He taps on the glass again, and the two blocks of text switch places.
Marcia takes the device, warm from his touch, and scans the letters for the ones she knows, the ones she doesn't. She starts to tap out her reply, glancing now and then at the words that have appeared on the other side. There are some letters she does not recognise, and some joined together in ways she hasn't seen…
“T-hat is not c—” She starts reading, but stumbles on the syllables. She wrinkles her brow, frowns and hands the device back, but Hong Yi yells with delight, glancing between the screen and her face. He says something in a rush of syllables, waves at the screen, and reads out her words. “That is not certain.”
Leaning, she studies the letters again. “Th” makes a sound like “f.” She echoes him: that is not certain. He grins for seconds, and then his expression sobers. Clearing her words, he starts tapping out more.
“You have abilities relating to healing?” he reads aloud in Latin. She nods. He types. “But this disease has a hundred-in-hundred mortality rate, without a physician.”
“I know.” He doesn't seem to need a translation.
She waves for his device, and he hands it over. With Hong Yi watching over her shoulder, she begins to print her reply, sigil by sigil. She makes a mistake. He points out the tile with the shape like a triangle attached to a square.
Then, one painstaking minute later, she shows him the words. “It will not be easy, but I have faith. I have survived many things that should have killed me.”
As they cross a road and step onto its grey paved verge, Vesper returns to Marcia’s side—this time with the long-haired man following her. Brown-skinned and brown-haired, he stands tall despite leaning with the weight of Honourless on his shoulder, orange silk coat swishing around his feet. He has a distant look in his eye that resolves to attention when Vesper speaks to him.
Turning to Marcia, he says, “I do not think we have properly met.” It's perfectly comprehensible Latin. “My name is Dorian the Hopeful—I am Orobelle’s protector. Vesper would like me to ask, on her behalf, how you are feeling.”
“Ah! Dorian, what a relief to hear words I understand,” she says. As they walk, the mountain wind whips past, biting through gaps in her armour. She draws her arms around herself. How does she feel? “I don’t know. I’m startled, terrified…confused.”
He relays the words, again in Latin—and her eyes widen when Vesper answers, as if comprehending him. Marcia watches her form foreign words with her mouth.
“She asks if you are sure you can survive,” Dorian says. “Hong Yi claims you are able to heal yourself, but there are physicians—in this world, at least—who would know how to treat such an affliction, too.”
As he speaks, Marcia begins to notice a tremble in her arms, the cold raising goosebumps all along them. The gnawing in her leg has grown insistent; it turns her stomach. “I know that my survival without intervention is possible,” she says, “but that is all I can say for sure.”
As he repeats her words to Vesper, it dawns on her: there is magic at work here. Everyone must be hearing him in their own tongue.
“She says, ‘I'm sorry it has been so sudden, that you were taken without warning…’”
“No, I am happy to be gone, at least now,” Marcia replies. “I had few friends there, and many enemies. There was a woman I fancied, but she was a slave, and there was a prince too entangled in political plots…I do not know if either will survive the reckoning to come.” She exhales slowly.
“‘That sounds frightening, all the same.’”
“It is less frightening than it is disorienting. And now, I am at death’s door. Dorian—I have some questions of my own.”
Blinking, he gestures his agreement. “I shall answer as I am able.”
“Who are you?” she says. “You and everyone in this gathering. Where do you come from?”
“That is a long story. We have come a long way in search of you. Each of us hails from a different world, except myself and Orobelle.”
Marcia blinks. “What do you mean by a different world? How can there be another world?” She thinks again of the way the world flashed by, of the alien structures in the distance. “Is this…”
He nods. “These worlds lie parallel to each other, side by side, but we can only transit between them through special means, like Tunnels, and ghosts like Honourless.” He nods at the woman over his shoulder. “My duchess and I, we have crossed five worlds to find you. You are like the rest of us. You wield influence over some innate force of the world. And my duchess, Orobelle, holds these worlds together—she is the one who sought us out.”
For a minute, Marcia stares, as a hundred mysteries coalesce into one. The kindness she drew from strangers. Her ability to placate with touch…her sensing of the internal state of every body. He must be referring to that; there is no other meaning to his words.
Her eyes dart from one person to another—Orobelle, whose small form belies a world of unspoken trouble, Hong Yi with his questioning eyes, and Vesper—who is watching her with such intensity that she has to look away.
“What magic do you possess?”
“The giving and taking of heat,” Dorian answers, after some thought. “I light campfires…I cool water for drinking.”
“A pantheon of gods, that is what we are,” she murmurs. “Is Orobelle only here to unite us? Is there other business, for which you should come so far to find me?”
“We are saving my niece’s life,” he says.
“Ah…and what do I have to do with that?”
“She was taken by someone—someone who destroyed the town Orobelle presides over. You would be crucial—or so I've been told—in our confrontation against them.”
“I see. I have wondered, how is it that everyone hears you in their own tongue?”
“Oh, that…that is a boon from my servitude to my duchess. I did not always have this skill.”
Marcia waits for the next sentence, but it does not come. She nods slowly, mulling over this barest hint of a new picture of the cosmos. The city of Constantinople, which was her world for years, is suddenly tiny and far away. There is a lot to this man, much of which he’s not saying—and she has a feeling she may never hear of it, if the duchess has her way…
“Well…could you ask Vesper this, then—does she know Latin? She spoke a few words of it to me before. She even has a name like a Latin one.”
This question, Dorian echoes immediately for Vesper, who seemed almost to be waiting to answer. When she replies, he translates: “She doesn't know Latin. But she knows a language descended from Latin, which shares similar words.”
“Descended? She’s…from the future?”
“It is not the future, nor the past,” he says solemnly. “Each world has its own place in the flow of time. For those living in a given world, that is their present.” As he concludes, Vesper speaks up again, gesturing for a translation. “She says, ‘I have only seen swords like yours in museums. Latin is no longer spoken where I’m from. It is lucky we share some words in common… By the way, I was impressed at your poise and level head during the fight.’”
From nowhere, a jolt of thrill spears through Marcia’s dread. She musters up a cool smile. “Why, that means a lot coming from you, my dashing saviour.”
When Dorian translates for Vesper, her eyebrows rise in perplexion at first, then her face eases into a smile of her own as she answers. “‘I did only what the situation demanded. If you had been any slower to act, there would have been none of you left to save.’”
Marcia lets herself bask in the compliment for just a second, before the gravity of her predicament sets back in. “Well, let's hope there is still some of me left by next week,” she replies, and they walk on.
At last, they enter the city, frigid in the afternoon sun. Concrete blocks pepper the roadsides among evergreen gardens, tall and grey, with few concessions to fountains and glass. Cyrillic characters declare the names of places, but Hong Yi can only read them by sound—enough to understand they are in a city called Arkalyk. Everything else, he will have to Google later.
They soon come upon a surly hotel on the second street down, the only one to announce itself with block letters in English. Orobelle lowers her translation glass and waves them in its direction, and like a pack of dogs they follow her towards it.
“Honourless,” she declares as they march up the plaza to the lobby. “Honourless!” She groans. “Hong Yi. What currency do we need?”
Stopping outside the steel-framed doors, she waves for her bag. Dorian tugs one out from under Honourless’ limp form, and begins to produce a variety of bills out of the pockets. Hong Yi stares as the man conjures an unsorted wad of United States dollars and Nigerian naira.
“Erm…none of these,” he murmurs. “I’m gonna have to take this to a money changer.”
“Well, don’t be long.” She nods once at Dorian, who extends the handful of bills towards him. With a befuddled blink, he snatches the stack of money, and bursts into the hotel lobby.
The woman on staff comprehends his English, but only just; with a tidy smile, she recites the directions—one street down and turn the corner. With a hasty thanks, he zips out the doors and past his entourage on the doorstep, shoving the bills deep into his pockets.
If the wrinkled man at the rickety money exchange speaks English, he does not find out—currency is the only language he needs this time. The teller takes the proffered money with knobbly fingers with practised ease, and hands back an amount of tenge roughly equal to what he has calculated from the rate on his wall.
When Hong Yi returns, Orobelle and company have relocated to the rustic couches inside the lobby. It seems Dorian has lain Honourless down on the cushions, and Marcia sits by her knees, with Vesper leaning against the wall beside them.
Upon the first sight of his face, Orobelle marches up to him, hand outstretched, to which he yields the tenge. He was not expecting a thank-you. There isn't one.
This time, the duchess allows Dorian to make the bookings, although from the vantage of the couch, it appears from all her gesticulation that she is dictating every word to him.
They watch in restless silence. Honourless starts to slip off the couch. Hong Yi quickly nudges her torso back onto the seat with his knee. “What a slave driver,” Vesper mutters, eyes trained on the girl. “I hope Dorian is getting paid for his efforts.”
“In liquid food, maybe.”
It is Orobelle who returns with the stack of keys in her hand, Dorian tailing her silently. “Attention, everyone!” she calls—three heads turn. Dorian lifts the fourth off the couch. “Here are the keys to your lodging. I will have a room to myself. Dorian will be with me. The rest of you may share the family suite in whatever distribution you please.”
They only spare a second to glance between themselves, and at the woman now propped up against Dorian's shoulder. “Sure…we can be family for a couple of days,” Hong Yi chuckles.
*
There is something distinctly faded about this old hotel, as they venture up the rugged staircase to the second floor. The walls are striped in yellow and white, wallpaper that might have looked more at home fifty years ago. Decades’ worth of lint gather on the carpets, onto which light spills from the windows.
Following the trio, Dorian takes Honourless to the family suite, stepping aside for Hong Yi to unlock the door.
It gives way with a creak, to reveal…three beds. He sighs.
“Will Honourless be on the couch as before?” asks Dorian as they file into the yellow-walled suite. He is already stepping towards the couch—but Vesper intercepts him with her arm.
“No, not one more time,” she says, then drops her pack on the couch seat and points him to the nearest bed. Making no reply, he lays the woman down on the covers, then bows his greeting and turns back to the corridor.
By the time she lays down on her chosen bed, Marcia can already feel the infection creeping up her leg—a different beast from what she knows, tingling like a pinched nerve.
When she narrows her attention upon the infection, it burns and aches. There is no reprieve after a few minutes of stinging; it has gone deeper. She slumps against the backboard, wondering if this is a fight she can win.
Marcia once heard about a grisly siege strategy from her commanders, in which the disemboweled corpses of plague victims were lobbed over the walls to infect the dissidents within. It was then, as she smeared her sword with manure in the hours before battle, that she learned that war is not always a contest of force: even the mightiest succumb when black sores break out across their bodies and blood fills their lungs.
But she has also heard about the Roman legions who torch the cities that stand too proud against the imperial cause. When fire is put to the walls, none survive but the few who flee in time. It is the spirit of united peoples that razing seeks to destroy. A fire can ruin a city beyond saving, all its sick, and all its healthy…
Her eyelids dip. She tries again, tries burning the wound. The chill of impending fever sweeps across her body.
When she opens her eyes, Hong Yi is sitting in the next bed, extending his device in one hand with a frown that furrows his brow. She takes it and begins to spell out her words. It's easier now.
Usually, it is heat and pain that burn the infection away. I can force a fever, and whatever else it needs. But I do not know how much will be enough.
When she hands back the device, Hong Yi glances over the words. Where she took a minute to tap out her words, he needs only seconds: “Your thinking is sound. The rabies virus cannot survive a strong enough heat. Your body will become better at fighting the infection the more familiar it grows. But if this fails…we must take you to a hospital.”
Her eyes drift to the bandage. The siege is within her. “Four days. If I am not recovering by then, then do that.”
He nods. She needs no more words. There are worse places, and worse times, to face her possible death.
Closing her eyes, she lets her attention narrow in on the wounds.
It doesn't take long for Marcia to descend into the throes of a fever like no other. Hong Yi watches as she grows too weak to keep upright, and takes to curling under a blanket. She is shivery, and speaks in stops and starts, when offered his smartphone; by then, she can barely lift herself even to eat the snacks he has picked up from downstairs.
Hong Yi does not notice when morning segues into afternoon. Neither has slept in a day, but he and Vesper quickly agree to take turns keeping watch over her and liaising with the duchess down the hall.
“Orobelle.” When Dorian opens the suite door, he pokes his head through, steeling his face.
The duchess lazily looks up from the mattress, lowering her journal and pen. “What is it?”
“It’s Marcia. She was bitten, by one of the wolves. The illness they had, that's how it's transmitted, and she—”
“She what? She has powers of healing, doesn't she?”
“Orobelle, you must understand. This disease has a perfect fatality rate. Unless some miracle happens, it will kill her…”
Her face contorts into something akin to frustration. “What do you want?” Her voice is stern, but cautiously open.
“For now, money for food. She needs food. We do too, but she needs it the most. Please.”
Before she parts with the tenge, Hong Yi catches Orobelle looking to Dorian, though for what, he cannot tell. Once the money is in his hand, he has no more interest in knowing. As he scrambles down the stairs, he runs a quick search of the local stores, and then dashes out the lobby door.
The dining choices in the city of Arkalyk are not like any he has seen before, but then again, Kazakhstan is not like any country he has visited. This is a town that grew out from its mines, and he sees its age and industry at every turn. Workers line up for lunch in the chilly sun, dust powdering their jackets. There is always a distant churn of machinery, rumbling down the roads like a heartbeat.
Wonder what Honourless was thinking about that brought us to this place, he thinks, as he peers over the menu options and starts typing the characters into his browser. At the front of the queue, he apologises in English when the shopkeeper attempts to greet him in Kazakh—but she understands the word, sorry, and they proceed in sentence fragments, enough to string together a transaction from.
Four packets of palaw under his arm, Hong Yi jogs back up the windy road. He pours pieces of grit out of his shoes at the suite door, shaking off the last of the cold.
The pale blue curtains are still drawn when he enters. Vesper sits on the floor by Marcia's head, their gazes unwaveringly locked. In the next bed, Honourless lies heartily snoring.
There is little space to spare here between the kitchenette, the table, and the beds, all packed into a narrow rectangular unit. He stops at the kitchen counter attached to the wall, barely wide enough for all four packs.
“Lunch is here!” he announces.
Vesper looks up. “That smells delicious.” She rises to her knees.
He rummages through the cutlery drawer. “Is she doing okay?”
“I don't know. She can barely speak.”
“Less than ideal,” he mutters. “Don't let me distract you from her.”
“Oh, we're not doing much. It's about time I sorted out food and water for myself, anyway. Do you have an aspirin?”
“I have modern meds that do the same as aspirin. But surely she can control her fever if she made it happen on purpose?”
“I…I don’t know that we should leave her battling a fever this high alone. I can feel the heat radiating off of her.” Vesper walks to the sink and plucks open the cabinet under it with a squeak. “If she's not improving in two days, we're taking her to the doctor.” She drops a kettle on the table and knees the door shut, brow furrowed. “She really reckons she can survive rabies.”
“I mean, with the vaccine, we could, too. I suspect she is basically giving herself the vaccine.”
“Is it contagious?” Vesper turns on the tap and puts the kettle under it.
“No human has ever transmitted it to another. And even if it were possible…she just got bitten a few hours ago, it wouldn’t be infectious yet.”
“Are you sure? This disease is fatal.”
“Yeah, I’ve done some reading. I really wouldn’t lean on guesswork here.”
“Reading…on your phone?” He nods.
“Quid dicis?” Marcia mumbles.
Vesper’s eyes dart to her, then flick upward in thought. “De ti,” she answers.
“De mē?” Marcia answers, smiling hazily.
“Sí. De tu salud.”
“Gratias tibi, mel.” With a small smile, Marcia’s head drops back to the pillow.
After a pause, Vesper grins with a shake of her head, putting the kettle on the stove.
Hong Yi glances at her. “I didn't know you spoke Spanish,” he says.
“Mum’s side of the family does,” she answers.
Amid the hiss of the stove, Hong Yi starts to unwrap his palaw on the corner table, stomach growling. “That's so cool. Do you understand what she’s saying?”
“Just enough. I'm surprised I can make out anything at all. Last thing she said was something like, ‘thank you, honey.’”
“Wow, she's flirting with you.”
“Ha, very funny. Anyway, reckon we could learn Latin with your phone’s translator?”
“Good thinking. Even better, actually. I can get us a Latin reference book.”
By now, Hong Yi has already grappled with the quality of the hotel’s wireless network. While the stove hisses, he pulls out his phone and lays it beside his lunch. Learn Latin. The app store disconnects in sputters. Icons fail to load. He picks the first free app he sees.
Five minutes into watching the loading bar crawl, he sighs, “This might take a bit.”
The whistle of the kettle stirs the room. “Well, that's all right—tea?” Vesper calls.
“Sure, I'll have some.”
“Black, green, Tashkent…”
“Whoa, I've never had Tashkent tea, maybe that.”
“Fair enough.” He hears the fridge door open as he digs into his rice with a spoon. The loading spinner spins stubbornly.
Vesper soon has four mugs of tea ready, two of which she places on the bedside tables, with an unanswered tap on Marcia's shoulder. Then she brings the remaining two to Hong Yi. He is already camped at the table facing the sink, squinting at his smart phone through gleaming glasses.
He is—she thinks as she pulls up the chair beside him—the only one she understands. It’s hard not to like his company; he is chatty and genuine, qualities in short supply among this traveling party. But even then, she senses there is more there than he makes available to acquaintance.
“So, did you grow up in New York?” she ventures as she sits.
His eyes dart from the screen to her, and then he laughs. “Easy mistake,” he says. “I was in New York on a three-day vacation. Orobelle just has the best timing. Or the worst.”
“Oh, do I know it,” she answers. “You were on a date on vacation? Did you know Terri before you got there?”
“Nah. I met her the day before—saved her pet parrot from a gazebo roof. I couldn't even make that up if I tried. We decided to go on a date the day I was meant to leave for Boston.”
“Ah…is that common in your world? Going on dates with people you just met?”
“Sometimes we even go on dates with people we've never met.” Hong Yi points at his phone. “Like I said, you can do anything on the internet. Including meet your dream boy or girl and get stood up on the first date.”
“That sounds…er…chaotic.”
“Oh, trust me, that's the least of it. What's it like where you're from?”
“What, the dating?” Hong Yi nods. “It couldn't be more different.” She steeples her fingers before her mug. “It's all about getting married in the end. So eligible men go pick up eligible women, and they date with the objective of having a family. It’s all protocol and expectations, in the end.”
“And that isn't your speed, I'm guessing?”
Vesper laughs. “‘Twas never in my thoughts. No one in my town interested me enough to make that prospect sound bearable…strolling across that same bridge every couple in town crosses on the first date, with someone I hardly cared for.” She straightens, picking up her spoon. “And then I became a soldier, and there was no time.”
“That would do it,” Hong Yi chuckles. “But you're happy like that?”
“I think so. I have not a clue how I would feel about dating.” Then she pauses. “Sorry we took you away from your world. And your date.”
“Hey, it's okay. I don't always get to choose what happens to me, and that's fine.”
“Is it?”
His eyes are full of thought. “I dunno, I just roll with the punches.”
She can't imagine simply accepting it, being snatched away from the world. She did feel as if he acquiesced too quickly. Even with the war driving her away, she would have demanded to visit her parents at the first opportunity. And surely Hong Yi would have more at stake than she does…
“You’re more patient than I am,” she says simply.
“Yeah, I don't go running after rabid wolves,” he laughs. “What was your rank in the army?”
“I was a Captain. I had a few platoons under my command.”
“O captain, my captain!”
“Not that kind of captain,” she chuckles. “It’s not as prestigious as it sounds.”
“Sure, big shot. They didn't give you much in the way of clothes, though, did they.”
“It’s bollocks, isn't it? Whyever would a walking corpse need three changes of clothes?”
“At least you had a toothbrush. I guess.” He glances down. “Oh—the app’s ready! Fucking finally. Are you ready to learn some declensions?”
*
Declension, or the way a word “declines” from its infinitive form within its sentence context, is a style of conjugation that Hong Yi has only ever encountered before in Spanish. By way of scientific terminology, however, he has seen Latin conjugation in action, and that makes it only a touch easier.
As they pore over the digital book over their lunch, swiping the pages left and right, Vesper seems to get something entirely different out of it. “Ah, vacca! I thought that might mean ‘cow.’”
“Oh right, like ‘vache.’”
“Do you know Spanish?”
He grins, rubbing his neck. “I know some grammar. And functionally a hundred words. Now, how would we say… ‘We are learning Latin?’ Might be good for Marcia to know…”
“To learn. ‘Discere’…if we were to say we are learning…well, it says here that Latin doesn't have an equivalent for present continuous tense…”
In the mists of her fever, Marcia crawls up against the backboard and picks up the receptacle of what may be tea, left there an unnameable number of minutes or hours ago. As she sips the cold liquid, she catches snatches of the conversation between Hong Yi and Vesper, a few words she knows mingled with ones she doesn't.
“We are learning Latin,” she hears, then, and at once she listens closer. More English, something she can't understand, and then, What do you need?
From here, she can see the diligence glowing in their faces, eyes reflecting the yellow of the walls. Her mind is too fogged by the heat for her to decide how to react. She turns slowly, neck aching. Honourless is asleep.
Her head spins, and she cannot see. Her stomach roils. She needs the latrine. She inches out of the bed, shivering, and rises on her feet, teetering as she vaguely realises someone has removed her sandals and helmet…
“Need help?” calls Hong Yi.
She groans a wordless answer, afraid to lift her head.
They are both there in a flash—or perhaps it has been minutes—steadying her by the shoulders. She wants to see their faces better, but her vision is too bright.
This runaway fever, she has been allowing to run its course. She fears retreating too soon, letting the sickness win, like a starving lion on the sand.
But she cannot last out this burning forever. She must be careful, must maintain command over herself…
They are muttering to each other in the rolling tones of English, as she stumbles through a doorway onto the cold ceramic tiling, held by both hands. The noise is getting too much; her vision is flashing. Her face grows cold. She sinks forward and vomits on the drain, crumpling to her knees.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Forged in Fire - II
Honourless’s eyelids part to reveal a yellow ceiling. The fog of her long sleep stubbornly lingers as her eyes scan the empty room.
The curtains are drawn, and the walls are a yellow matching the ceiling. She is lying in one of three beds, and the other two are ruffled, as if recently used. She rolls onto her side as her mind pieces the scene together.
A tumult of voices drifts over from nearby.
Gasping, Honourless springs out of the bed and stumbles in their direction. The floor is rough red carpet. There is an open door by the kitchen counter, and past the door, a room of flat white tiles. As she enters, she is hit headfirst by a fetid scent mingled with the mouldy musk of pipes. The source of the voices is Hong Yi and Vesper, mopping the floor with paper rags while they shout at each other. Marcia lies propped against the stone wall beside a white cistern, with a glass of water in hand and an expression that would appear blissful, if her skin weren't shiny with sweat.
At once Honourless shouts, “She should be seeing a healer!” But all three look up bewildered, and when they speak, not a word out of their mouths means a thing to her.
She lets out a wordless cry, throwing both arms up. What in the Light’s name is she meant to do here?
Turning on her heel, she thunders away—away from the inn room, leaving the front door ajar, away down the hall. She presses her ear to each door down, until she hears voices she knows.
“Hey!” She bangs on the wood with a fist. “Orobelle! Dorian! One of you, come with me right now—Marcia is going to die!”
“What now?” the duchess answers. “What do you mean ‘die’? Dorian, no—”
The door clicks open, revealing a cushy suite with a bed large enough for two. Orobelle is practically swimming in the covers, gaze lifted from the pages of her diary. Dorian’s bedroll lies unfurled on the carpet, and the man himself stands frozen with a hand on the doorknob.
Honourless is swallowed by rage, rage like she has only ever felt towards the baroness before. Has the child ever once thought that her protector might also want a bed?
Snarling, she lunges at the duchess. Honourless only has the satisfaction of seeing the girl’s eyes widen, before the wind is knocked from her lungs in a flash of long brown hair. Even as she protests, Dorian wrestles her backward through the doorway, gentleness briefly gone as he slams the door shut behind him.
“Hey! Hey, what are you doing?” she snaps and snarls. “Let me at her!”
“Honourless,” he says. “Please. Don't touch her. I will come with you.”
“Why do you put up with her?” she roars, wrenching her arm out of his grip. “How could you accept her treatment?”
He motions for her to lead, and they march back down the little carpeted hall. “That is not my choice to make,” he replies. “There is more to it than you can see. And I cannot speak of all of it.”
“Thanks for mentioning it, then,” she mutters.
“Please, Honourless.”
This time she understands something in his tone—a tiredness, and a fear.
She sighs. “Fine. But you can't stop me from coming to my own conclusions. Here.” She stops outside the door with a hook-shaped numeral, still standing ajar.
By now, Hong Yi and Vesper have Marcia on the couch, a glass of water clasped in her hands. Both lean together, faces lit by his luminescent device, and their charge is at least alive enough to be sipping, eyes gently shut.
Honourless waves a hand at the trio. “Tell them Marcia should be seeing a healer. And ask if she has had food.”
Kneeling on one knee, Dorian repeats the words, and three pairs of eyes rise to him. Hong Yi answers first, then Vesper does—he interprets without missing a beat. Yes, she has had lunch; she has asked to be taken to a healer if she is not recovered in four days. As words pass back and forth between them, Honourless finds that what little Marcia says is spoken in such different syllables that it must be a different language from the others’. But Hong Yi’s device must be able to translate between them.
Briefly, her heart surges with the hope that it would translate to the Queen's Tongue, too, but then she remembers what Orobelle has said of Wonderland: that its path through history has been so different from this world’s, that little is shared between them, beyond the enduring laws of the cosmos…
“I cannot keep doing this,” Honourless mutters. “We must have a way to speak to each other.”
At this, Dorian pauses from their talking, and turns to look her in the eye. The room is silent all at once, besides the drip of water from the sink. Quietly, he reaches into a pocket of his coat, and from it produces a brass-rimmed looking-glass, like the ones she has seen Orobelle hold up to signs and documents.
She blinks as he lifts it towards her, held in the middle of his palm. “This will translate any word viewed through it,” he says. “You may have this one. My Duchess has spares.”
Honourless reaches out, and gingerly wraps her fingers around the rim of the proffered device. “You sure she won't be mad about me taking one of her toys?” she says.
“Well, you are right—we must communicate. This is the best way I can think of. I shall entreat her to consider that. And however she responds…that is my consequence to bear.”
The sadness in his eyes would be enough to soften any heart other than hers. He is a servant of the Duchy, and of the Queendom. He is a person, like she.
Honourless looks away. “If you're choosing this, then I shan't stop you.”
*
Dorian explains, with saintly patience, the purpose and function of Honourless’ translation glass. Like his own comprehension of tongues, the glass translates intent: whatever the intended meaning of a written or printed word, the translation glass will reveal it to one peering through, in their most familiar script.
It is Hong Yi who first comes to her thereafter. He glances at the tool in her hand like a curious bird, saying something in inquiring tones. As she works to decode his mannerisms, he starts to rummage in his pockets. From one, he pulls out a small, dog-eared book the size of his palm. A bitten red graphite stick is threaded through its binding rings. He motions the utensils towards her with a nod.
“Oh!” She snatches the tools, a grin blossoming across her face, and races to the table to drag up a chair.
The first message Honourless puts to the ruled lines is simple: I guess Dorian does have a mind of his own. She spins the book to face Hong Yi as he lands in the other chair, sliding the translation glass over the table to him.
He scans the lines through the lens, and as he does, his mouth hangs open. Then he laughs. She makes a sound of reciprocal delight, and they swap notebook and glass.
Through the lens, she feverishly watches him write in his own script, the sigils full of angles and criss-crossing lines. Whenever a character passes into the centre of the glass, it shifts and changes, from his script to hers, condensed to match the compact size of his words: Who can blame him? The world's biggest spoilt brat owns him.
She glances over her shoulder. But Dorian is busy interpreting for Marcia and Vesper.
The widening of her grin is matched by his. They swap tools again.
I like you. You make the ghosting easier. We could keep doing it.
Never knew that was something I was capable of, but I'm happy to help!
Is there any lunch left for me?
He nods and points across the room at the counter by the basin. Beside the tap lies a wrapped paper packet.
Grinning, she returns the notebook and graphite to him. But he shakes his head and pushes it back. She raises an eyebrow. He lifts his rectangular device and points at it with a smile. “Ah,” she declares, with the decisive tone of some more eloquent response.
Before she begins across the room at the bidding of her hunger, she feels a tap on her shoulder. Hong Yi, still beaming, turns the glowing surface of his device to her, and points at the translation glass. She lifts it to read, brass rim gleaming in the light through the curtain.
You're pretty amazing, too. I am glad I have a way to tell you, finally.
Honourless smiles with a shake of her head, pats his shoulder twice, then goes to take her lunch.
*
“She says, ‘Let me know if you need a drink, or a blanket, or company,’” says Dorian.
Marcia’s vision is not quite steady, and a pain has settled behind her eyes. Perhaps she is showing it, for though Vesper makes an attempt at a smile, the worry is stark in the lines on her brow. “As much of your company as you are willing to spare, Evening Star,” she answers.
She hears her interpreted reply through a veil of fog. “‘I am happy to sit by your bed until you recover.’”
When Marcia tries to look at her, she still sees those eyes, fiery with sunlight, reflecting the sand of the colosseum. “With you watching me so, fever will not be the only heat I feel,” she murmurs.
When Dorian repeats the line, Marcia watches as Vesper abandons the smile for a puzzled frown as she answers—and their interlocutor translates— “‘We could open some windows if you need to cool down.’”
Marcia decides, then, that she is in no state to be saying such things. “N…no, no need,” she murmurs, pressing a hand to her forehead.
Hong Yi spares Marcia a set of clothing, and it is the closest thing to a good fit they can find, though she seems perplexed by the zippers. She denies help in the bathroom, though there are five minutes of silence before the shower turns on. She shuffles out, drenched hair wrapped in a towel, wearing Hong Yi’s grey buttonless shirt and shorts.
By now, Vesper has pulled a chair from the table to Marcia’s bedside. Sitting with one arm draped over the lacquered back, she watches as Marcia flops down on her mattress and closes her eyes. You jelly? declares the tagline on the grey shirt, above a cartoon of a purple jellyfish. Though the fear still sits heavy in Vesper's chest, she can't help a laugh.
Now, the room is filled again with motion. “I’m gonna getting dinner and supplies,” Hong Yi calls from the door. “Make sure she has water. Oh, and, I left some pills on the counter—give her two every six hours.”
With a nod and a wave from Vesper, Hong Yi disappears back into the dusty streets of Arkalyk. Honourless, busying herself at the counter till now, pays a visit soon after, slapping the translation glass and an open notebook into her hand.
“Oh! Right.” Jolting upright, Vesper shuffles the glass and notebook between her hands, peering at the scrawled script of circles and lines. As she passes the glass over the words, lines of English are revealed, written in a similar scratchy style: I must go outside. There is nothing in this damned room. Hong Yi took the key. Will you be here when I return?
Up to this point, Vesper has yet to see much beyond the street of their hotel. But all is quiet, and nothing is calling her away, after months on end of following one command or another. Perhaps some respite is deserved.
Sliding the pencil out of the notebook rings, she scribbles a reply. Yes, I promised Marcia I would stay. It’s a city of decent size, don’t get lost.
With a peek at the words and a chuckle, Honourless pockets the stationery. She walks off with a call of, “Athe Vesper u Marcia,” and all she hears then is the door creaking open and shut behind her.
So she finds herself alone with Marcia, who now lies wracked with shivers, legs tangled in the blankets. Between the language and the delirium, little she says makes sense. Minutes past Honourless’ departure, Vesper quietly brings a filled glass of water and pushes two pills out through the foil, motioning them towards her. Marcia peers up with fever-wet eyes.
There’s nothing Vesper can think to say, so she mimes putting the pills in her mouth, and then drinking. Marcia stares at the pills for a minute, then picks them up, puts them in her mouth, and gags. She snatches madly for the glass, and knocks it over. With only a gasp as water spills over the nightstand onto the carpet, Vesper rights the emptying receptacle and sprints to the sink, while Marcia moans at the bitterness.
By the time she returns, Marcia has already swallowed the pills, but takes the glass with a whispered gratias, gratias, and gulps it all down. Vesper draws the curtains and opens a grimy window. Light and cold air tide in.
The room begins to dim to blue as the latter is covering the spill with paper napkins. She only becomes aware of the distant hum of machinery when it begins to peter out, uncovering the eerie quiet beneath. The call of some unnameable bird rises, stark and piercing, from the melange.
The two clumsily piece together a conversation about the room’s contents: the scenery is beautiful. The furniture is old. Light. Marcia wants it.
Kicking back the chair, Vesper stands and wanders about the hotel room, finding each switch and flipping it on and off, gradually selecting a combination of lights that gently illuminates the beds.
Whatever Marcia mumbles when she returns, Vesper can decode enough to recognise as a quip about her eagerness to serve.
“Oh, you're teasing me?” she chuckles, starting to feel a little silly. If only Hong Yi were here, then she might have some hope of a worthy reply. Instead, she spends a minute constructing her next sentence. “Quomodo… Quomodo…sientes?” She concedes defeat.
Marcia’s eyes drift up to meet hers. “‘Sientes?’” she repeats, slowly. Her gaze is a little more lucid than before. “Est sicut…‘sentis’?”
“Quomodo sentis?”
As Vesper puzzles over the faint echo of the Latin word in its descendant, she does not notice Marcia reaching for her until the icy fingers wrap around her wrist. Marcia lifts her hand, presses the back of the palm to her forehead.
She jolts to attention. “Christ, you're hot as a stove,” she mutters. Marcia is no longer so hot she radiates, so the medication must be doing its work—but still her fingers are ice and her forehead is on fire, matted hair sticking to skin.
Marcia sags back, gesturing at the glass she drained empty. Vesper picks it up. She can feel that stare boring into her as she goes to fill it at the faucet, and brings it back to the dresser.
Rather than paying the water any attention, Marcia continues to watch her. Her eyes are dark as night beneath her long lashes. There’s a scar on her chin, and one on her temple, normally hidden by her fringe.
Vesper remembers many a time when she was beheld as a curiosity, a specimen of study. She has felt the stares of strangers who hungered to pick her apart. Marcia’s attention is similar, yet lands differently. She feels like work of art being appraised. The thought makes her face feel warm.
Marcia finally picks up her glass and glances at its rim. “Gratias,” she says, then scrunches up her face. “Th… Tha… Thank…”
“Thank you?” Vesper offers.
She sees Marcia rehearse the consonants with her tongue. Her eyes are teary from the heat. “Thank you,” she says, managing a tired smile. She sways.
Without thinking, Vesper descends to catch her by the shoulders. “Please, please…” she murmurs. “Don’t burn yourself like this…it will kill you before the illness does…”
Marcia nods, cracked lips parting. “Bene est…bene est…”
Returning with dinner and a roll of paper towels, Hong Yi detours to knock on the duchess’ door. At this hour, the light has yet to fully desert the sky, but the hall lights have flickered on, old incandescent fittings on the walls. It is time, he thinks, to take Marcia to the hospital. The vaccine course would take weeks, but if Orobelle values the life of her ally, if only to further her quest, then—
The door clicks open, and Dorian peers through. “Your timing is good,” he says, waving him inside.
Orobelle sits half under the covers. She does not have the same lax demeanour as before.
“Hey—”
“Hong Yi. Good that you are here. Take a message to the rest: we leave as soon as Marcia is well enough to move.”
The question he had prepared falls from his lips. “She won’t be ready yet. What's the big hurry?”
Wordlessly, Orobelle lifts up a round brass contraption with a glass face, but unlike the corefinder, this one has a gently domed face, and three hands. She turns it towards him, and points at it with her other hand.
“Uh, what is that?”
“We have thirty days left,” she answers. “Half our time is up, and we have only found half of us.” Dorian watches quietly from a corner. “I shall have Honourless scout ahead. She can tell us what to expect of the next world.”
“I—I’ll let the others know.” The hospital, she needs the hospital— “Can we still send Marcia to the hospital?”
“Is she not recovering?”
Orobelle is not here to parley. After all, Marcia’s health is only an obstacle, through the eyes of her multiversal destiny. “Frankly, I—I don’t know.”
“Well, will a hospital visit expedite her recovery?”
“Um…actually…it would be a three-week process, or…”
“Then no, she is not going to a hospital. Or else we can leave her at a hospital and come collect her when she is done.”
He sighs. “You've got to be kidding me.”
“I assure you, I am not.”
He hangs his head. “Alright. Alright, your Grace, I’ll let them know. By the way, Dorian,” he turns, “you want some dinner? I got you a pack.”
As he pulls one of the five packets of beef rice out of his bag, Dorian’s head lifts with wide eyes, then turns, inevitably, to Orobelle.
The duchess fixes Hong Yi with a stare, and at once he shrinks back. “He is already fed,” she answers. “He will be alright.”
“I…okay.” Hong Yi watches Dorian lower his head as he tucks the food away. “We’ll finish this between the four of us, then. Have…have a good rest of your evening.”
“Farewell.”
Silence hangs in the air as he shuts the door, and something continues to sit ill at ease in his chest as he walks back, engulfed in the perfume of the hall. A painting of the Steppes gazes down from the wall to his right, lit by its own bulb.
On the walk to the room, the carpet changes from dark grey to light, where the windows have faded it. Two serving staff cart towels past, one of whom nods a greeting as she passes. He smiles weakly back over his shoulder as his hand meets the door handle. Then he steps out of the hallway.
It is not terribly surprising, all considered, that he finds Vesper sitting on the edge of Marcia’s bed, both too engrossed to notice his return until he calls out their names.
“Oh! Good evening,” Vesper exclaims, head whipping back. “We were talking—erm—trying to talk about what's coming next…after this.”
“Well, perfect, I have word from Orobelle about that. Or rather, demands. She wants us to get moving soon.”
“Really? Does she understand how ill Marcia is?”
He drops the stack of food boxes on the table and plucks his jacket off his shoulders. “Nope. I mean, is that really surprising when she hasn’t visited once? She wants us to leave—and I quote—as soon as Marcia is well enough to move.”
Vesper kicks her chair back. “Christ almighty. That girl’s a piece of work. No, she’s the whole bloody workshop.” She sighs. “Well, good news on that front, then—the medication was a great idea. Marcie’s back to burning now, but for a minute there, she was lucid enough to think about how she was feeling, and I think she said the infection…is greatly reduced. Still there, but on its way out.”
He pauses. “Wait, really? I guess her scorched earth policy is working.” His brow furrows. “I’m still worried. She needs to stop having fevers that high.”
“I told her. Or I tried to. We should have taken her to the hospital when we had the chance.”
“Yeah, no luck with that. Orobelle specified that we will not be doing that.”
“To hell with that duchess! I hope she’s fucking happy, because at least one of us will be.”
It is Honourless’ first time sleeping in a bed in twenty years, and perhaps her body feels the dissonance of its comfort, after standing on a mountain outcrop for an hour. Perhaps it is simply how much she slept after that last jump, or perhaps it is the conditioning of a decade in the jungle.
Either way, her eyes fly open in the dead of the night, and for a minute, they see nothing.
In the shadows, she listens to the breathing of her companions. She sees Vesper curled on the couch, head tucked in the crook of her elbow, Hong Yi dozing in the farthest bed with his arms wrapped around a pillow, and Marcia, tossing now and then.
What a strange party. All they have in common is that they’ve all been pulled together by a quest they do not understand, and severed from their old lives.
In that way, Honourless has it easiest. She had no hopes, no people to be torn from. As much as she despises the duchess, this is an improvement upon fighting tooth and nail to keep her place in the world. This journey is her road back home.
By way of written notes, Hong Yi has apprised her of Marcia’s condition, and of Orobelle’s—as usual—unreasonable orders. In turn, she has confirmed to him that this world is his own.
Why? he asked then.
It was the one you wanted, she replied.
How did you know?
I did not. I only felt a tugging in its direction, and let it point us here. I assumed that was you. It has paid off.
I could not have researched Marcia’s situation without the inter-net. Why did you land us in Arkalyk? I am curious.
I only wanted us far away from those plots and machinations. This is where that thought took us.
In her bed, Marcia flips to face her, curling her knees towards her torso, but her eyes are still closed. In her waking, her eyes are always tear-clouded, as with a widow mourning a burning city. But the ever-loving Duchess is about to drag them to the next world over, the perpetual motion machine that she is, no matter who it hurts.
She feels the weight of the question, as she often does, of why she is still doing this when her bonds have been cut. Could she flee, never to be seen again? The Queendom must not have a way to follow her, or else Orobelle would not have resorted to petitioning for her help.
She could live again, in whichever world she chooses, just not Wonderland. She could be a wanderer without a duchess’ goad on her back.
But just as it was family that gave Orobelle the power to unlock the baroness’ shackles, it is family that tethers Honourless to the duchess’ cause. There is no leaving the Queendom behind while a piece of her still lives there.
The morning sun pricks into the room, touching hair and skin. Hong Yi wakes first—still recovering from jetlag a dozen different ways, he isn't sure if his sleep will settle until they come to rest somewhere.
But rest doesn't exist on this mission, he thinks, sitting down at the dining table with his laptop. Well, there are worse places we could be than here.
The air is still and faintly scented like tea. The two windows dimly light the space. On the couch dozes Vesper, a hand hanging off the edge.
He sneaks a glance at Skype, but doesn't say a word. His buddies are complaining about orientation week. They have no idea he's been checking. He doesn’t know what he would say, if they found out.
Marcia stirs from bed not ten minutes later, and spends another minute crawling out of the covers. She walks unsteadily to the fridge to pick out a carton of milk, but never once does he feel as if she needs the support.
He watches her tear it open, and drink ravenously, straight out of the carton. As she does, her eyes dart to him. Their gazes meet. Her hair is a mess.
He stares back, swallowing. “Salve!” he calls.
She lowers the carton and smiles back. “Et salve tibi,” she answers.
“Tu es bonus?” he asks, certain he has messed up the conjugation and diction somewhere or another.
“Am…good,” she answers.
His heart leaps. She and Vesper must have been talking more than he realised. Marcia has sunk onto the couch beside the sleeping soldier, and now prods at her upper arm. Vesper groans and flips over—then jolts awake.
“Oh, it's you…” she mumbles. “How are you?” By now she has propped herself up on an elbow, and, without a pause, reaches up to feel her forehead. “You’re still warm.”
“‘Warm?’”
“Oh, er,” she starts, “Caliente, cálido…”
“Ah, calidus.” Marcia grasps the forearm suspended before her face. “Sum calidum pro te.”
This time, there is no doubting the flirtation in her tone. Vesper, however, frowns at her. “What do you mean, am I the reason you're still unwell?”
Hong Yi rubs his temple. Is he allowed to say something?
For the first time since they landed in this world, Dorian is out of Orobelle’s sight. The duchess has grumbled, but made no indication of begrudging any of his transgressions.
She knows his translation glass is in the hands of the criminal she hired. She made no remark. She has not scolded him for letting the woman in.
All she did say was, “Perhaps you need some time to reflect.” And it is impossible to tell why she suggested it, but he is here, now.
In the hallway he gazes out a window at the lush hills beyond. The air carries a gentle chill, as of a highland, cool even in summer. He warms himself by reflex, the air in his vicinity soaking the heat.
“Dorian,” a voice pulls his gaze to his left, down the corridor. It is Marcia, closing the door of the family suite. There is an indistinctness to her gaze, so unlike the woman he saw on the arena sand, but her mind is present. “I thought I would get some fresh air…I hear it helps the infirm.”
“Oh, Marcia. Are you well?”
“Better than yesterday, thank you.” She rubs her head. “I have…never been this ill before. The entirety of yesterday is a blur. But it is only a matter of patience, now…”
He lifts a hand to touch her forehead, feeling the heat there, before gently easing it away, the way he alters the heat in his own body. She goes still, stands rooted to the floor.
“The fever is all through you,” he murmurs, “ but the infection is only in your leg…surely you do not need…”
“Dorian, this is amazing,” she breathes. As his hand drops away, she stares past him, up the corridor. “Whereabouts is the duchess? Isn't she anxious not to have her protector close at hand?”
“She sent me outside,” he answers. “I was asked to reflect.”
Marcia’s eyes widen. “What about?”
“Perhaps she thinks I have been disobedient.”
“Do you owe her obedience?” she asks. “What would happen if you weren't? She relies on you.”
He winces. “I may lose my place as her guard, and I might be sent home…with my sister.”
“Sent home? When she cannot carry her own luggage?”
“She could replace me with ease.”
“You must be under an oath of servitude. But she cannot dismiss you. You're a—how does she say it, a core. She's come this far, employed a woman she hates, all to find us…and you are one of us.”
He shakes his head. “No, I cannot think of that. My pledge binds me. I serve her house, and safeguard her life, and I am to put my life on the line to preserve hers, should it be necessary. That is the predicate of my existence, now.”
“What were you, before her?”
“A volcano watcher.”
“You watched volcanoes?”
“I did. Every clan needs a watcher, but none wanted to perform the task. But my chief learned that I can give and take heat at will, and it seemed inevitable, to all of us, that that duty would fall to me.”
“Ah…so you did do more than light campfires and cool water.” She smiles. “I need a better way to while my time away than rotting in bed. Say…would you tell me a tale about your life before?”
He concedes a blink of surprise, then ponders the question. “I say it could count as ‘reflection’.”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Ashes to Ashes
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts colonisation/military conquest, deadly infectious diseases, massacres, and bereavement.
Amaranthia— Talurn— What is my name?
There are pieces, scattered through her memory, of the person she once thought she would become. That version of her still lives parched by the desert, flees from volcanoes, and sleeps in the heat of her husband’s arms.
None of that will ever be her again.
She is here, in a corner of a city a world away from where she was born—colder than night, greyer than red. Across her tiny apartment, pots, paper, and lacquered chairs lie in piles around her tear-washed feet. Every time she looks, she pictures it all burning away, watching the ashes scatter in the wind.
It must have been a week now—or more—since she woke to find Freesia’s bed empty. It has been a week since she realised, fingers cold, that her daughter wasn’t playing a game of hide-and-seek.
For three sleepless days, she has beseeched the palace to find Freesia. When they would not hear her, she went to her brother, to speak to the Duchess himself. The palace does not have a face, but Dorian does; that face was stern with worry as he said, “I will, but I do not know if she will hear me.”
For three sleepless days, she lay alone with her grief. Then her brother came back to her on the third evening, with a parcel wrapped in silk, pink as the final blossom of spring. And he said, “I am leaving the Queendom for sixty days.”
“What for?” she breathed.
“To find Uri,” Eirucan answered.
She gripped his arm and cried, “Why? Where, where is she—?“
He shook his head, face falling, the way it always did when there was something he could not say. “Take care of yourself. Talk to Narsi. He will be happy to help you whenever you need it.” He held out the parcel with a nod, pressing its cool silk into her motionless hand. “This is from my duchess. I hope this will be enough to last you through the months I am gone.”
She watched, wordless, as his back disappeared into the dusk. The pattern of her life was repeating again. She was watching her last tether burn. Everything she touched still withered away.
But if Uri was so far away, and if her brother had even a sliver of a chance to find her, then she had to let him go.
This time, she did not plead, and she did not scream. And by morning, as promised, Eirucan was nowhere to be found.
It has been a week since that day, and by now, in the silence, she knows there will be no end to this all-engulfing fog.
But lying among the pieces of her apartment furnishings, still unrepaired, she thinks of her husband for the first time in years. In her mind, he is still alive, picking urana in a valley, lit by the sun forever.
This morphine of not-knowing holds her together. As long as she doesn’t know why he no longer walks with her, she can never be destroyed by the agony.
Yet she remembers being told he died. And though she has tried—and how she tried—the knowledge persists, that he is gone, and is still gone. Like a stain that resists scouring, there is always that mark on her memory, betraying the lie in every story she has told herself since.
She looks so much like you, Caric. Why must you haunt me so?
On the grounds beneath her window, the hedges are green with springtime vigour. It is so very quiet, and she can hear it again, a distant cry she has not heeded for years—as of some creature she caged in the caverns of her mind.
It wants to be found again. It wants to be answered.
*
In the Queendom, Amaranthia has few friends, but friends there are indeed—most of them like herself, taken or driven from the next world over to this strange, glittering land. There is Narsi, the postman, whom the people of this world call Cedar—for you see, I am tall and stately and my face is lined like its bark, he likes to say—and Manus, the basket weaver who has never told her his birth name.
It is Narsi who whispered to her the secret route to the Cracked Land. “Once a day, at dusk, there is a wagon that takes letters between the worlds,” he says, “and sometimes, the driver will take a person, too, for enough coin.”
Now standing in that rickety postal depot, palming some of Duchess Orobelle’s gold to the woman watching the wagon, his words prove true. “Swan of the Outer North Quarter, at your service,” she declares with a flourishing bow, too chipper for this hour of the day. Then she points Amaranthia up into her two-mule cart, to keep company with two sacks of letters, a ceramic vat and a bale of hay. “You could do us the honours of pouring drinks. Which way-station are you headed for?”
“Whichever will get me to the village of Licur,” she replies.
“Station Twenty Two on the Queen's Road! You must ask the station master to call you a ride to the village.”
Amaranthia does not know where station twenty-two is. She supposes she might know its location by a different name, but Swan was born in the duchy, and there is little chance she knows what it is called in Tysian.
With a lazy braying of mules, the wheels begin to roll out of the depot, and soon they are coursing down city roads, watching the towers and houses grow sparser.
“Why are you going back?” asks Swan as the beasts hit their stride. It is the first of her many offerings of conversation before nighttime descends.
“To resolve unfinished business relating to my husband.”
“Is he still there? In the next world?”
She pauses. “I want to believe he is.”
“Poor dear,” murmurs Swan. “I ought to warn you, it could be hard to return without a permit.”
She nods. “So Narsi told me. I brought my letter of invitation from the Duchess. The one that first let me through the gate.”
“That could do it. But be careful who you ride with, some don’t take well to your people trying to return…”
As their ride wears into the night, Amaranthia shivers with both the cold and the dread. Head on the hay, she drifts in and out of sleep, waking briefly in the lights of the world gate before her driver’s cart lurches through, and into her homeland’s balmy night.
“There was a time when I believed I would live all my days Dorna,” Curia begins, the crackle of campfire flames punctuating her words. Leaves ripple over the humid clearing. “A dreary life that would have been, too. You see, my left shin—I lost that in a volcano run. It is only because my dear friend Faran pulled me onto a boulder that I am alive at all…but never again would I be of use to my clan. A one-legged woman cannot run, and they had few ways of improving my condition.”
“But then her Grace saved you.”
Curia turns at Calibra's interjection, and shakes her head. “I s’pose that’s what they would like to tell you…but no, it was not like that…for you see, there is a lot about the duchy’s rule that is not spoken of.”
Around the camp, the scout vanguard huddles closer to listen. Among their bright gazes, Eniun continues to speak.
“I was too young to remember this myself, and I only know of it from what our elders told us. But the Queendom first announced its arrival in our lands with great fanfare. The guards of our village ran to look, and the reports returned—there were hoofed beasts pale as bone, pulling carriages, and the people carried swords, and inventions never before seen by Dorna. Explosive blowpipes that fired pellets, trinkets that kept time to the second…and among them was their young leader, Duchess Adamanta. And, she spoke our tongue.”
“Our Duchess Adamanta? But you’re much older than her.”
“Yes, but you forget. Adamanta became duchess at sixteen. And a year in the Queendom is two years in the Cracked Land. She was youthful, but sharp beyond her years. And when she first came to our patriarch, she invited our village to ally with her. She said she could bring great prosperity if we complied, and ruin if we did not.
“Aside from brief skirmishes with Acse, we in Leyse had never seen hostilities before. There was no need for war in our homeland…not when the great volcanoes might kill us on a whim. Death was theirs to give and take.
“But when our patriarch received Her Grace’s words, he heard the threat in them. The villagers grew uneasy, and angry, and in a matter of days, anger turned to belligerence.”
There are glances about the fire. Perhaps they know how this story ends, but with a nod, she continues.
“Like I mentioned, the village of Dorna was never warlike. Our weapons were made for beasts. And the gentler way to put this is, when our best warriors tried to drive the Duchy out, they made an example of them. They tied our warriors to a dead tree and fired pellets into them until we could no longer recognise their bodies. Even as young as I was, I would never forget the sight—or that sound, like rain, as their blood hit the ground on the square.”
There were gasps and winces around the campfire.
“Witnessing this with his own eyes, our patriarch’s demeanour changed. But who could blame him? This was not like anything he had seen before. He called upon our chief, and she, Tanahor…she made the calculation that we could never defeat Adamanta. When she went to negotiate, she went without armed guards, and surrendered.
“The Duchess graciously accepted the surrender. In three short days, we had learned two things about this conquering queendom. First—they played by rules, and would comply if we did so too. And second—we stood no chance against them.
“Well, that's not fair,” Maura mutters. “If Dorna has never seen war before then you had no fair chance to defend yourselves. You were taken by force.”
Curia shakes her head with an inward smile. “The duchy never meant to let us choose. This was how they won all their other lands: by rule of might…and death. Perhaps we were lucky, that our chief saw that there was no victory to be found, and decided that the death would end there.”
Through the windows of the Arkalyk Hotel, Dorian can see where the streets give way to plains, the city’s buildings placid and grey as cattle on the edge of a meadow. “Hong Yi tells me we are in a land called Kazakhstan, in his home world,” he says, gaze resting on the horizon through the glass.
“Kazakhstan?” asks Marcia, glancing up at him with dark brown eyes. “I do not know that name. Is Hong Yi from here?”
“He does not seem to know their language.”
“Ah…where are you from?”
“Nowhere you would know, I believe. But I was born to the clan of Licur, on a plain by the foothills of a volcano. There is little to know about our village, except that we lived by the cycles of their eruptions, farming on their lava plains, and letting them bury our old huts.”
“Does Orobelle come from the same place?”
“She could not be farther.”
“Ah, then how did you come to serve her?”
“She bought me,” he answers simply. Pity and wonder fleet over her face. “The landscape of Licur was unforgiving, but I loved it dearly. Then these strangers appeared in our land, and when my chief sold me to them…I knew it was not my choice to make, and so I went with them. But much as I wanted to keep my head down, there was a bargain I had to make—so I did. I asked to take my twin sister along.”
Watching the peaks rise from the horizon, Talurn feels her heart crack again, like the crust swelled by new lava. Himac, Darmun, Turan, she can name each mount, and its spirit—the ancient ones who give life and destroy it, and the one thing the Queendom can never subjugate.
It was in a valley among those peaks that her husband first found her, picking urana in the late afternoon heat. He first announced himself by calling out from behind her, and then she turned to find a red-haired man watching her, his face half-lit by a golden sun.
“I see your clan has found the secret field too,” he said.
“It is no secret, then,” she answered, dropping a few leaves into her pouch with a toss of her hair.
They harvested side by side, filling their pouches with the fleshy leaves, and then they did so again a week later. He was Caric of Acse, and every time their paths met, he lingered with her, both slowly pinching leaves off stalks. He always had a quick wit and a winning grin, his long hair tied loosely at his nape.
The tragedy of beauty so arresting was that she knew it would be gone too soon. But still, she endeavoured for him, and flirted, wildly gambling. Then some spark caught, and they kissed and held each other in the shelter of those peaks. They returned each week, and their villages knew there must be something afoot, for they were harvesting so often and bringing home less than they normally did.
Then at last, Talurn said, “Our lives are short. Volcanoes erupt. Strange people are passing through our lands. The world may change soon, and it may not be so frightening if we were together.”
“I would love to be with you,” he answered, sweeping her into an embrace. “But I am of Acse, and you are of Tyse, and I do not know whose tradition we follow.” In Acse, weddings did not mean moving away, while in Tyse the men went to the women’s villages.
“Then we shall ask,” she replied, “if you are willing.”
“I am.”
So they went home to her village of Licur, and saw Corcaro, the patriarch. “If you wish to be wed,” he said, “then you may be wed, in our tradition. And Caric, you must become of Licur. Would you accept?”
“Only if I may perform the departure rites with my clan,” Caric replied.
“Of course…do what your spirits bid you. And we shall see you again soon.”
Then they went to Acse, where all clans lived in a growing cluster of villages, and they told their patriarch of their intent.
“It is not unheard of,” he said. “We have had our people leave for other nations, and others join us. But we shall celebrate you, if you do depart.”
“And I would miss you too,” he said. So the village celebrated him for two days, and drank in his name, and Talurn’s, showering them in what little urana they could spare. Then, the couple returned to Licur, to be officiated by Corcaro, and he became part of the village family.
The first outbreak of violence between Leyse and the Queendom came a year later, in the village of Dorna upon the foothills of the Turan Mountain: an insurrection that turned into a massacre. On that day, ten Leysian warriors were hung and shot to death.
The day the news came, Talurn entered her birth throes. Through that blazing, unquenchable afternoon, she brought a child into the world. Her screams gave way to her daughter’s, the piercing cry that heralded the evening.
On that day of pain and joy, the thought of the subdued village was far from her mind. As she and Caric brought the wet newborn to her hut, she could feel the bristling around her, only quelled briefly by the sight of the child.
“You have saved a rotten day,” said Gama, the basket weaver who lived beside them, as she laid a gentle hand on the forehead of the sleeping infant.
Talurn wrapped her in grass linens, and laid her in the cot they had made. Her name was Uri: to quell.
“I raised Uri, as did every adult in Licur,” says Dorian. “Once she was old enough to walk and eat, she joined the village nursery, where we adults took care of our children in turns. We all shared in their nurturing—all as parents to each one. I was a volcano watcher, and my duty was often at night, so I was often at the nursery in the day.”
“You enjoyed it?” Marcia asks.
Dorian nods. “Very much. I learned all their favourite games, and the foods they hated, so I knew what not to give them. I played their games with them, like the ones where we sat in a circle and passed messages. I never had an interest in marrying, but I loved being a parent.”
“Most people I know feel the opposite,” she laughs. “Does Orobelle know about any of this? The things you enjoyed?”
“No,” Dorian answers, and casts a glance up the corridor. “She has never asked, and I have never felt it necessary to mention.”
“People of the Queendom had passed through our lands for centuries before our first altercation, or so the stories say,” Curia continues. “It was only recently that they began claiming pieces of it for themselves. They came through a hole in the air, and they built a glowing gate to mark it. But while they crossed freely, our people were not allowed to so much as approach, on pain of death.
“Before the battle, Leyse’s encounters with the Queendom were few—first with scouts like yourselves, none of them speaking our tongue. But things began to change after our tribe became their vassal. They brought builders, who began to pave a new road through the land. It grew over the months, snaking between mountains. To this end, they brought machines, wonders of engineering, which tore up the soil.
“Then, with those machines, they began to uproot the urana fields. Those plants are one of the cornerstones of our lives. They draw groundwater up with taproots, and store it in their leaves. They water and feed us in the months when no rain falls.
“Perhaps without knowing it, the Queendom was threatening our existence. The chiefs of Tyse, Leyse and Acse met over it, remembering the violence they visited upon us. It was the chief of Tyse, who relied most upon those fields, who sent his spokesperson to plead for a change of their route. The builders had diverted roads around mountains and chasms, so surely they could do so for our fields.
“But the Duchess’ councillor replied: ‘No, you misunderstand. We only avoid mountains because it is costlier to clear them than to build around them. These fields are easy to remove, and so we remove them.’
“They would listen to none of Tyse’s entreaties. They thought only of what the road would cost in stone and hours of work, and not of the life they gave us, and the decades of tales spun around them. They did not cease their work. We knew the terrors that they would wreak upon us, so rather than resort again to violence, we offered up everything: our lands, our knowledge of the volcanoes, a share of our crop.
“They scoffed at our offers. They had no need of our crops; they had crops in plenty. They cared not to know our wisdom; we could not teach them anything they didn’t know. So we watched, and mourned, as the Queendom uprooted an urana field and finished their road. New laws were passed around: all the land the road covered, and an equal width on either side, was the Queendom’s territory. None of us were to set foot upon it, except where permitted.
“Not long after, we received tidings that the Duchess would send a diplomatic envoy to our patriarch. When we accepted the invitation, the diplomat rode into our village accompanied by ten guards—you might know her by the name of Hiscera, Councillor of Correspondence.
“Now that they had a foothold in our world, the Queendom had come to propose a trade. They offered us their wagons and their water. But had they not just rejected all our offers of trade? What could they want in exchange? ‘Your people,’ said Hiscera. The one thing we had never thought to give up.
“Our patriarch spoke to Chief Tanahor about the terms, and she knew, at once, that we were not being asked to make a choice. The next time our patriarch met Hiscera, I was brought along, though I did not understand why until they discussed it before me. I was the first one my chief would offer to them—a woman with a peg for a leg.” Curia closes her eyes to the firelight, letting the silence was over her. “There were some on our side who squirmed at the choice. But the Duchess considered me with a gaze as hard as stone, and said, ‘This one will do fine.’
“And so, that is how I, poor Eniun, was traded from Dorna to the Duchy. I was taken across fields I knew and fields I didn't, to be the Duchess’ servant, and now, here I am.”
As Curia reaches the conclusion of the tale, there is not the merriment that normally accompanies one at the campfire. There is still talk, but with that talk are glances about the clearing, at the ones they know to have a part in this story, distant or uncomfortably close.
“It makes one wonder about the other places the Queendom once subsumed,” Maura finally says. “My homelands were not always part of the Queendom…but little is said of how they came to be so…”
“Oh, I think the answer would surprise us all,” Curia chuckles. “If it were known…if it were talked about, there would be a reckoning. But I only speak of this because I was there. I was there, and we are two worlds from the Duchy…and even then…she is all around us.” She points at the diamond badge on her cowl. “She is the reason I have my left leg, after all…poor me, who had no good use outside of caring for children, while I had a peg for a shin…”
Talurn and Caric were, for the first four years of Uri’s life, happy. It was a happiness so rare that the village’s spirits lifted around theirs, and they welcomed Caric into their basket weaving and the milking of urana, lifetimes of stories exchanged for fresh ears.
Four years, too, had it been, since Dorna became a client of the Queendom. Their doings had gone all but silent. Nothing was heard of these otherworldly arrivals for decades, besides the occasional news of a Leysian man or woman being sold.
When Eirucan and the other watchers gave word that Himac was about to erupt, the people of Licur packed up their lives and fled—away from the peak, closer to their stark grey road. Only as they settled upon a quiet field did they see that horrible snaking thing in plain daylight, its paving stones alien beneath the desert sun. Around it, urana fields had moved and spread and been culled at the edges, like beasts herded across the land. Licur watched from afar as carriages rolled along the horizon.
One day in the boiling belly of the year, a messenger came to Licur’s gates from Acse. She did not speak to anyone but Caric, who returned from their meeting to Talurn’s hut with a dulled gaze.
“What tidings did she bring?” she asked, knowing that twinge of his cheek too well.
“My parents,” he replied simply, unable to keep his gaze steady. “Their funeral. They have passed away from illness.”
In Acse, unlike in Tyse, couples raised their own offspring; the children of these unions would in turn care for their parents in old age. Talurn, who had met Meturi and Parnas and heard tales of their camelops husbandry, had never thought that Caric’s gravest fears, in all those years of guilt and night terrors, would come true.
Had the grief worn upon them? Had they been frailer than Caric remembered? Her husband was reluctant to speak, but this he did say: “It must be my fault.”
He left with the messenger’s cart, once their tearful goodbyes were over. But the tears were the extent of Talurn’s outward sorrow, for she knew he would return soon.
Caric did not return. A week passed, then two. The funeral should have ended, and he should have had the time to make the trip home. But perhaps he had chosen to stay longer, and she would not hold it against him.
It was four weeks before the questions became impossible to ignore, and that was when the roiling dread in her chest burst free, into a rampant terror.
Skin cold as ice, she could not settle enough for sleep, and slept only in the nursery where her daughter, too, slumbered. In the mornings, her twin brother came to wake her, and she would weep in his arms till he had to leave again. At last, Eirucan offered to seek Caric out himself, but she begged him to stay.
“I cannot let you,” she cried. “I cannot let you ride the same road he did.”
From the day the news came that her husband had been found dead, Talurn's life floated in suspension between dreaming and waking. Always, in her dreams, he was alive, yet impossible to reach or hear. She slept and woke, slept and woke again, yet still he was not there.
The world had reached a dead end. This world—a world that always strove to kill—had seemed less frightening because she had shared it with him, her lone bulwark against despair.
But now, there was nothing where he had once been.
There was nothing. It was the next best answer. She did not attend his funeral. She would not hear anything the villagers had to say about him, or his death. He was nowhere, and she could live if she believed he could someday be found, if she could have happy dreams where the taint of death did not walk…
“We were lucky, loath as I am to say it,” Curia murmurs. “Lucky the Queendom kept us as a reservoir of humans, of blood and flesh. We were bought, and our people were changed. I was, too.” She laughs. “We are no longer truly Dorna, now they have reached their fingers into our heart. But we are…alive. Acse…Acse was not so lucky.”
“I used to tell my sister I would ride for weeks in her name. We were born together, and inseparable since then. And she only wanted me to remain at her side, just to be sure she would not lose me, too,” Dorian sighs. “She became afraid to leave the nursery. I only saw her there. And I never told her of the way her husband died…”
Amaranthia waits at the way-station, amid the sandpapery gusts and sun-lit mountains, with a mounting sense of fear. Once she hears the truth, she can never close this door again. Everything that will pour through, sorrow and grief and hope, she will have to stand and take, like lava coursing down the slopes of a volcano, down the mountain cracks faster than any horse can run.
Swan had left her with a few parting lines of advice, most prominently that the cart to Licur would come twice a day, and that the next would arrive at the first crack of dawn. And my wagon returns at sunset, if you wish to ride with me again.
As promised, the cart to Licur peeks over the horizon in the first seeping of daylight heat, rolling up towards the station. When the driver’s face resolves from the darkness, Talurn sucks in a gasp.
“Gama,” she breathes.
“Talurn?” answers the woman, the same woman, with a shaved head, who once sat with her and taught her how to weave baskets. Her face is lined with age, and her eyes are sad. She lifts a hand—perhaps by reflex—to obscure the hat upon her head, and the gleaming Queendom’s crest upon it.
But Talurn sprints to meet her, and throws both arms about the cart-driver as she listlessly dismounts.
“Gama, you’re still here.”
“Talurn! I have not seen you so alive in years,” Gama croaks, hands resting on her shoulders. “How are you? How is Eirucan? Your daughter?”
She shakes her head, eyes welling up. Her jaw aches. “I don't know. I don't know.”
Gama's face sinks. “Oh, Talurn, why did you return?”
“To finish what I was afraid to.”
Acse stood upon a plateau that housed, in its heart, an aquifer. Water was priceless, in this land of heat, and anyone with free access to it could venture farther than any other.
When the Queendom found a Tunnel atop that same plateau, their next move became a foregone conclusion.
Acse was too close, or so said the Queendom’s interpreter, with a face as stony as a mask. The village had to move. From the day the Duchess made her demands, they made their choice, too: they chose to sink their heels in, to hold their line.
You see, Acse was not like the other two nations: it did not move. When their forebears had found this territory, a short plateau with a cache of water that lava could not reach, they had put down their roots and learned to live upon it. They drew water from wells in the ground. The time they no longer spent watching volcanoes, they devoted to cultivating urana farms.
Acse, whose people had spent generations carving lives from the plateau, whose bond to the land had been hard-won, would not budge. There were—as with Dorna—disputes, not debates so much as vitriol met with coddling non-answers. But Acse’s patriarch quickly learned that all they had to do was stay put where they were, for if the Duchy massacred a village while it existed peacefully, no one would ever come to their bargaining table again.
They stood their ground, and without enacting violence, the Queendom could not retaliate. Or, that is what they believed.
It was in the weeks prior to Caric’s return to his town that some strange new illness began to creep through it. It began with coughing and fever, no different from any other illness. Then the coughing became bloodied, and the bleeding spread, until the sufferer dwindled to coma and death.
It took their elderly first, killing them swiftly but not before spreading to their caretakers. Your husband’s parents were some of the first who took ill. The village was like many others: the adults came together in aggregates when they were not otherwise busy, and cared for the disabled and infirm of the town. The disease liked social formations like that. Anyone who was connected to anyone else, and anyone who moved among the public, would succumb.
When your husband arrived, they had only just begun to learn that this strange sickness was not like any they had seen before. The patriarch saw, with clarity, what had to be done. He declared that none were to leave or visit—that this would be Acse’s trial to best alone.
He separated those of us who had not taken ill into the meeting hall, to save us while the rest of the village fell.
Caric died of this disease soon after his parents. I only knew he was here because his arrival had brought terror.
One by one, our village dwindled. Every day, a new corpse was reported, but only by way of fire signals between windows. The patriarch was dead within a week, as was his successor. After three weeks, there were only nine left in the hall. All was silence beyond.
When we heard a knock on our door at last, we were almost afraid to answer it. “Let me in,” called the voice of the visitor. It was one we knew: the Queendom’s interpreter, Hiscera.
Thin and, pale, her face was an omen. Behind her stood a large, red cart, pulled by three horses. “Come with me,” she said, pointing at her vehicle. “Leave this wretched place, before we set fire to its streets.”
That day, I knew, meeting those steely cold eyes, that she was the plague itself. As we rode away, choking with the sorrow and relief of daylight, a column of smoke rose behind.
It was a signal to all who saw it from afar: There is no place that you can save from our reaping.
“And now, there lies a road through the ruins of Acse,” concludes the young woman, trembling. She is too young. She watched her village die when she was a child.
“We learned too late. Too late. The godless Queendom would do what it will to have what it wants, even bring plague,” answers an aged Corcaro, sagging in his chair. “Pray tell, do they treat you well at least?”
Talurn stares as she attempts to corral the disarray of her thoughts. This is the Queendom, the one whose tongue she learned. This is the place that has sustained her while she nursed her grief.
The Queendom saved her. The Queendom raised her brother to the upper echelons, gave her an escape from the village and its sorrow. But the Queendom tore up their fields, burned their villages, scattered their histories and rewrote their futures, as easily as tossing ashes into the wind.
The Queendom killed him. It killed him. She killed him.
They call this place—these plains and deserts and volcanoes—the Cracked Land. And they would keep breaking it, just to find the water within.
She sees the clouds, the urana fields, the sun, the lava, the straw huts all flash by, and her husband is in all of them, and her husband is dying in all of them, and his daughter stands in his place, looking so much like he did in a younger day, before all this sadness came to be.
“They treat me like a person,” Talurn finally says. “But that is only because of Eirucan.”
“That is a conqueror’s tactic,” Marcia murmurs, eyes narrowed in thought.
“We did not know it then, but all that the Queendom touched could become a weapon in their hands. Land and water…fields…plagues…families…”
She nods. “It cannot be easy for you. Becoming a warrior in the Queendom that tore your world to pieces…”
“There is more to it than that—there is a reason, although I cannot speak of it. But it is easier for me than it is for my sister.” He looks away. “Sometimes, I feel she was made to bear the grief of every village they destroyed.”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Forged in Fire - III
Dorian's story ends as they cross the cusp of their third night in Arkalyk. They part ways at her door. Dinner is already awaiting her inside.
As the food settles in her belly, Marcia feels the weight of her drowsiness inexorably tugging on her eyelids. Once her head sinks into her pillow, she cannot keep her eyes open, and she descends into a benthic slumber.
*
Marcia dreams of a faraway market. The air is hot as sanded wood; it parches her throat. She is in a town like Carthage, dressed in desert reds, a silvering of ocean water peeking from between the houses. Nowhere she has been before. But there is something familiar about its scent—the mingling of spices and flowers. Oxen and carts rumble across her path. She wanders, cape trailing behind her, looking for people she knows. The desert sun burns her eyes, hotter than flame.
Then, there is a rattle of stall poles and carts falling, and a chorus of shouts explodes from somewhere out of sight.
From around the corner bursts a bristling pack of wolves. Screaming strangers scatter. Biting back a cry, she leaps and turns on her heel, sprinting back up the way she came.
Her body burns. She pants with the heat and fear. They are already snapping at her heels. Teeth sink into her calf, and suddenly she cannot feel her leg anymore.
*
Marcia wakes, gasping. Her legs are tangled, one cutting off the sensation in the other. Her head spins with fever, and tears spill from her eyes. She reaches for the glass beside her, which still sits half filled.
She drinks solemnly, head against the backboard. Everyone else is asleep. The sounds of their breathing keep her company.
That morning, Marcia’s fever recedes to a less lethal intensity. Near the wound, her leg is still inflamed, but only from her own efforts. She spends a minute with her eyes gently shut, inspecting her body from within, and that is when she finally knows: she has passed the watershed moment, the turning point.
Her blood has learned the nature of the disease, like a spy deducing the key of a cipher. It is only a matter of time before it is overcome. Now, the danger lies in the damage that she has done to herself. She must let her war go; this is enough...
She lifts herself gently onto her arms. A daze colours the world, fogging all its hues in her eyes. But she can move without toppling, and at last, she takes notice of the room.
Everything here is airy and glossy. Glass, once the privilege of the wealthy, films every window, caked in the dust of age. Water comes to the room, and light needs no fire. This is the world that conspired to create Hong Yi’s miracle device. He is of this world, too, the lenses he wears upon his face, and the clothes he has been sharing with her, brighter and darker than dyes in her world can produce.
One by one, her companions awaken to the gentle air. As Hong Yi and Vesper prepare to leave for morning groceries, they call out a greeting as they go. That is when she tells them—
“I’m getting better. Much better. I am sure I will recover now.”
There is a bout of frantic tapping on Hong Yi’s device, then a widening of eyes, a chorus of “good”s—one of the handful of English terms she has learned. “Amazing! You are the first ever to recover unaided,” he attempts to say.
“Quite the achievement—if it meant anything to me.”
Then, stiltedly, Hong Yi answers, “Do you want to join us to go into town?”
“Yes,” Marcia says, in English. Another of the words she knows. They glance at each other and grin, their words rolling over her.
*
Out of that dusty concrete cocoon, Marcia re-emerges into the city of Arkalyk, wearing blue trousers and a deep maroon tunic picked out from Hong Yi’s collection. He grins at her as she shades her eyes from the piercing sun, hair fluttering in the breeze.
She has seen a few cities in her time, and each has been different from all others, ever surprising her with their changing faces. Grey structures line every street, in larger and more regular blocks than the apartments of Constantinople, as if they had sprung forth fully-formed from stone. Yet like the cities she has seen, everything sits upon a net of interlocking roads, and those roads are roamed by roaring wagons full of rock and rubble.
This city, says Hong Yi, will be one of many for them—a single stop on a fateful voyage, perhaps never to be visited again. There is a lightness about the day, as if meant to be forgotten, no great terror hounding her every step. Even Honourless, so often scowling in a corner of the room, is mild as the weather as she walks.
At every storefront, Hong Yi functions seamlessly with his device, speaking with shopkeepers the same way he has done with Marcia. She watches as they come up by a small bakery and now, skipping translation, he queries in the local tongue, pointing at some bread in the display.
They leave with four pastries, patterns scored into the tops. She doesn't remember the last time food tasted so sweet.
Amid their departing merriment, with the bread in her mouth, the exhaustion pounces on her. One road down from the bakery, Marcia loses her footing and sways, only for Hong Yi to catch her by the arm. She clings to stay on her feet. Her head is spinning again.
“Do you return?” he asks, stumbling on the syllables.
“Don't end this trip for my sake,” she answers, though it is clear he did not understand.
“I go with you,” he continues. “Honourless and Vesper do not.”
She nods slowly. “Take me back.”
*
As they backtrack through gray town streets, past red fountains and shuttered shops, Marcia asks a question whose words Hong Yi spends the walk looking up in his dictionary.
Could you teach me compliments in English?
They wander up familiar roads, grayed by dust. By means of that same dictionary, he begins constructing an answer.
“What kinds of compliments?” he asks.
“The kind appropriate to charming.”
By the time he decodes this sentence, they are on the street of their hotel, concrete dressed in rose paint, the sun balmy on his face. He has an inkling as to why she is asking, though he's not about to prod about it. She is still holding his arm, but gently, never resting all her weight upon him.
“Beautiful. Gorgeous. Both relate to appearance,” he reads off of his screen. “Strong. Fortis. Amazing. Mirabile.”
“Beautiful,” Marcia tests the syllables, sounding them out in her own accent. They climb the dim stairs into the hall, all golden wallpaper and irregular carpets. There is a quaintness to how the morning sun filters through the windows and seeps into the rugs.
Seven doors down, they open their own, doorknob wobbling. Light beams in upon the dim, furnished interior in its muted yellows. Marcia settles at once into the cracking beige couch by the doorway, laying one leg then the other on the seat. He starts looking up the words to his next reply.
“Marcia, Rest well. I do not speak well, but…hope words are not needed to tell you I care about you.”
Marcia lays back, eyes meeting his from her recline. “No, you speak very well,” she replies in Latin, a chuckle to her voice, then she lets her head drop to the cushion.
“Only because of this,” he answers, motioning at his device.
But she is already out like a light.
In a new note on his phone, Hong Yi has started jotting down a list of worlds. His was the fifth they found, and Vesper’s was the one before it. Marcia’s is the sixth, and nothing is known about what might be beyond.
For one more night, they withhold from Orobelle the knowledge of Marcia's steady recovery. For predictably, once the duchess is apprised of it in the morning, there is no stemming the tide.
“You will be out by afternoon!” she shouts from the doorway. “Time is running out. We have four more Cores to find!”
The flurry of packing in the room is high-strung, fragments of conversation traded in starts and stops and scribbles. They have only just begun to adjust to these daylight hours, but again it is time to leave them behind.
Are you ready to hop again? Hong Yi asks Honourless.
More than before. We go in turns. Three at a time. Once I know a place or person, it is easier to find it again.
He begins to hand the translation glass back, but she turns the notebook page and continues to write.
I will gather us in Aden. Then I will take a few of us onward. Once we are at the destination, I must study the land. Then I will return for the rest of you.
Marcia asks after her armour, then finds it tucked under her bed. Sword and all, she straps on the leather over Hong Yi’s tee and jeans, and Vesper offers up her backpack space for the rest of her getup. Hong Yi gathers up his belongings from all across the suite, pulling socks out from under the dresser. Honourless shoves her entire wardrobe into a plastic bag. Then, it is time to go.
*
The foyer looks out onto the fountain plaza, and almost no sooner than they roll their luggage into the room does Orobelle begin dictating her plan to Honourless. “You take Hong Yi, Vesper and Marcia first,” she says. “Put them somewhere safe. Then come for us.”
Honourless does not reply, instead ambling towards the trio already gathered loosely into a ring.
Vesper glances at her two companions as each takes one of her hands. Learning to hop universes, she is starting to find, is like acclimatizing to flight, or warming up to life in the army. The outward sensations differ, but at the core the turmoil is the same—of being torn from the world against one’s will.
Honourless closes the gap between Hong Yi and Marcia. Her eyes shift from one to another, gaze setting like cooled steel as they each mirror her resolve back at her. Vesper’s grip tightens. Honourless draws a deep breath.
*
The sky is dark when the four tumble onto the ramparts of a city wall. Vesper crawls to her feet and waits for the spinning to stop. In her periphery, her friends kneel, lie, pant, wheeze with fright.
The lights of Aden are still again, pricking the blue darkness from many watchtowers. The city beneath them lies dim and half asleep, the spires of mosques and the bare roofs of houses rising out of the desert pale. With a drawn out groan and an audible swallow from Honourless, the air pulls taught, and she winks out again, leaving the trio alone.
Marcia has yet to stand. She sits with her head in her lap, clutching about for handhold. Vesper and Hong Yi descend to her side, and they each offer her one shoulder, exchanging glances while they help her up against the hewn stone.
“Are you good?” he asks in Latin, and Marcia shakes her head slowly, letting herself sag against the wall.
Night deepens as they wait, and the stars seem brighter here than anywhere else, bright enough to cast light. In minutes, the space before them ripples yet again to admit Honourless, this time holding a pair of cards.
Springing out of the Ace of Diamonds in a burst of pink light, Orobelle only spares seconds for a headcount. “Take them to the next one. We'll wait for your news,” she says, snatching Dorian out of the woman’s hand.
Grimly Honourless turns to the other three, but Marcia holds up a hand between deep breaths. Her next words come out in a groan.
Leaning towards her, Vesper gives Marcia a squeeze of the shoulder, then takes Hong Yi’s hand, and Honourless’. “Orobelle, you can’t make Marcia go yet. She’s still recovering.”
Orobelle’s face hardens. “She may have a few minutes.”
“And you’ll give Honourless a break too, once she's done with this, yes?”
The duchess frowns. “I am the duchess here. You do not give me orders.”
“I’m making a request. You're welcome to persist with your cruelty if you like.”
“If you think this is cruelty,” she snarls, “then you would not last a second in the Queendom.”
“Well, then it's a good thing we're not in the Queendom.”
At this, Orobelle's face contorts into a scowl so close to crying that for moments, Vesper fears she has crossed an unmarked line.
But she does not see, nor hear, what the duchess has to say thereafter, for Honourless’ grip goes vice-tight, and the roar in her throat engulfs Vesper’s thoughts. Then Orobelle’s face—and all faces—and the stones on which they stand—pull away into some unnameable distance, along with all sound.
The air is static—too much static.
Rubble slumps in teetering mounds around them, lurid beneath a red-grey sky. Among the debris of concrete and glass lie the remnants of a plastic sign whose text Vesper can only just make out as Forever.
The sickness that rises from the pit of her stomach is quickly overtaken by the far more pressing sensation of the air buzzing on her skin. It ripples along her arms like an electric charge, and she squeezes her eyes shut, trying to shrug it off only to feel it return.
“Something's not right,” she mutters, tapping Hong Yi’s arm. The air is frigid, a far cry from that balmy gulf wind. “There’s too much static. I can't explain—it’s like an itch, like—”
“Like…like the air is electrified?” Hong Yi frowns, eyes scanning the desolation around them. “I was afraid you'd say that.” Already he is tugging on Honourless’ arm with one hand, typing a message with another.
She whips the glass from her pocket in the same moment he turns his screen towards her. “Asith!” she shouts. At once she shoves the glass away and snatches them both by the shoulder, and before Vesper can begin to piece together what has happened, she feels the wrenching tug of Honourless’ grip, and then the turning-inward of the world.
When they land, Orobelle begins to scream out a reprimand, until Hong Yi fixes her with a look more severe than any Vesper has seen on his face before.
“I think we landed in a nuclear blast zone,” he says, not a hint of lightness in his voice. “An atomic bomb was dropped there. Or a hydrogen bomb. I don't know.”
The shift in the duchess’ expression is instantaneous. She has wrapped herself in a blue hooded cloak and now tugs it tight around herself, white fingers peeking from its folds. “Honourless, where did you take them?” she snaps.
Honourless utters one sentence, folds her arms and leans on a wall.
The duchess’ icicle-sharp gaze pivots to Hong Yi. “I don't know what a ‘core blast zone’ is. But Honourless claims she took you to the same city as the one where we found you.”
“New York City?” His eyes have gone very wide. “Thats…uh, that doesn't bode well.”
“What does it mean to you?”
Vesper stares listlessly at him, the words going cloudy in her ears as he speaks. “Okay, so…New York City is one of the trade hubs of one of the most militarised nations in my world. There have been pacts against nuclear weapons for decades. Every world power recognised the danger—bombs that levelled cities, killed tens of thousands, and poisoned the residents for years afterwards—that fun stuff. The country where NYC is located was one of the frontrunners of those peace treaties.
“If NYC was bombed, it means that in this world, the pacts must have failed. There’s no knowing what other places have been destroyed. We…have to tread carefully. The next world could be a hellscape. And any nuclear blast site, anywhere with active radiation…could kill or seriously harm us if we stay too long.”
*
“An atomic bomb?” Vesper breathes as they begin to regroup from the disarray. “Do they…build one? In the future?”
To this, Hong Yi spends a minute gaping wordlessly. “Has your world not seen it? They dropped the first bomb in 1945. August.”
She stares back. “No. It didn't happen. It’s already September. The war is almost over. No one believes we will see it in our lifetimes. What do you mean…they poison the land?”
Hong Yi draws a long breath. “Radiation. Nuclear bombs leave behind unstable particles that release emissions as they decay. Emissions like—like sunlight but much stronger. They linger and continue to irradiate living things in the vicinity for years afterwards. Burns, cancer, mutations…there's a reason only two have ever been dropped. They never used nuclear weapons in war again. In my world.”
“How many people did they kill?”
“Tens of thousands on first impact. Tens of thousands after. Some say a hundred thousand in total. It was the sort of singularly horrific event that changed the world for good…” He sighs. “Sorry, you're a soldier, you’ve probably thought about this more than I have.”
It takes Vesper almost a minute to realise her view of the city wall is lost behind the haze of images of collapsing buildings and fields of corpses, and an ache squeezing her heart…
She blinks twice. She sees Hong Yi and everyone else staring at her. She sees the ground.
Her eyes unfocus again, and she snatches Hong Yi’s shoulder, leaning against him.
“Holy shit. You okay?”
She shakes her head and rubs her eyes. “I…think so.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Frostbite - I
Content warnings (contains spoilers)
This chapter depicts animal death.
In the nuclear-stricken expanse of Siberia, hunger is the essential condition of all life. Gnawing, clawing hunger, stripping faces of colour and hearts of warmth.
In the depths of the months once known as summer, snow pools deep enough to bury a corpse. The sea brings no ships; the phantom memory of crop cycles lingers only in moth-bitten calendars. And all bow to the tyranny of hunger. How much is left in the stores? Is there a house one can raid? Are there rats left with flesh on their bones? Fed or dead. Fed or dead. Every day, one casts the dice again.
Teetering on the northern tip of Krasnoyarsk Krai is the city of Dikson, once obscure through its remoteness, and now, briefly, saved by it. It has no name for itself, but it is where the researchers of the Dmitri Melnikov return to roost from September to April each year. Here, all vegetation has long abandoned efforts to grow, from the skeletal trees to the weeds in the cracks of the snow-blanketed streets.
It is up one such street that Artur trudges, towards the lighthouse where he has holed up since returning from the ice sheet.
At Frantsa Iosifa last year, there were days when Artur felt like a child watching through the window on a winter’s night. He sensed a glow of joy, just out of his grasp and knowing, and while the scientists' keyboards clattered away, he fussed over his vessel, seeing to maintenance and repairs.
Well, the Dmitri Melnikov was never his, by all rights. But learning to pilot the icebreaker, he developed a bond like that between horse and rider, learning its habits and demands by heart. It was his in the same way that a hearth fire belonged to the one who lit it: a comfort and a companion, its absence leaving an ache.
But last year's voyage was not like the ones before. On the return, Dr Andreyeva and her team chattered and drank as if they could see the silver lining of the nuclear winter now. But on being asked, the head scientist simply said, “No, no, not the end of the winter...but a chance...that humanity may live past it. This oil trap may fuel all of Siberia for a decade yet. And a decade is a long time...”
Then around him readouts were printed from machines, and the bespectacled doctor, all sharp edges lined by age, was gone into her euphoria once again.
But to what end?
Artur pauses on the front step of the lighthouse. The scintillating snow mirrors nothingness back at him. To what end do we weather this winter? Then he imagines the flash of a face in the fog, like a haunting, of a woman whom the months have somehow failed to scour away. His breath catches.
For the chance, he thinks. Then he hears a whimper.
“I return every year in February,”Sabina said, the day she left the lighthouse empty behind her. Since that morning, Artur has tracked his calendar religiously.
This month is the first February since her departure. In the intervening year, he has watched the world dwindle at a glacier's pace. When he arrived back here, the village by the lighthouse hill was all but threadbare.
Still, with the tools aboard the Dmitri Melnikov—borrowed with the blessing of the researchers—he has spent the rest of the sub-zero months restoring the pale tower. First the door, refurbished with a spare lock from the basement, then the broken staircase rail, he repairs the lighthouse for no reason other than that he needs something useful to do.
Some days, he sits in the light room and watches the static sunset. Other days, he wanders to the town centre, passing rusty cranes and toppled shipping containers, the snow starting to pile inside them. Sometimes the fog is so thick that he cannot see his own boots.
All the while, in the village beneath the hill, families vanish every week, rubbed out by the frost and the starving rats. Though Artur has watched the long silence whittle the population away, there are still a number who know him well enough to put a name to his face.
So follow the jokes: “That madman Artur is repairing the lighthouse! He thinks he can save ships! Their captains shall live to die another day.”
He has heard Selma regaling her husband like so as he passes, and the man answers, “If I had as many hours as he, I would spend them readying for the day the village starts eating each other alive.”
“I’ve seen the way Ustin watches our house. Like some hungry dog at the sight of meat. He will be the first to turn when our stocks are exhausted, just you watch.”
“But that Artur will be the first to go. Eaten in his own lighthouse.”
Artur has never dignified them with an answer. Heedless they will continue to mutter as he passes, shovelling snow off the unused driveway.
In this long twilight of the world, the empty sea betrays no blink of light to show that any vessels still pass this way. For a while in its history, humanity thought it knew the sea in whole. Now, it is a mystery again.
Whatever lies on the other end of it, whatever ice or oil or flame, if there is a wonderland untouched by the grey light, that is someone else’s destination—not his.
There is a scruffy grey something nuzzling at the warm crack between the lighthouse doors—too big to be a dog, too small to be a bear.
As Artur draws closer, his breath shortens. He begins to make out the pointed ears of a wolf, and the lines of its ribs through its fur. It scrabbles at the wood with a mangy paw.
His heart kicks into high gear. He feels about in his pockets for something to defend himself, and comes up only with the key to the chain on his door. That chain hangs rusty over the head of the beast, creaking with every nudge.
Given how the creature’s skin hangs on its bones, he has more than a sliver of a chance of coming out on top, even unarmed. The scientists sent him home with rations, and he is doing well with them. This wolf does not appear to have eaten in days, if not weeks...
Artur creeps up the path, dodging loose rock, though he feels naked out in the open. At two metres away, he can see the tatters of its fur, the sallow skin showing through in patches.
His boot crushes a nobble of snow with a crunch. He freezes, but the wolf does not turn. Letting out a long, slow breath, he inches forth, one step at a time, ready to grapple it.
Its head flicks to a side. Its golden eye meets his. He tenses, arms ready to deflect its teeth.
But it prods the door crack again, this time with its eyes trained on him. He stumbles, gasping as his panic settles. Of course, it must want food, but it must know it is too weak to make prey of him. These creatures have no notion of right and wrong. It is not choosing to spare him out of decency—only desperation.
But he knows that the beast, with no pack in sight, hasn’t a week left to its life.
“Fine. Fine. You win.”
The wolf, though almost as large as Artur, watches quietly as he turns the key and the rusty chain clatters apart. He watches for its next motions, and when he does not move to halt it, it slinks through the gap into the shadow of the stairwell, head hung.
He follows after, sighing. It could be sick, only sick wolves seek out human company, he thinks with a grimace. It could kill you without meaning harm. Then what will Sabina say? She won’t say anything, because she’ll never find your corpse.
“One day, and then you’re out,” he snaps, already picking open the crates of rations that the scientists left him. As he does, the wolf, large enough to topple one such crate over, sits by his feet and watches, tucking its legs under its body. When he fishes out a bundle of dried meat, its head perks up, but it lacks the vigour to lunge for the morsels.
He peels the wrapper open, teeth gritted as the tang of dried meat hits him. Water drips near his feet; the wolf is slavering. He tosses the entire strip at his guest, and then plops himself down on the lowest step.
The wolf snaps up the offering, pressing it onto the floor with a paw and tearing chunks from the slice with its teeth. It makes short work of the snack. Watching, Artur shakes his head.
The ice sings, Artur learned last year. Pyotr, the bespectacled boy always eager to explain his craft, said, when floes rub against each other, they make a sound like whales, too deep to be heard by humans. Their voices reverberate far and wide, and the seabed echoes them back.
And with those echoes, the scientist saw the oil in the earth's crust, oil that had once been left untapped to protect the Arctic ice. The ice needs no protecting, now.
The night it was confirmed—when the icebergs creaked at the right frequencies and the seabed showed the oil in its belly—there was a long-distance radio message back to the mainland within an hour.
Artur has imagined the shape of the seafloor many times since then, its secret pockets and hills, and the places where it has been drilled open. In his work, he only ever skirted the surface of the deep. Yet these doctors know its reefs and ridges like the face of a lover, its shape felt out with the groans of shearing ice.
He was still merely floating upon the waves, as they talked with oil merchants of drilling through its bed. He watched them work through the night, faces lit from below. He slept at the bridge in stops and starts, wearing his furs, his breath fogging the glass.
In the morning, they told him a miracle had been worked, somewhere among those flickering screens. The birth of an answer to a world-ending question.
*
This two-week transit from Frantsa Iosifa to Dikson is different from every other: talk of family and hometowns floats on the air. They never talked of the future before. When they dock again in the home port, Artur sets down his passengers at the weathered pier in the fog, and steers to the dockyard for servicing.
The hull of the Dmitri Melnikov is always battering ice, and its pipes and ballast chambers sometimes crack from freezing water. The shipyard is decaying in slow motion, like the rest of the coast, and its skeleton crew will need the whole fortnight to repair it with their hand tools and single operable crane. He watches, lovingly, as they patch its hull in the drydock, welding over iceberg gashes, readying it for its next voyage.
It is midway through the wait that he is called out to receive his yearly shipment of rations. It arrives from storage in a lorry twice as large as normal, and when the passenger door opens, out steps Dr Andreyeva herself.
She walks straight into a handshake. “Mister Volkov! I hope you are well. You have been nothing short of a blessing to our team. None of what we've done would have been possible without you.”
There is a telling sadness in her eyes. “Doctor Andreyeva,” he answers, “you're too kind. I only do what I best can.”
“Don't be down on yourself. How can we ever thank you enough?” the doctor answers. “Your service has been invaluable to us. And I come here with good news, but painful news, too. We have spoken to Lukoil, and they have promised to take us there on their fleet next year. A free ride. So, for better or worse...this has been our last journey together, Mister Volkov. It is likely we will not be employing you again next year.”
He only allows the words a split second to tear through him. “You can’t refuse anything free in times like these,” he answers steadily.
“Know it was not a decision we came to lightly, for we have dearly loved working with you. As our thanks,” she continues, “we have brought you as much from our partners as we could afford as a gift at this time. I do not know how long these supplies will last, but our hope is two years, at least. And by then, with luck, we may have oil on the market again.”
Artur nods mutely as the lorry trundles up alongside them, and its driver kicks the passenger door open, waving him in, the way he does every year.
This was his last voyage. With the scientists, with the icebreaker, with that vicarious wonder. Ahead of him, the path is erased by snow.
He stands in the berth and bids the Dmitri Melnikov goodbye, and Andreyeva, and the Dikson shipyard. Then with his supplies, he boards the truck with the grinning driver, face never cracking with a smile, a frown, or a tear.
One evening becomes two. The wolf lingers around Artur in front of his stoked hearth. As he throws her one half of his dinner, he finds he can see how dogs may have been bred from them. There is no telling if her pack is still alive, but whether they are or not, they must be lost to her.
That is the only way that he can comfort himself into believing she would resort to this, besides madness or disease. She does not look diseased, particularly not after a few days’ nourishment.
“Not much left in this world for either of us, is there?” he murmurs, as she paws at the peeling tips of his boots.
Soon enough, the wolf starts to recognise his routines: he wakes up before the first crack of light, has a breakfast of tea and hardtack, then climbs to the light room to sit and drink till sundown three hours later.
She starts to follow Artur up and down the flights of stairs, despite his complaints and protests, despite ineffectual kicks into her flank. Eventually, he gives up, and lets her curl on the floor in the light room, the tips of her fur frosted by the light from the lens.
Now that she is better-fed, she has the bearing of a predator again: claws sharp as knives, haunches built for pursuit, ears that hear him from the other end of the stairwell.
“Let her in, Artur! She’ll die if you don’t,” he groans, glancing at the slumbering beast by his row of bottles, some full, others less so. “Those villagers were right. I’ll be the first to go.”
It is on the fifth morning of his new guest’s stay that Artur hears a knock on his door.
“What?” he grumbles. He wiggles his wolf-bitten slippers onto his feet as he ambles down the stairs. The knocking comes again, and he bristles. “Quit that racket!”
“Artur! Artur, it’s your friend, Ernst,” answers a muffled shout.
“Which Ernst?”
“The one living on the corner you pass every week on the way to the port! I should have known you would be so cold. You never even stopped to talk to your friend!”
Twisting the key in the lock, Artur loosens the chain just enough to open the door a crack, but does not remove it. “What do you want?”
Artur does know the face. Ernst is tall, bespectacled and pale, his cheeks hollowed out by eating too little. The glass of his lenses is chipped, and he squints when he speaks. “I, well, noticed you coming home last year with a massive truck. Absolutely massive! Truly wasted on a village of our size! I saw the man bringing crate after crate into your dingy lighthouse, but I could not for the life of me understand why you should need so many boxes.”
“Yes, and?”
“Well, last night, it occurred to me that you hadn't come out of your lighthouse in days. How could you have lived that long, I wondered, without going to the village? Then, all at once, it occurred to me what must have been in the lorry last year—food! Enough to feed a village!” Now his animated demeanour takes on a pleading quality. “Surely, surely now, you would have no use of so much?”
Only now does Artur hear a shuffle of feet on the snow, from another person out of sight.
“I am not giving it away,” he answers flatly.
“Oh, Artur. You have more than the rest of us combined! I reckon you have enough to feed the whole village for weeks! Surely you cannot turn your needy neighbour away in a time like this…”
“For God’s sake. I have lost my job. This is the last shipment I will ever get. Until they come back with oil, and I hope they do, this is all I have—”
Squinting down at Artur till now, Ernst’s face goes slack, and he jolts backwards with a cry, eyes round as the full moon. Pointing past Artur's feet, he shrieks, “Is that a wolf? What is that fiend doing in your home? Are you—are you feeding that thing?”
Artur stiffens as he feels the brush of a wet muzzle against his arm.
“What? He has a what?” A second voice, a woman’s.
Artur breathes faster. He tries not to show it. As their voices rise in a tumult of accusations, he reaches for the door’s crossbar and slams it shut in a jangle of chains, loops the chain round and round the bars, and locks it, and loops the chain again.
Amid the banging of fists on his door, he turns to the wolf and growls, “Hey, don’t do that again!” He kicks her rump towards the stairs, and she yelps as she skitters away. “Other humans don’t like your kind. I mean…I don’t like that you’re here either.” She stands higher than his waist, but yields as quickly as a berated puppy, trotting up the stairs beside him with a drawn-out whimper.
As she reaches the second floor, she picks up his boots and drops then before his feet. He sighs, pulling his first slipper off. “I’m blaming this on my ancestors.”
There must be whisperings of Artur’s guest. He can tell they have been lurking near the lighthouse street, for they leave tracks in the snow, pelted into the the ground all the way from the last fork in the road.
The wolf can sense his fear, or something like it. She hangs close to his legs as he rises from his unsteady armchair, her black-ringed golden eyes asking the questions she cannot speak.
He scratches her between the ears as he picks up a rag from the coat rack.
“Oh, if Sabina were here,” he murmurs as he starts to polish the chair’s arms, “she would know how to make those stupid people go away. She's learned. Well-read. She uses words better than I.”
By now, the wolf has wandered halfway down the steps. When she realises he isn’t following, she turns and gives a howl of pleading.
“Shh!” he hisses as he abandons the rag to the seat. “No howling. You'll draw attention. I'll come get you your snacks.”
Halfway down the stairs, Artur pauses. Out the narrow stairwell window, he sees four villagers talking in the snow, all facing where he is. He doesn’t think they can see him, but he hurries downward anyway, out of line of sight.
Sabina, he thinks, was wrong about one thing. There is little nobility in the average human heart, and people like she are the odd ones out in a world like this.
He wriggles his fingers under a crate lid and feels around for two handfuls of jerky. His companion comes skidding down the steps as he hands over the meat, and she licks his palm clean when she has finished it all.
“About time I named you, I reckon,” he mutters. “I’ll call you…oh, I am no wordsmith. I will call you…”
Every so often, a shadow passes in the grey that briefly thaws Artur’s apathy away. He polishes the lighthouse lens, and turns on the beacon as the sun descends.
Fixing the lamp last December was a simple wiring job—none too different from those repairs he has performed upon old boat lamps. A circuit part had rusted and snapped. Whoever once tended this lighthouse stocked it well. He soldered a new wire on, waving the fumes towards the stairwell.
This lighthouse must be much older than he is, older than his parents would be now, even. Every corner bears the memory of the one who used to live here—the coat rack and the remains of a moth-bitten jacket, the cigarette pack he found among the tools. There is not enough to know the old owner by, beyond their taste in vodka and furnishings. But it is enough to make the place feel haunted.
Only twice in the months since his return has he seen a vessel on the bay, though he spends many waking hours in the gallery wearing his furs, a cup of tea cradled in his hands. The first time, it was a boat too small to be a hospital ship, and the second time, the ship had the wrong kind of machinery aboard—cranes for lifting cargo, though there was no cargo to be seen.
Phantoms in the night, gliding soundlessly through the fog. None ever call.
What use is hoping, if it will all turn out the same?
But in the town, he hears all kinds of whisperings—Lukoil has opened an office in town. Hulking carriers laden with oil rig scaffolds passed through last month. One of the port cranes is being repaired.
And what use is despair, but to kill any chance of salvation? Against all odds, the tiniest seed of hope is rooting in the snowfields of his sorrow.
They found oil. We found oil. We could live for ten more years…
Artur wakes to howling.
And shrieking men, and banging wood, and chains clattering against his door. The buzz and clack-clack-clack of a cutter, splintering the silence of several months.
He flies from the rickety bed onto his feet, gasping for air.
She’s not by the bed where she normally is.
But he can hear her. Her howls have turned to whimpers, somewhere far away.
“Binka!” he cries out, foregoing his boots, tripping down the stairs two at a time. “Binka! Stay away from her!”
There is a crowd at his door, surging together around some prize that he now sees—hoisted in two rugged men’s arms, snapping and writhing and howling—is the wolf Binka.
“What are you doing?” he bellows. “You broke into my home—”
“Why are you harbouring this mangy beast? There are enough plagues upon our town!”
“What a selfish fool! We are all starving, and you would rather feed this pest—what has gotten into your head? It's of more use dead than alive!”
“Stop!” Dizzy upon tides of rage and panic, he wrestles through five men and women at the door, none enough to hold him, but five more pile upon him, battering him blind. In flashes between heads he sees Selma and Ustin shove Binka onto the ground, still too frail to put up a predator’s fight. And then he sees Ernst, glasses flashing as he screams out a curse, hoisting a hunter’s rifle over his shoulder—
When the bullet booms out of the barrel, Artur flinches away. Once the echo of the explosion has faded, there are only human voices left, cheering at the sight of red.
The crisp air is rent by another bang. This time he hears the splatter of gore over the boom of gunpowder, before the cheers flood into the gaps again.
Artur feels a stirring inside him, something that has bubbled there for years, or maybe centuries—something that would destroy everyone and everything around him. He has always tried to drown it, time and time again, but every sorrow, every wound, has stoked it—a cruel hunger that would put this winter to shame.
Yes, there is nothing left in this world that he wouldn’t destroy.
With deadly calm, Artur fixes his eye upon Ernst.
“Leave,” he growls through his teeth, jaw clenched so hard it aches. He strides forward.
The man scampers back. “Patience, patience,” he breathes, “we were already on our way!”
“Leave.” Artur points a finger at him, then at the other ten gathered, all clumped together like sheep, hoping to be invisible among each other. Their haughty frowns have sloughed away, showing the bone-white terror beneath.
Even as he stands, the sky begins to stir around him. The snow starts to spiral into a howling vortex. They pull their coats tighter, scrambling backward, unsteady as newborn foals.
The wind swells into a gale, enough to rip leaves from trees, if there were still trees. Enough to rip scarves from necks. Blood dances off the ground. Binka’s head lies severed from her body. Her blood paints their hems red.
They finally start to run, eyes flicking wildly between him and the storm rising around him, with a superstitious terror somewhere between fear of God and the Devil. And then they cannot keep their eyes open, for the snow is shredding at their faces.
“Monster!” screeches Ernst. “Devil spawn!”
A blizzard rises around the lighthouse, and Artur is in its eye. The townsfolk pull what is left of their furs over their heads. They sprint and trip and fall. They bleed from a thousand cuts as they tear away across the snow, weeping, and the storm swallows them, and every footprint they have left, and the remains of the wolf he knew as a friend.
Artur tumbles to his knees and roars at the sky, tears freezing as they fall.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
Frostbite - II
Content warnings (may contain spoilers):
This chapter depicts heavy alcohol use and decaying corpses.
Orobelle carries the weight of the world in her eyes as she beckons the team back together. “Vesper, Hong Yi, Honourless, you triangulate ahead,” she mutters. “Dorian, Marcia, with me.” After a long pause, she finally pulls the corefinder from the pocket of her bag, and holds in Vesper’s direction. “Guard it with your life.”
“Well, if you insist,” Vesper answers, dusting her hands on her shirt.
Stepping in among the circle of travellers, Hong Yi's voice fills the silence. “We probably don't have a lot of landing options in the Fallout World next door,” he says. “Could Honourless take us to, let's say…Perth? I don't know much about Perth, to be honest. It’s a city on the west coast of Australia, far off from everything, and I doubt it’s getting nuked anytime soon. All the better if Honourless can find us a nuclear bunker—a sealed chamber under the ground.”
It is knowing only that much about the destination—that it is a west coast city with a monosyllabic name—that Honourless takes her two allies by the hands. Without a word, she draws in a deep breath, and strains, and plucks them off the face of the world, into that interstitial universe of lines. Light races past unwaveringly, lengthening into strings, and as they do, Vesper closes her eyes.
*
When at last the colours snap away, they leave…nothing. A pitch-black starless dark.
Briefly Vesper wonders if she’s forgotten to open her eyes. But two blinks later, the perfect darkness persists.
Then the stench hits—it presses on them, so thick they start to gag. She stumbles about, and hears the shouts of her allies, until she kicks something soft, and freezes. She has felt it before.
“Corpses,” she mutters. “Room's full of them.”
Hong Yi gags again—then a soft thump as Honourless catches him, spitting a slew of admonishments. Meanwhile Vesper opens her palm, and lets an electric arc dance across the tips of her fingers, illuminating—
—faces. Hands. Piles and piles of people, some crumpled in poses so seemingly alive that she would believe them asleep, if not for the missing limbs and eyes, and visibly decaying blackness around their wounds, staunched by the cold. She swallows, beating away the memory of the river under Gerjen Bridge…
A pile of corpses is strewn all the way to a closed door on the far wall. Above it, a tiny green sign draws her eye, but what little she can make out is incomprehensible. “I don’t think this is Perth,” murmurs Vesper. “There’s writing on a sign, but I can’t make it out, it’s…maybe an Asian language, but I can't say which.”
She plucks the corefinder from her pocket and holds it as close to the arc as she can without the current jumping. She watches for the needles that settle. It is not like reading a compass, so many points crossing, each tip marked in a different colour. But soon enough she can discern that one has settled pointing at her, and another at Hong Yi.
A third settles not long after, pointing past the wall to their left…
Just as Hong Yi stumbles to her side and grabs her arm with eyes welded shut, her gaze falls upon a row of screens, gleaming dimly in her arc light.
“Y…you tell me where to go,” he groans. “I’m not opening my eyes until we…”
“Do you know how to use a computer?” she asks.
“Yeah? Why?”
Vesper starts to drag him along, and he stumbles, finding his footing, and yelps when it collides with a cold elbow. As they shuffle past arms and legs, she kicks his shoes to guide his steps out of the way. “Almost there,” she says, eyes flicking to the desks and their screens. “Alright. There’s a chair to your left.” He kicks to his left, and one foot collides with its wheels, making it roll a foot away. “It’s…a little farther to your left now.” She clutches his shoulders and steers him towards the wayward seat.
The chair looks like something out of a sci-fi novel, molded from a single piece of plastic. She shoves him down onto the cushioning. He lands with a shout of her name and whirls back, eyes flying open, then snapping shut at once with another yell. Vesper sighs. Honourless, leaning against the far wall, gives a little chuckle.
She rolls the swivel chair back into place, Hong Yi tucking his feet in above the wheels. She rotates him to face the screen. “All right, open your eyes.”
He does so. There is a terminal in front of him, and he immediately starts taking stock, reaches for a button on the tower, and gives it a push.
It clicks. Nothing. He pushes it again. It takes him two attempts before he says, “Uh, could you check under the table to see if the thing’s plugged in?”
She kneels to the ground and nudges a cold hand out of the way. There’s the plug, and there’s the switch. It appears to be turned on, but she flips it anyway. Another click of the power button garners no answer from the machine.
“Okay…uh…could you get the plug and tell me how many pins it has?”
She reaches under the desk and yanks the plug out of the wall, finding that it has two round prongs. “Two.”
“Okay. What shape are they?”
“Round.”
“Hm. We're probably in China, if what you said about the sign is to go by. That's not enough to tell us the city, though. Can you generate and hold a twelve volt potential, and make it alternate in polarity? Just pass the current between those two pins and alternate them like…”
“Like a power grid current?”
“50 hertz.”
“I think I know how to do that.”
Laying the plug on the ground, Vesper rubs her hands together and generates the potential. Then, pinching each pin with one hand, she begins to feed power into the plug. Alternating current is not her strong suit, but she has felt it before, sticking forks in sockets as forbidden in many a safety manual.
Hong Yi pushes the power button again, and this time, she hears the computer answer with the whir of a fan, then minute clicks and the flash of a screen.
“No way—”
The scent of melting is all the warning they have before a fuse pops and the screen winks out.
“…No way,” Hong Yi sighs.
Vesper shakes her head. “Sorry. Luckily we have…eleven more goes.”
“True. Okay. Next up—”
On the second computer, Vesper ramps up the voltage slowly, and they make it far enough for Hong Yi to gasp. Then that tower, too, shorts in a spitting of sparks.
She punches her leg with a growl and turns to Hong Yi again, lighting the air over her hand. But he has yet to move.
He stares at the blank screen, no trace of light leftz.
“We’re in my hometown,” he says simply.
She relights the arc in her hand. “How do you know?”
“The domain name. Dixiacheng Wangge. That’s the underground city in Beijing.”
“Oh.”
“I need to get outta here. Can we check the corefinder against your compass?”
Wordlessly, Vesper slides the devices out of her pockets, laying them on the table while she produces an arc light. He glances over at the reading, then slips his phone out of his pocket, the plotter filling the screen in a jarring cascade of green and blue. He begins to tap away at the interface.
“Okay, good news,” he huffs. “There are only two cities along the great circle route. Bad news: they're both very small, so I have no clue if our target is even in them.” He sucks in a deep breath, and blows it out, squeezing his eyes shut as if his life depends on it. “Okay. Let’s go. We can decide where to jump to next after we’re out. Please.”
Vesper turns to Honourless with a wave and a nod, and she winds her way around the poor dead of this underground bunker.
The great boon of travelling with these two companions is that neither one needs much telling what to do. They clasp hands, and Honourless leaps—and in a whirl of colours too bright for their dark-acclimatised eyes, they leave those future catacombs behind.
“Reykjavik, Iceland. Asunçion, Paraguay. And miles of ocean between.” Hong Yi presents the information under the dim moon in a town whose cold they are underdressed for. A hollow terror has settled in his eyes since the Underground City. “I mean, they could also be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, for all we know.”
“What’s our best triangulation point?” asks Vesper.
“Has to be somewhere that hasn't been bombed to pieces,” he says, and she can hear the way his voice has shrunk.
Rather than answer his suggestions, Vesper claps his shoulders. “Keep marching, soldier. Just one step after another. We’ll make it through.”
He nods meekly back. “Let's go, then,” he says, gesturing at Honourless as he types. “For triangulation…Arkalyk again, that could work.”
*
In this world, Arkalyk is all but a husk of itself—killed not by the nuclear apocalypse but by something perhaps older: a slow death that has left no sign. Now in the place of shops are tents, their huddled residents tending family plots of crops in the rundown streets.
The route Hong Yi draws from there points them northeast, crossing over the line from Beijing at almost the northern coast of Russia. “Looks like we're in for a cold one,” he says, fingers searching for a settlement. “Not a whole lot going on in that area…but there's a town there that I've never heard of—Dikson.”
Vesper paces about beside him. “Whatever shall we do if our mark were not in a settlement?”
He shrugs. “We could keep walking, or driving, and consulting the corefinder, but other than that…sorry folks, I’m not sure. There's only one thing we can do now.”
*
By the time they return to the starlight-bathed city of Aden, Orobelle is dozing on Dorian’s bedroll in the shadow of the wall, while he stands guard. Marcia leans on the wall beside him, the pair in quiet conversation.
When they land, the duches stirs with a groan, then leaps out of bed, hands swinging towards Vesper before she has even fully opened her eyes. “Corefinder,” she mutters, and Vesper lays the device in her hand. Only once she has inspected it in full does she carry on. “Where are we headed next?”
“Somewhere cold, probably,” Hong Yi says. “Close to the north pole. Let’s get some winter clothes sorted. Who needs something?”
*
Honourless’ skill in theft has been improving in leaps and bounds. With two jumps, she secures for herself, Vesper and Marcia a motley assortment of winter coats, gloves and hats, taken from his world, out of place in the Aden night.
Hong Yi finds himself chuckling as they suit up—it’s the puffiest he has ever seen the crew. Will it be harder to transport us like this? he asks Honourless in a corner once his hat and muffler are in place.
If they made us weigh more, that would make a difference. Those clothes do not weigh much.
What memory will you spend this time?
The same as always. The name of someone I no longer care about. This time, I am thinking of Ivy, the kid on the street who used to fill my shoes with rocks.
Ivy. Why don’t you tell me each memory before you spend it? I can write it down for you.
I am forgetting them for a reason.
But surely there will come a time when you run out of those kinds of names.
If that time comes, then we talk.
She takes Hong Yi and Vesper by the hand first. They nod to each other, Honourless’ face steeling up as her eyes focus past them, upon a place too far to see.
“These jumps are starting to feel as routine as doing the groceries,” Hong Yi says, feeling Honourless’ grip tighten.
“Speak for yourself—” Vesper is cut short as the universe redshifts away.
Artur kicks the last flecks of snow onto the mound in the ground by the lighthouse door. He does it so that the grave shows some sign of existing, even though he knows that the next snowstorm will scatter it again.
Even then, the white around the mound is mingled with flecks of earth, earth that the lighthouse keeper’s shovel hit a metre down. In the process of digging, he has excavated two more of the lighthouse’s front steps, and only now begins to wonder how deep they go.
Beside the new mound, Artur has planted a rusty pole and mounted his slippers atop it. That will have to do. The keeper has another pair somewhere; he’ll make do.
He hasn’t shed more tears since the day of Binka’s slaughter, but his attention has had elsewhere to go. The better part of February has passed him by without a sound, and the number of days in which Sabina may return are diminishing. He has woken twice to find paint and wastewater smeared on his door. He cleans it as he finds it.
Now that he is alone again with the memory of what was here before, the lighthouse seems quiet as death. He falls back into a cycle, hope replaced with habit. In the day he sits by the glass and watches the sea, reading old paper manuals from the storeroom. At night he lights the beacon, and waits to see if it brings anyone to shore.
A week of this elapses: scaling the stairs with vodka, pulling his chair, brushing aside the remains of his old companion, returning below to make another attempt at jerky stew that predictably fails, and falling asleep with alcohol on his breath—sometimes in the armchair, surrounded by the foggy sky, when he doesn’t make it to the bed.
*
It is with blurry eyes and an ache in his skull that Artur hears a knock on the front door. Through the morning freeze, it is crisp and strident.
He jolts up as it repeats itself, echoing up two stories. His heart booms. The villagers wouldn't knock like that.
The picture of Sabina’s face as he last saw it, turning as she vanished through the doorway, clouds out his alcohol-muddied vision as he stumbles down to the entryway.
But as he dashes down the last three steps and shuffles towards the door, he hears a voice he doesn’t know. A child? Surely she did not bring a child with her. He would not know what to do with one in his living room…
He makes out the demand in the visitor’s words as he loosens the chain and opens the door a crack.
“Did you not hear me the first time?”
Through the silvery gap in the door, huddled in furs and crystals, is a child no higher than his shoulder, with hair and skin almost as pale as the snow. At her side is not Sabina, but a man taller than himself, with a deep maroon coat and long brown hair under an old-fashioned cap. Artur's heart sinks.
“Sir, you must leave with us at once.” The sorrow begins to change—to roil up inside him. “We understand you have work to do with this lighthouse, but I assure you that this is more important than—”
That is all he has to hear before he slams the door with a growl and loops the chain back on. The yammering stops, replaced with yells and the banging of a fist. He returns to the light room, and this time he wedges the door shut behind him.
The comforts of this cold, grey city—one called Dixon, or a name of that style—are few and far between. They first land among the shadows of colossal metal frames in the grey and the boom of freezing waves, rolling against the stones below. Their breath puffs out in white clouds as the group of six appraise the strange vista.
Marcia feels the cold sink its teeth in. She paces about, even the three layers that almost cooked her to death in Aden not enough to protect her from the freeze. She shoves her hands into the pockets at her waist, seemingly made for that purpose, as they scurry away.
They soon find—after an hour hiking in the snow, with Orobelle and Dorian as cards in Vesper’s pocket—only one hostel taking lodgers. Its door stands shut, and it does not have a name; they only find it when a stranger quietly opens the door to leave.
The rest are more than eager to pile in through the door, but Marcia halts at the doorstep. She is sure she hears a crunch of feet behind her.
Turning to look, she sees only the pale white snow gleaming back. She is still frowning when she follows the rest into the warmth, closing the door behind her.
The air in that woody atrium is suffused by a hearth that greets them when they step inside. Orobelle and Dorian request lodging for six, then learns that their options include a few double rooms and two twelve-bed hostels. The counter server converses in a language yet again different from any she has heard, and she can only understand the duchess’ replies.
“We shall have a double room,” Orobelle declares before anyone can speak. “And the rest will share a hostel room.”
As far as interaction goes, it is easier for Hong Yi and Vesper to get by than in Arkalyk—many here speak English, albeit with different inflections. Marcia uses them as her conduits. Now and then, as they shuffle along to the hostel, her mind blacks out—as when she has not slept in a day—then returns to attention when she has taken a deep breath.
She feels a nudge of her shoulder, awakening her to the fact that she has stopped walking. To her right, Vesper offers her opened water flask.
Marcia blinks. “Many thanks,” she says, taking it from her hand and swigging. Water spills down her chin. She returns it, thrill surging over her when their hands brush. Fingers lingering, she holds Vesper’s gaze, then ventures, in English, “Thank you…gorgeous.”
Vesper’s eyes widen. “Me?” she laughs, and whatever she says in answer is incomprehensible except her tone: deflective, and less certain than how she normally speaks.
Marcia grins back, startled to feel as if her fever has returned. “Who else?” she murmurs. With a shake of her head, Vesper waves them into the room, though the grin never fully deserts her face.
*
While Vesper and Hong Yi tour Dikson in search of for food, the duchess and her protector disappear into their lodgings. Marcia, meanwhile, lays herself down on the closest bed in the hostel room and curls around a pillow, closing her eyes against the nauseating heat and chill.
She is dimly aware of the former pair returning from their foray with a bag of raw fish because she can smell it through the door. She crawls out to meet them. They knock on the duchess' room for culinary help, and Dorian hastily obliges, cooking the fish to oblivion, the heat radiating for metres on every side.
The cause of his hurry becomes clear as they pick away at the burnt fish at the ramshackle table in the lobby. He and Orobelle pass them, dressed for the outside.
“Do not leave till we return,” snaps the duchess without meeting any eyes. While the pair march out the front door, the remaining four pick bones from between their teeth.
It is barely an hour before Orobelle blusters back into the hostel room in her furs, solely to deliver a rant about the “ingrate” who slammed his door in her face.
“The man did not even address me! Not even a commoner's greeting! He had the nerve to slam the door in my face!”
Vesper closes her eyes and rubs the bridge of her nose. “Have you learned nothing?”
“What, should I have humoured him with flattery while standing outside his door? In the snow?”
She sighs. “Want me to go do it? Or one of the others? I'm not choosy.”
“If you reckon you could convince that bull-headed oaf,” the young duchess growls. “He is twenty minutes down the coast. Follow the road away from town until you see a village. He is in a lighthouse.”
“May I borrow Dorian?”
Orobelle flails her arms as she spits, “And leave me without a protector? Absolutely not!”
Shrugging, Vesper turns to Hong Yi. “Can your phone do Russian?” she says, yanking her jacket and sweater from where they hang from her bunk bed.
He blinks back, already slipping the phone from his pocket. “I think I downloaded it a couple of years ago, yeah.”
Walking past, she claps a hand on his shoulder. “Ahoy, recruit, get those boots on the road.”
“Yes, Captain,” he chuckles, pulling his winter jacket on.
*
Finding the lighthouse proves almost too easy, for even in the grey gloom, they see its light blinking from the cliffs, revealing the frames of cranes each time it flashes past.
They follow the light down the contour of the coast. The streets and sea are eerily silent, alien white expanses of snow sprawled where beaches and breakwaters would be.
“What do you think he'll be like?” Hong Yi mumbles, jaw stiff in the cold.
“No nonsense. Russian. Irritated by little duchesses barging in on his quiet.”
“Yeah, I thought as much, but like, powers?”
She turns to him. “Whatever serves one in a lighthouse? Maybe he's the flashing light we see.”
“Yeah, that's a solid guess. I think he's gotta be some sort of chemistry guy. We've got physics and biology represented, but no one who does chemical reactions or anything…”
It's half-light when they trudge at last up the slope to the lighthouse, fingers and ears numb, breath coming in white puffs. It is impossible to tell the hour of day in the dimness. Vesper remembers Scottish midwinters where the sky turned black at three, but this far north, and with no view of the sun, there is no telling which month they have landed in.
“Well, here goes,” she says as the foreboding tower glides into view, bone white and grimeless, lit heaven-white from above with each pulse. Flash—a two seconds beat—flash—
As they surmount the last snow-capped step, Hong Yi shrinks back from the door. “Uh…you knock,” he chokes.
Vesper gives him a look, but the fear is hard to miss. Nodding, she knocks thrice, slow and sharp.
No answer.
She knocks thrice again. “Hello? Anyone home?”
The wind roars by, and through its static noise, she thinks she heard a creak.
Then, a voice from above, bouncing off the slopes, bellows: “What is wrong with you people?”
They look up at the faceted window of the gallery, reflecting the sky in every direction. One panel juts from the glass, and behind that, there lurks the murky shape of a person. The sight is only there for a second, before vanishing.
Then all around them, a biting gale begins howl to life. It rouses from the ground around the lighthouse like some invisible serpent, or perhaps a flock of doves, spiralling with shards of snow and some old forgotten earth.
It surges and sharpens, sharpens, tearing at their skin like sandpaper, battering them back. Yelling out, Vesper shields her stinging eyes, but even now the gale fills their jackets like parachutes, thrashing and tossing them backward. The friction ignites auras of static on everything—their sleeves, their faces, the dry air.
“Let us inside!” she calls. “We must shelter!” Crying out as he trips, Hong Yi snatches Vesper around the waist and lands with feet apart, leaning back to counterbalance her. Her shoes sink into the snow as her weight doubles, knees bending while her companion pulls her centre of gravity down.
Then a gust bursts from the front to barrel them back, and they both cry out as their feet scrape through the snow, away from the wall—
“He's doing this,” Hong Yi gasps, spitting snow out. “He’s controlling the wind!”
“Christ! Are you creating this wind?” Vesper shouts at the sky, and at the man behind the glass, veiled by curtains of stirring snow. Hong Yi tugs on her arm, and they doggedly push towards the wall, step by heavy step.
She is certain the stranger should not be able to hear her, and yet he answers with a roar louder in her ears than it should be:
“Are you here to condemn me, too?”
“No—we are here because we need you!”
“Why?”
“Because of this!” She gesticulates at the gales around them. “You are like us!”
She can hear the way his teeth grit as he growls his answer, anguished as a mourner. “How can you be like me? A godless fool?” The beacon flashes past, and they see his silhouette in its whiteness.
Vesper and Hong Yi look at each other. Voices cannot carry across this gap, between them and the stranger above.
She glares up through the swirl of the building blizzard, and lifts her left hand into the air, creating a grounding channel.
With a crack and a boom, a bolt leaps from the centre of the swirling cloud, branching and blossoming through the snow. The thunder resonates long after the lightning has winked out, and she begins the opposite manoeuvre, building potential in her right palm so steep her hair starts to stand—then points her hand up at the window.
A second bolt booms, setting the tower aglow. It strikes true, rattling the glass and steel frames overhead. The window slams shut, and they can see the stranger no more.
Almost as fast as it came, the wind falls around them, like a blanket tumbling from a line, laying the snow back down at their feet. In the dimness, Hong Yi rises from his crouch. Vesper feels her weight return to normal.
He frowns. “Did you…kill him?”
She squints up at the empty gallery. “I can’t have.”
He starts to laugh. “Oh my God, you sure are good at the theatrics.”
“Am I? I only assumed he was the kind to listen to force.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right—”
There is the muffled sounds of chains falling, metal rattling against the door. Then, after an endless pause, there is a creak of the hinges, as the door cracks open and reveals a face cast in shadow.
He is pale with jet-black hair, some of it falling into his ringed eyes under his sorrowful brow. His stocky frame is dressed in furs, one gloved hand resting against the doorframe. His beard seems about two weeks unshaved.
“Who…are you?” he murmurs, in that same rough voice as before, weakened by confusion. “Where do you all come from?”
They look at each other. “You must have seen our…friend from before,” Hong Yi says, smiling sheepishly.
“She is about this tall,” Vesper motions out a height just higher than her shoulder, “and probably wasn’t very polite.”
The man nods slowly. “You are working together.” His eyes rise to Vesper. “So you…have these…” he swirls his hands illustratively, “strange powers, too?”
“We both do,” she answers with a nod. The man’s eyes shift to Hong Yi.
He shrugs. “Sorry, mine aren’t as…flashy, not so fun for demonstration. Uh, watch this.” He plucks a wool glove off, which hangs from his grip one moment, and in the next, billows like a leaf. He flicks it into the air. The lighthouse keeper stares as it flutters slowly down in the wind, then is picked up by a breeze, drifting away from them.
Hong Yi yells and starts to chase—but the stranger lifts a hand, flapping a palm towards himself, and another breeze whips the glove back towards its owner. Hong Yi cups his hands as it approaches, and suddenly leaden, it plummets into his palms.
“Please, come inside,” he says then, and he pulls the door open.
*
It takes a few stubbed toes before the trio reaches the second floor of the lighthouse, where embers smoulder in the fireplace and a pair of oil lamps illuminate the round room in place of the thin window. Two chairs sit by a coffee table, and from a coat rack hangs a collection of fur jackets.
The man seats himself, and Hong Yi follows suit in the other chair. He divulges his name—Artur—and they, theirs.
“So…we are all connected, by these powers. They come from the same source. And you…come from beyond this world. Like aliens.”
“Uh…we're not aliens…but something like that. We are from different versions of Earth. My Earth has a Russia, too, but in…the past.”
“And mine from even farther in the past,” Vesper adds.
“Not aliens…world hoppers. Just like in that movie. Door to Tomorrow.”
Hong Yi smiles awkwardly. “Never heard of that, but yeah, probably like that.”
“Your powers, they tie you to the same fate as ours do,” Vesper puts in. “The girl you saw…she is the orchestrator of that fate. Found us in our worlds, and gathered us one by one. And now we have found you, too.”
Artur nods solemnly at these words, relief and pain both fleeting in his eyes. “You want me to leave with you.”
Vesper lays both hands on the back of Hong Yi's chair. “Are you able to leave?”
Artur glances to his right, at the furnace in the wall, one arm folded upon his lap. “Not yet,” he says, eyes unfocused. “I wait for someone here. I must see her first.” He closes his eyes. “Five days. End of February. Don't come back until then.”
So Artur waits, watching the grey sea for every little vessel that crosses the horizon into sight. That bizarre interruption from days ago has trickled out of his thoughts, muted by his hope and sorrow, spiralling in turns in his mind. He waits for a telltale knock, a trail of footprints in the snow, watching every shape that roams up the fading road.
Does this world have a future? Perhaps, but he can see no sign of it anywhere. Trees no longer put out leaves. Frost no longer melts.
But the lighthouse blinks anyway. What use is despair? Humans are still clawing towards tomorrow, as they always have and always will. While they do, why shouldn't the lighthouse glow for a ship that may never come?
On the last day of February, the wind roars, and here is a day of blanket clouds, the same as the days before it, and the months before them.
Artur listens to the crackle of frost, the rumble of waves on cliffs of stone, somewhere out of sight beyond the fog. The hours pass, and February burns out, dwindling into a final ember. Then that afternoon, as the bay clouds start to gather in the dark, he hears a knock on the door.
He quietly descends the stairs and unlocks the chain, uncoiling the two loops of links, lets them fall dead to the ground.
From outside steps Vesper, a grey jacket in the old style over a brown wool coat, hands clasped behind her back.
“You,” Artur mutters, heart sinking despite himself. “You’re a day early.”
“Half a day. But I’m not here to drag you away. God knows we’ve done that enough times. I’m here to wait with you.”
He stares. “Why?”
“What isn’t improved by company?” she answers, pulling her outer jacket off her shoulders while he pushes the door shut.
“Silence,” he says, following her with heavy footsteps.
“Well, I like silence, too.”
He doesn’t pay her much attention as he climbs back up to the light room, picking up his green tea where he left it.
She follows, hanging her jacket on the coat rack. She sits down on the ledge beside the glass, while he settles into his armchair. He can see in her face, silhouetted against the roiling grey, that there’s some quiet knowing there. She does not speak. He sips his tea.
Over the sea, the fog that normally lies like a field of corpses is stirred by a brief wind, heads and florets of clouds coalescing.
“What do you really want me for?” he finally breaks the silence.
“I don’t know,” she answers, eyes shifting away from the glass. “Orobelle doesn’t know. Something none of us understand, something that’s bigger than my world…or yours. It's something more important than the war I left behind. For you…it really should be your choice, whether you leave this world for another. The child will try to force you. But no one can force you.”
Artur flinches away, eyes stinging. “How can I leave this world…the people, places…to die without me?”
Sadness enters her eyes. “Is it going to die?”
“Maybe not. We found oil under the Arctic. Oil trap. I don’t know what it means, but the scientists…”
“It’s something.” She is looking away again, at where the distant clouds have gathered black on the edge of the night. “Something is a whole lot more than nothing.”
He nods, picks up a vodka bottle, then lifts it to his lips to swig. They watch the night cool around them.
“Do you know this song?” Vesper asks then. “It goes something like this…”
She starts to hum a melody that at once sounds intimately familiar and strange, lighting a patch of his memory like a sliver of sun through clouds. “Uletela ptashechka…” He begins to sing it, one line, before his memory gives out. “I learned it long ago…before everything.”
Vesper nods. “A boy in the army taught it to me. He drank a lot. Like you.” She looks into the choppy grey water. “I don’t know what became of him. He may have died. I may have killed him. I have no clue.”
He realises none of this surprises him. “Soldier?”
Her eyes are still trained on the waves. “More like…weapon. That’s what they would call me.”
“Ah, you almost killed me,” he says. “Last week. This window.” He points past her.
Smirking, she shakes her head. “Won’t happen. Long as I can help it.”
“The one who taught me the song died, too. My mother.”
Vesper meets his eye with uncanny sorrow. He waits for a prying question. “D’you have any to spare?” she says instead, pointing at his assortment of bottles tucked away behind his chair.
He takes a glance around the chair frame, plucks a smaller bottle from the floor, and rolls it to her across the concrete. She looks at its peeling label, the name wreathed in intricate Celtic knots, and the year 2185 beneath the name.
“You English like whiskey, yes?”
She breaks the seal as she uncaps it, giving it a whiff. “I don’t mind it. But I’ve never had whiskey from the future.”
“‘Future?’ It is forty years old. Ancient.”
“Good thing whiskey lasts forever then. Till it’s opened, that is.”
He snorts, then rolls a shotglass to her that she catches under her palm. “Winter keeps it good.”
She pours out a shot of the golden potion. “To survival,” she declares, lifting it, and he raises his half-finished bottle in answer.
*
The sun glides beyond the curve of the world, stealing the last daylight of February from the sea. There are no lights in the distance besides the faded purple band of the horizon. Artur does not ignite the lamp in the quartz. The lighthouse door never sounds with the knock he has been awaiting.
As it finally grows too dark to tell land from sea, he rises to his feet, pale face reflecting what little light still creeps through the eternally overcast sky.
“There is nothing left in this world for me,” he says. Vesper lifts her head from against the window’s steel frame as he lays a hand on the doorknob. “Take me with you.”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
The Vanishing Act - False Shuffle
Content warnings (contains spoilers)
This chapter contains depictions of arrest and hypodermic needles.
Among the things mentioned in passing over dinner with Lea, one is that San Francisco taxis drive themselves. Before the reset, the last thing Felix does with his PalmNote is to book such a cab.
Their ride meets them at the Hexagon’s lobby, ghostly silent like all the other phantom engines that power this city. This morning, Adelaide wears a cerulean dress that flares around her knees. The day seems to deserve it, momentous in its own muted way.
They watch through dimmed windows in the backseat as lights flutter across them, pink and lime and blue, selling the latest plasticky fad in dieting products. Beside her, her travel companion is busy checking departure boards. The buildings start to thin out, till they are zipping through the pastel suburbs where she used to roam.
Half an hour later, the ride whizzes to a stop by a runway fence, where they alight while a robot voice thanks them.
Along the fence, they search for a gate. “This one,” whispers Adelaide, pointing at the recent tire tracks under a spotless gate. Hidden in a veil of light, they wait for ten minutes, till a KN Air Services truck trundles to the entryway, with its noisy gas engine. Once the gates have swung open for the visitor, they sprint in after, through the narrowing gap.
There is nothing inside but bare tarmac under a rolling gray sky, subdivided into roads by a thousand painted lines. The warehouses stand in files to their left, steel roller doors half raised. In front of one, the truck putters to a stop. The back hatch open, and the driver leaps out, watching in a fluorescent vest as an autonomous cart rolls from the warehouse door.
“There's our ticket,” Felix says. While the driver's gaze is trained away, the pair scramble in under the hatch, diving in among toolboxes and pipes.
Five minutes later, the truck rumbles back to life and rolls away, gears and spanners jangling, the stowaways curled in a corner and trying not to breathe. A rack of pipes rattles uncomfortably close to Adelaide’s head.
At the other end of a one-minute drive, the driver reopens the hatch to retrieve box after box of tools. It is when they disappear for a chat that Felix and Adelaide leap out of the container and across the tarmac, dashing crossing painted stripes in a refractive bubble of light. Out here, the ground is severe grey, the air stirred with fuel, and Adelaide feel exposed. If a plane were to land now…
“Gate 34,” Felix whispers with a glance at his tablet. “Let’s head for the terminal wall.” They sprint along the boundary of the glass facade. The air is frigid, but the fear is red hot, booming in her ears.
The jet bridge of Gate 34 hangs unwatched in the morning sun, its entrance on standby one story from the ground. Adelaide points at a flight of steel-frame steps ascending from the ground to a door in the metal tube. “We can wait till someone opens it,” she whispers.
“Ready when you are,” he answers, and they race for the stairs, still cloaked.
Things have lined up so far. Felix lugs their trolley bag upward, step by clattering step. No one is there to hear them. They wait for someone to come, their key to the chamber.
Then a hum shakes their feet, and they stumble apart. The machinery is waking beneath them. “Hold on,” whispers Felix. Adelaide snatches his arm. The bridge groans, and with a head spinning budge, the ramp begins to lift, the steps pantographing as it rises to the height of the aircraft to come.
Adelaide bites back a yelp as the bridge's ascent segues seamlessly into its sideways extension, like a turtle’s neck from its shell.
The whole assembly comes to a stop, and the bristling machinery slowly settles. Then, they hear a rattle of the steps. Beneath, a uniformed woman is climbing towards them. Adelaide dodges out of the way, breath held, while she unlocks the door to enter. Swooping their luggage off the floor, they sprint in after her, and then stumble to a walk, coming to rest among the bridge's glass windows while the employee departs for the departure lounge.
“We should wait here,” says Felix then, pointing out the counters barring the terminal end of the bridge. Adelaide nods mutely.
It is hard to miss the plane arriving. The buzz of the engine crescendos, over a minute, into a roar that makes her ears hum. She shrinks away from the noise, hands clamped over her ears, until she reaches the boundary of the ripple in the light, her companion disappearing like a mirage. The corridor is too bright. She darts back in, plugging her ears with her fingers.
Ahead, the bridge latches onto the aircraft like a larva to rock. Then the doors behind them open in a hiss. Leaping aside, they let the alighting passengers pass them first, then wait again. The traffic begins to come in the other direction. Felix waves for them to move. They slip in front of the walkers and their roller bags, invisible and a good distance ahead.
All sound falls away as they pass the cabin door. The scent of sanitisers cuts through the dry cold. They dodge flight attendants. Adelaide lets out a long breath as, still invisible, they wheel their bag up to the galley in the back, and wait.
Flights to Asia are never full these days, passenger volume whittled down by protectionism and pandemics both. The rows of cushy chairs begin to fill haphazardly, one empty seat to each filled. At the back of the left aisle, they watch the comings and goings until the cabin doors groan shut and the pressure shifts. Once the passengers are settled and they are sure of the consecutive vacancies, they pick out an empty row to sit in—and only then do they blink back into view.
The seatbelt clicks into place. Adelaide settles into her window seat, draws a deep breath, and exhales slowly. “I've never flown internationally,” she murmurs, turning to Felix as he returns from shoving their luggage into the baggage compartment. “What if someone notices we're not meant to be—”
“Hush, don't let anyone hear you,” he whispers as he takes his seat. “All those checks ought to have happened before the gate.” She makes a sound of agreement, then draws her lips into a line.
The plane pulls out of the terminal, and rolls into a graceful takeoff, not so much as a word among the passengers who are already lost in the flight entertainment. Attendants in red pass them heedlessly. At two o’clock, they are asked for their preferred meals, and by then, Adelaide has finally begun to relax, the buzzing anxiety settling into a gentle unease as the aircraft rattles on around them.
The cabin lights fade out through sunset pink when nighttime arrives. In fifteen hours, Adelaide manages five hours of sleep. Her hunger is only just staved off by the half-sized meals that they buy for thrice as much as they are worth.
Felix does not seem to think much of the mash nor the tea, and his inflight entertainment of choice is to read the retail magazines in quiet disinterest. Adelaide takes her tablet phone from her pocket and begins to write again.
We are flying without a ticket. I don’t know how we made it past security. I don’t know how Felix knew we could do it this way…
She writes of whatever she can think of: the uncertain future ahead, and the quiet dread of knowing she will never return. She sleeps in stops and starts, never quite noticing when she drifts away until she returns to consciousness.
By the time they descend over the waters and touch down at Hong Kong International Airport, Adelaide’s legs are wracked by gnawing aches. She awakens from slumber with her head on the tray table, imprints of the napkins from dinner pressed into her cheek. Before the cabin doors have unlatched, Felix slides their luggage bag out of the compartment above.
Everyone shambles off the plane in one daze or another, out into the gentler air, the uncanny brightness. While passengers funnel into the carpeted hallway, they linger and wait for the service door to open again.
For two hours they watch. The passengers of their flight leave, and then those of the next flight board in a tumult of voices and wheels. But the chance never comes. The passenger exit snicks shut, and the plane takes off. Through the windows, they have a view of the hills and runways beyond, two dizzying floors above the ground.
Adelaide and Felix glance at each other under the cloak of light. “Through border control, then?” he says. “I cannot hide us for much longer. It is much too tiring.”
For the first time, she notices the dark rings around his eyes, remembers not seeing him sleep a wink on the flight. A lump of guilt forms in her throat. “Yeah, let’s go.”
So they rejoin the passenger crowd on travellators, trickling towards the next hall. The border control gates form a gleaming wall, the new country on the other side. The automatic gantries flash violet, their scanners demanding faces. Peering from behind a pillar, they watch the gates open and close as documents are scanned.
Felix leans on the luggage bag. “We can’t have you scanning your face,” he murmurs, “nor I. I do not have a travel document.”
Adelaide’s eyes rest on the inactive gates. “It’s a silly suggestion,” she says, “but could we go invisible and climb over the ones that aren’t being watched?”
“Not one bit silly. We could do it, if we are quick and clean about it.”
“Quick and clean,” she repeats, and nods.
The pair tiptoe towards the closed gantries, ducking under the nylon barricades within their bubble of light. At the threshold, Adelaide freezes, and eyes her companion for his next move. With a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, he says, “When I cross, I will flash an orange light across the gantry. I will keep you cloaked—do not move while I am looking away.”
That is all the instruction Adelaide received, before Felix creeps towards the transparent barrier, and dissolves out of sight, along with their bag.
She stares in the gap between the gates, half veiled in the dark.
The plastic rattles. Her breath catches, but her heart hammers on.
An orange light flashes in the shape of a flower.
Swallowing a gasp, Adelaide inches up. She is much shorter than Felix—her shoulders are barely high enough for her to boost herself over, and it does not help that she has not put her arms to much strenuous use.
She looks up, and finds that he has slipped back into view. He holds one hand towards her and nods once, mouthing words she cannot read.
Biting back a cry, she makes the running leap.
Her right leg slips right in the wedge-shaped gap between the gates, and her left doesn't quite clear it. The pinch of the plastic makes her yelp—and then everything is moving too fast. Eyes dart in their direction, and Felix snatches her about the waist while she fights to loop her left leg across.
She has barely seen Felix as terrified as he is right now, hoisting her halfway over his shoulder while she finally clears the barrier.
And then she makes eye contact with a security officer. And it takes a second of looking, of widening eyes and mouths, for her to realise:
The officer can see her.
Gasping for air, she lands on the other side. The officer cries out and breaks into a run, and Felix mutters something under his breath—before the air ripples around them again.
“Haste!” he snaps, snatching her arm to drag her away.
The officer stumbles to a stop, pointing and shouting at the spot where she last saw them. They wind their way around gaps in passenger clusters. The officers are not chasing. Fighting her own panic down, Adelaide snatches the luggage handle, and they take off past the baggage belts.
“I am so sorry.” This is the first thing Felix says, as they clear the customs doors and stumble out into the arrival hall. “I let my guard down.”
“No, I'm sorry.” They are walking at double pace. “You’re tired, because of me. And I couldn't get across the gate when it counted.”
“Oh, Addie, that wasn't your fault.” He stops short of reiterating his stance, and instead points out the station on the edge of the airport, where the ceiling dips beyond a row of windows. “That’s where we want to be.”
Hong Kong’s airport train flies across the green outskirts of the city on elevated rails. Boarding the first train to pull into the airport station, the two settle into a pair of adjacent seats. They watch through the glass as the bay glimmers into view beyond the fences, and then the cranes of the port.
Like so many subways the world over, the MTR network has moved its ticketing to an app. Felix downloads it and purchases a city ticket. When Adelaide follows suit, she makes it as far as a payment screen, eyes darting to him by reflex. She is only just aware of another twinge of guilt when he wordlessly takes her phone and begins to enter his payment details.
The rest of the journey is a welcome lull, if a short one, owing to the speed of the train. The seats are full of travellers and locals both, as is their transfer station south of the strait. As they skirt through underpasses wider than halls, Adelaide stares around her, taking in the screens and the bilingual ads that glow off them.
The local subway is packed to the doors, elbows bumping and feet colliding with every swing of the train. They lean with their luggage between them, Adelaide hugging a pole. Wide-eyed, she studies their fellow commuters as the light flickers over their faces, noting the number of them using tablet phones barely any different from her own. Someone makes a phone call in what she supposes to be Cantonese, but there is enough English around that she doesn't think language will be a problem.
The brakes screech. The train decelerates steeply into the next station. While Adelaide clings fast to the pole, Felix, hanging onto a ceiling handle, swings and collides with her back.
She jolts upright. The surprise of his touch fills her head with heat. That's not right, she thinks at once.
“Sorry,” he mutters before righting himself again, but now she is too nervous to talk, and so she doesn't.
It is not until they have finally exited the MTR station onto milling city streets in the afternoon heat that they finally speak again. “When do we want to try lowering your disguise?” asks Felix.
“How about now?” Adelaide murmurs as he consults the map on his tablet. “I’m sorry I made you hide us for so long. I didn’t know it was so exhausting.”
“You needn’t apologise for my choices,” he says, gaze lifting from his screen. “It is the least anyone could do for you.”
“But it's all at your own expense. I just…why are you doing so much?”
Seeing her crestfallen look softens his expression. “Addie, why wouldn't I? You cannot be David Seeley’s test subject for the rest of your life. You deserve to live, and others deserve your friendship. And if I am making your days better, then, why, that makes all of this worth the while.”
“Worth risking your own life?”
He shrugs with a sidelong smile. “What can I say…I have a lot of time, and no fear of the consequences.”
Adelaide’s eyes unfocus. Bathed in the hazy sun, he waves for her to follow. It is more than the sun, making her vision spin. They continue to wander, dodging pedestrians and their shadows.
There are hotels and hostels aplenty in this corner of Kowloon, and it takes Felix all of ten minutes’ looking to find one that suits their needs. He speaks little as he decides, though he asks Adelaide for her preferences, from time to time—whether she minds separate rooms, which she does not, and whether she would like to be closer to restaurants or markets, for which she has no preference.
He leads them up crowded streets, past spotless mall lobbies and grimy apartment blocks, somehow spared of the future’s ruthless scouring. Then he stops before the lobby of a roadside lift, and steps inside. The concrete echoes their steps. The lift smells of old cigarettes.
The hostel’s counter staff quickly catch on that Felix does not speak Cantonese. While they do business in English, Adelaide peers over the solar-powered cat waving its paw on the counter, and her reflection in the receptionist's metal placard. It is her ordinary old face, pale and rosy, new red blonde hair.
He hands her the key codes to both doors on a torn pocketbook page, and takes them up to the sixth floor. Their rooms are squirreled away in the very depths of the hall. Hers is closer; behind the red door is a bed, a bathroom and an armchair, lit warmly by the recessed lights.
She drops what little luggage she has and takes stock of the room. A humid musk permeates the air, trapped by windowless walls. Between the bed and the counter is a linoleum floor. The air conditioning is controlled with a remote. Sitting down on the bed makes her eyelids droop at once.
She perks up as her phone buzzes. “Freddie, read the latest message?”
“Message from Felix: ‘Visit me in 6-11 at your soonest convenience.’”
“Just a second…” Dragging herself off the bed, Adelaide slips out, closes the door behind her, and knocks on her companion's.
By now, Felix has rolled their luggage bag into the gap between the bed and the wall. He sits on the edge of the mattress.
“How’s your room?” he asks.
“Not much different from this one…but I feel like I could fall asleep anywhere right now.”
“You and I both.”
“Why'd you call me over?”
At this, Felix picks up his phone. “Would now be a good time to outline my plans? I promise I'll be brief.”
She nods. “Go ahead.”
“Well, as you already know, I am here to locate the final piece of the wormhole portal, a supercapacitor. The National Engineering Research Centre of Hong Kong developed the capacitor in question, although the specifics of its location are unclear. I have an inkling as to where it is, but locating it may take some espionage on the premises.”
“Will you be able to figure it out?”
He nods. “I have booked a visit to the Centre in two days’ time, and I will speak to the project’s head researcher,” he replies. “I ought to be able to find and retrieve the capacitor on the same day.”
“How big is it?”
He motions out a cylinder about the diameter of a steering wheel. “Small enough to carry in hand.”
“So while you're doing this, what will I be doing?”
“Whatever you choose, my dear,” he replies. “You have access to my finances through your phone.”
Her eyes widen. “Are you sure?”
He beams. “Why don't you pick out a place to dine?”
They have dinner in a secretive neon-lit teahouse whose menu changes to claypot rice in the evening. Back at the hostel, they turn in all too eagerly, parting ways at the doors with an agreement to do nothing taxing the next day. Both sleep through the evening and wake at noon; by the time they step out onto the streets, the walls are bright in the sun.
That day feels special, like the eye of the storm. Adelaide doesn’t yet know what will become of her after this, or of Felix, but she will have to decide for herself, soon.
Today, she is wearing a green sundress, to match the humid heat. Felix has ceded navigation fully to her. In the absence of a local familiarity, Adelaide simply goes where her attention takes her. On the sun-baked streets, they stroll past hawkers and dine together in noodle restaurants. They both struggle with the chopsticks and let their attentions steep in the flavours. They share milk tea as they stroll back, passing the plastic cup back and forth between themselves.
Once the sky washes vermilion, Adelaide makes a course for the markets. Drifting among the glowing faces of shoppers under strings of LEDs, she finally walks maskless among the shifting shadows. They pass poultry roasting on spits, and fruit piled so high behind glass that the shopkeepers are half hidden. They munch on meat skewers and spring rolls with two paper bags of fruit between them. Strangers shoulder past, couples hand in hand, families flocking one stall after another with egg waffles in paper bags.
In that moment, Adelaide feels light. The earth, the buildings, the streets, they do not recoil from her. She could keep walking like this, or at least she wishes she could, with the colours filling her eyes. But Felix has a task that he cannot defer. And then, after that…
She turns to ask him some question or other—like if I bought us some fruit, what kind would you like?—but finds him already watching her, curiously.
“What do you think of this place?” he says then. They have slowed to a stop beside an electronics hawker. She cannot tell if he is conjuring illusions, or if it is just her post-flight drowsiness, but he looks different, brilliant as carnival lights.
Again, she is drowned by a sticky, honeyish joy. Again comes the impulse to disown it, to wash it off.
But this evening, she lets herself steep in it for just a minute. She beams and stares to her heart's content. “I love it,” she answers. The colours glisten in her companion's eyes. “I haven't felt this free in eleven years.”
Felix smiles back, head tilting to a side. “I am delighted, then. Better that you liked it than that you didn't…”
They have talked over the future many times already, and Adelaide has nothing new to say about it. “I just wish you would be here too,” she answers. “But I know why you can't stay.”
His eyes widen. “Well, then let us take our time.”
They stroll down Nathan Road, sparkling and blinking all around them. Shops full of confections, phones, and fish blur by. Adelaide stops by a glowing hawker stall and buys without haggling—a plastic cat keychain with a golden tassel, a glittery turquoise hair clip in the shape of a butterfly.
She tucks her hair behind her ear and clips the butterfly on. “How do I look?” she asks, turning to Felix.
“Like you could steal some hearts,” he replies.
“Figuratively?”
He laughs. “Maybe literally, too.”
They wander back to the hotel with all their cakes and meat skewers finished, the paper bags long discarded in a recycling bin—save for one last bag of apples.
“I'll be out quite early tomorrow,” Felix says, as Adelaide unlocks her door. “If something should go wrong, if I find myself making a quick exit from Hong Kong…this could well be our last time seeing each other.”
“Oh.” Whatever words she was about to say, they scatter like ash. “Please…stay safe. Okay?”
“You too. Promise you’ll take care of yourself.”
“I’ll do my best.”
He pauses, some unreadable current of emotion fleeting across his face. None of it makes it into his words. “Take care, my dear. With luck, I shall see you tomorrow.”
Adelaide stands frozen on the threshold of her room for almost a minute after Felix leaves. If this could be their last time talking, then she wants something else, something more than such a threadbare goodbye.
But she soon finds that she can no longer fight the pull of sleep, so she lets the door close, and turns off the light, curling up in her bed.
There is no window in this room. By the time Adelaide awakens, it is well into the afternoon, and she is alone.
Please help yourself to my finances. I shall have little more use of them if this venture proves successful.
F. M.
So reads a note slipped under the door. She takes a minute to walk next door and check her travel companion’s room for any sign of him. She sits on the bed for an hour and watches the entrance with a blossoming ache in her heart, but he does not appear.
Returning to her own room at last, she picks up the paper bag of apples from last night. As she picks out the rosiest fruit and begins to eat, she toys with her phone’s lockscreen controls.
What is she meant to do with this unexpected ache, somewhere between rapture and grief? Will it stay after he goes? How much of this is the relief of being free—and how much is the joy of having someone she can believe in?
For several minutes, she hears no sound but the rattle of her thoughts.
Then, three sharp raps on the door.
“Hello? Adelaide?”
The wood muffles the voice. It is not Felix. It is an American voice. A voice she doesn’t know.
Dread rakes over her. Her thoughts glitch out.
They knock again. And this time, they say:
“Adelaide Moore. Enough of these antics. I have a warrant for your arrest. Open the door, before I open it myself.”
The world flashes—light and shadow, like strobing like lights through subway windows.
The engine of reality thunders forth.
The doorknob rattles. A key in the lock.
Adelaide’s hearing has gone foggy, but she is lucid enough to pull her phone from her pocket. She swipes her lockscreen and taps the microphone button.
She drops it under the counter and knocks the bag of apples over it. The lock clicks open, the door swinging away. She sees the hallway outside, two agents in jackets—one of whom soars in, pouncing upon her.
She only starts screaming then.
Their face flashes past—they shove her, pinning her against the counter. Methodic, efficient, their gloved hands bruise her back against the wood.
“Go away! Go away, go away!” she sobs, as if she could blink and scatter this nightmare, to find the room empty again.
“Cuffs!” The voices pierce the film of her dreaming. “Come quietly and this will all be over quickly—”
With one sputtering burst of bravado, Adelaide twists her arm and grips a bare wrist, thinking of the berries, of ageing, of necrosis—until the agent roars out in pain and, with the flat of their other forearm, slams her screaming against the wall. Her nose collides with the wallpaper, not one inch of skin making contact with hers as they clamp her hands down with gloved fingers.
“Don’t you dare try that again,” snarls the agent, then their voice takes on a softer quality. “We can make this painless. Just come along quietly, now. You have a nice, warm room waiting for you back at home.”
“How did you find me?” she cries. She feels the handcuffs—cold, fateful, like the ones from eleven years ago—snap around her wrists. A perfect fit.
“Did you think your little vanishing act at the airport wouldn't be caught on camera? You should know by now—it is impossible to disappear in this world,” they answer.
A needle in her arm. She can feel her strength giving out to theirs, her awareness of the world sputtering, as they glove her hands and drag her to the door.
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
The Vanishing Act - Sleight of Hand
For days before his visit, Felix has been in a webmail conversation with Dr Jenny Kuok, one half of the pair leading the supercapacitor project. She pounces at the mention of investors, and agrees to discuss their work over tea.
In the lobby of the NERC, a electrical systems engineer nonchalantly points him in the direction of the Future Sciences Lab. “Careful with those crazy guys.” He barely lifts his face from his reading. “They’re real mad scientists. Doctor Kuok is here every single day of the week.” He soon finds directories in plenty along every hall, and locating it becomes an exercise in following arrows.
It is hard to imagine the kind of future that the people of this world might aspire towards; to his mind, this world is the future, so far beyond his imagining that the idea of anything beyond it seems unfathomable. Yet the Future Sciences Lab is all of that aspiration in one: on the screens outside, banners declare a future of manned missions beyond the solar system, travel beyond the speed of light, and brain-computer interfaces, all outlined in two languages.
The quarry of his search—the Kuok-Lee supercapacitor—is one such future given form. The evolution of a technology originally developed for electrical vehicles, this particular incarnation was designed to condense stupendous voltages and discharge them over an extended length of time. Like the sun tower, he finds himself thinking as he leaves the notice board.
Even having received the best education in physics that his country has to offer, Felix cannot claim to fully understand the mechanisms of its operation. He knows one thing for certain, however: it is the missing piece of the San Francisco City Lab’s wormhole portal.
Watching the goings-on of the lab through dimmed windows, it is not hard to tell where the part itself is, concealed in a box sealed with a biometric scanner. It is removed once from the safe, seemingly to tighten a few fasteners, then returned immediately after. Staff of every description come and go, but only a handful look at it.
It is only around lunchtime that someone finally exits, and he halts them to ask after Dr Kuok. “Oh! You're the one she's waiting for,” the researcher pipes up, before disappearing back inside.
When they returns, they bring the woman herself, with a sealed cup of coffee and countless rings under her eyes. Yet she effects the same eagerness he noted from prior correspondence as she calls out, “Come, come! Mister Mercer, right? Let's go to the cafe.”
She takes him down the lift to the first floor, to the eatery at the bottom. “How was the flight here?” she asks as they meander down.
“Long, but uneventful,” he replies with a practised smile. “A little trouble at customs, but we sorted it out.”
“Oh, yes, always these days,” she mutters. “Our relations with the US are much better than three years ago. But we still can't get the prototype past customs.”
The conversation rambles through an eclectic array of topics. Dr Kuok swigs from her fresh three-shot coffee. Tea here comes in sealed plastic containers, and he doesn't especially like the sweetness, even when he asks for no sugar, but he sips politely on his drink.
Then, without giving away his true purpose, Felix musters up his best impression of his father. He positions himself as an interested business owner, asking about the capacitor’s uses and the range of its applicability.
“It was designed before we knew what it would be used for—large machines, maybe electric tunnel borers or a particle accelerator. But the San Francisco City Lab told us that they were interested in co-developing it. They have an interest in the supercapacitor for a machine they're building: the wormhole portal. We have been working in tandem to develop the port standard.”
“And this wormhole portal—its purpose is to tunnel into another universe?”
“Yes! Sounds crazy, right? But their first tests succeeded—they transported one gram of matter out of our universe.”
“So…they are sure there is another universe somewhere?”
“It's the most likely explanation.”
Felix’s goal here is not to gather information about the portal, although it does interest him. He is here for something that will be of far more immediate use: her face.
He takes a comprehensive read of her features as they talk, committing it to his memory, where it absorbs and reflects light, the shape of her eyes. He plays the part as well as he can, answering her inquiries with more of his own.
Then, when they part ways at six o’clock, he stops in the courtyard garden, and recreates a perfect likeness of her visage in his hands. He buys dinner, and he makes notes in his pocket book, sketching some of the details.
It isn’t until past ten o’clock that the last researcher leaves the lab, turning off the lights behind them. As the door swings shut behind them, Felix, hidden in plain sight, stops the door with his foot and slips in.
The departer does not notice that the door takes a split second longer to click shut.
In the pitch darkness, he identifies the camera watching the safe, and puts a bubble around it. He finds the metal box by the light of its digital display, blinking 22:13. “Now, let us see,” he murmurs, conjuring Jenny’s ghost face for the reader.
It takes scant wavelength reconfigurations before the device accepts Felix’s recreation as the real thing, and uncomplainingly unlocks with a beep.
*
This is almost too easy, for an act he has prepared for in such detail.
He has barely registered how fast his heart is racing until this moment. It is hard to parse that the object in his hands, a metal cylinder covered in rivets and grooves and held comfortably in both hands, holds the key to his return home.
Home. He was afraid to contemplate the possibility in earnest until he had the capacitor. And now, the thought of home swallows his senses—the bridges he wandered over, the harbours he set sail from, the mother and father he left behind.
Then his thoughts snap to Adelaide.
Of course, his home must win out again. He cannot be aware of a way to return, and not toil towards it.
But briefly, he wavers. To know someone else who understands the fear he hides away, and to see that she has lived the life he has always dreaded, and to long to keep offering her a safe haven…if there were a way to do both, to return and to remain beside her, he would take it. But that has to be her choice alone.
The security cameras see nothing as he slides the safe door gently back in place. He tiptoes away, opening the door just a crack to slip through, and then he is out in the depths of night. He stirs no leaves as he slides the capacitor into the bag he brought for it, and races to the station—nary an eye, biological nor mechanical, to witness him.
When Felix returns to the hotel room in Mong Kok, it is like discovering a crime scene.
Adelaide does not answer his knocking, not even an hour later. When at last he unlocks it with her keycode, she is not there.
Then he notices the objects lying on the floor that should not: apples, a bowl, his note.
Beneath a paperbag by the counter, he finds Adelaide's phone.
He has already begun to piece together a picture of what happened, but now, as he turns the phone over to find a 13-hour recording in progress, his dread crystallises.
He stops the recording. She was never especially careful about hiding her password from his view, so he taps it in—080646.
Without voice commands, he opens the file explorer and trawls through folders until he finds the recording. He starts playing it—a rustle of paper and fabric, a thud, and shouting—
Adelaide's scream startles him into a vertiginous tailspin of terror. Come quietly and this will all be over quickly.
He pauses the recording.
His heart hurts before his mind can catch up to it. Could he have done something? Should he have waited to be sure this precise scenario would not eventuate? His mind races and races, but it is too late to plan for a contingency that has already come to pass.
He continues playing the recording. More details surface: they saw her at the airport—they are taking her back to the lab.
As the door creaks shut and the recording goes silent, Felix turns off her phone. Again he is alone with the booming of his heart. Despite all her horror, the threat on her life, she knew exactly what to do.
He picks up his own phone, and starts searching for a flight.
For the first time in her life, Adelaide sees the inside of a private jet. If not for the shock collar and the return to eating puree, she would call it luxury.
But no number of plush PVC cushions, no free servings of apple juice to her cabin, could stop her wanting back the streets, their chaos, their fiery glow.
The speaker crackles once, and her captor's voice says:
“Adelaide Moore. I hope you are having a comfortable flight so far. I have a few questions for you, if you'll be so kind as to answer them. Remember, if you answer honestly, you may earn yourself some concessions during your future stay.”
Adelaide does not speak. She doesn't know if the camera over the screen is watching her, but if it is, it will see nothing in her face.
“Miss Moore, we understand you were not travelling alone. Who were you with in Hong Kong?”
She does not answer.
“Miss Moore? Who helped you escape?”
She stares right at the camera, unblinking. If I say even one word, I endanger him.
“You understand we can lighten your sentence and improve the conditions of your living space, if you cooperate.”
It takes a few more unanswered questions before the agent recognises they are trying to squeeze water from a rock. She is a veteran of silence. Nothing they say can extort an answer. They finally leave her alone with a sigh cut short by the click of the microphone.
Adelaide starts to fall asleep close to Hong Kong's afternoon, according to the screen. Since she boarded the plane, she has not spoken a word, not even to the automatic attendant. It's as if her mind has reverted to that primordial state, the one held in by green walls and terrazzo.
But she knows it too well to protest it. She closes her eyes, and sees the lights on the penthouse ceiling.
*
The chamber thunders around her, as if there were a storm outside, and the air conditioning continues to hum to cover it.
On the other side of the Pacific, it is still nighttime. This night goes on and on, through a sky about to be lost to her again. The ramp goes down, and she walks, legs aching, led by a squadron of ten with rifles over their shoulders and faces of helmet glass. This hangar is not the airport they departed from.
She gets five minutes to breathe the quiet air, and to see the fleeting stars. And then the soldiers march her into the belly of an armoured carrier. She does not speak even then.
Lights hum and trees rustle darkly. Adelaide doesn't perceive much else, on account of the nylon blindfold that was strapped over her eyes by gloved hands. She hears a glass door open, and a breeze wash over her that smells familiar. Smells of needles and alcohol and sterilisation.
The scents grow heavier with the tang of memory. Something flutters away on the wind as she re-enters the laboratory.
Inside the blindfold, her vision goes bright and dark in turns as the soldiers march her, led by the arm, to the loading elevator. She hears it ring its arrival—ground floor, going up.
There is no small talk, not even shuffling feet. The doors slide open, and she can hear the silence beyond. They lead her through a melange of scents and sounds, all echoes of those things she saw and heard for eleven dark years—things she has always known, though not by name.
And then her feet click on terrazzo.
“Ah, there you are, Adelaide! Welcome back.” Her heart leaps then plummets like a skipping stone, for she has heard that voice before, through the trilayer window—has known it, hated it, yearned for it.
“Doctor Seeley,” says a soldier. “We understand we will be leaving Moore with you.”
“That I did discuss with your commander,” Seeley replies. “I can take care of things from here.” He chuckles. “Eleven years helming this project, it teaches you a thing or two. Did you tease out any details about her escape?”
“She hasn't spoken a word since we collected her from the base.”
“I salute your work, anyhow.” The voice of the doctor is much closer to her ear now, and she hears boots march away and polyester crinkle, feels a gloved hand steer her by the shoulder. “How was your trip, Miss Moore? Missed your room?” The same hands unwrap the blindfold.
As the blue light fills her eyes again, and she recognises her old bed in front of her, exactly where she left it except with the sheets remade, her lower lip wobbles with unshed tears.
“Good,” she croaks, turning to look Dr Seeley in the eye. He is wearing a bright orange hazmat suit, but she recognises the glasses, the wrinkles on his brow.
He nods once. A smile. “That is good to hear,” he says, and then steps away from her, out across the wall boundary. “The lab will be putting security staff outside your room. So please…don't try slipping out again, they won't be so nice next time time. Understood?”
“I understand.”
Then, the wall begins to slide shut between them, just like it did eleven years ago—and the ceiling lights flicker on to replace the glow of blue.
One sleep. Two. Three. Adelaide doesn't keep track. Four meals, five.
Shadows she doesn't know move in front of her window. Some of them carry guns. She takes her notebook, crumpled in her skirt pocket, and reads what she wrote there. She writes more at the end. Her thoughts are all about the world beneath the lab. She wants to believe it was more than just a dream.
She tries, over and over, to commit Felix’s face to the page, but she isn't skilled in drawing. She remembers the colour of his hair, and the way he smirks when he is about to reveal some grand secret, like the skyline, or the tale of his life.
He could make pictures with such clarity that they looked real. Does he ever draw?
Three sleeps. And then—
The sirens start wailing.
They rise in guttural unison, and they're coming from everywhere, within her walls and beyond them. The shrieks of humans join them, but only the sounds in the adjacent hallway penetrate the walls, and flash out of knowing when they’ve run away, to be drowned by the sirens once more.
Lights are flashing, red and yellow, and she flies to the window, fighting to perceive what is outside. Two silhouettes flash by, and then silence.
She goes back to the bed to wait, heart pounding louder than the alarm. Something about the sound tells her it has to do with her. She watches the window intently, waiting for something to tell her when to move.
Ten minutes later, the wall clicks. With a familiar groan of steel and plaster, it starts to pull open. The gap on the left end widens like a mouth, one momentous inch at a time.
The moment the gap is one person wide, the room flashes bright again. Then he is standing right there—golden hair and a coat on his shoulders.
“Addie!” The voice casts out every last doubt. Her mouth gapes, and her heart surges.
Stuffing her notebook in her pocket, she springs from her bed and flies straight into a hug, crying before she registers that Felix is steering her to the exit.
“I am ever so pleased to see you too, but we must go at once.”
“Did you get the part? Where is the machine?” she gasps as the lights go dim and he leads her out through the crack.
“Yes! I heard your message. The machine is in the metaphysics lab.”
“Please let me come with you!” she cries then. “They found me even there, across the sea. They told me there's no way to disappear. There's nowhere in this world where I can be anymore.”
“Are you sure?” He meets her eye.
She nods vigorously, eyes already welling up. “I want to start over. Even if it means leaving this all behind.”
“It is settled, then! Come, the evacuation won't last forever.” He lifts a finger to his lips, and she nods, pulling her mouth into a line.
And then they burst out into the corridors again—and this time, she is ready, when he takes her arm and whisks her away through the cold.
The guards are gone. The corridors are empty, and the alarms echo down them, seemingly to no one. The windows reveal the faraway lights of San Francisco, beyond a carpet of black.
Together, cloaked in the blaring noise, riding within a ripple of light, they thread their escape through the facility’s halls, trash bins and door plaques and railings lit red in flashes. Felix pauses at the directory, eyes scanning for something, and then— “the Experimental Metaphysics Lab,” he whispers, and before Adelaide has found it on the list, he has dragged her onto a flight of stairs.
At every landing, the ground outside looks closer. More signs of people flutter at the ends of the hallways, none ever seeming to see them.
She senses when they have gone underground because the halls lose their windows and become heavily punctuated by pillars. The doors double in number. The alarm is still shrilling, the voice of a god. They stagger to a stop before one pair of doors, and Adelaide glimpses the plaque hanging above it—Experimental Metaphysics Laboratory - B2-01—while Felix tugs on the handle. No luck.
“Alright, let's see,” he says, running to the scanner whose blue screen demands a face.
Then he lifts his hand, and in his palm conjures a face, the face of Dr Seeley—
As the lock clicks and Felix barrels it open with his shoulder, they hear footsteps thundering from the end of the corridor behind. “It's the prisoner!” Her companion’s fingers close around her wrist and pull her through. “B2-01, EML, they're—”
They stumble inside. Then Adelaide and Felix gaze upon that great and terrible machine, the quarry of their search.
It is a cylindrical gazebo that spans the entire room. A dais of metal, wires, and cladding is sheltered by a roof of the same size held up by several pillars, all speckled with the tiny lights of screens and status beacons.
Even as he dashes up the steps into the machine’s interior and searches, Felix produces something from inside his coat: something cylindrical and metallic, pockmarked with LEDs and ports.
As he slots the part into its housing, the scientists burst through the door, pointing and shrieking. In the same moment Felix yells, “Get in!”
Adelaide’s feet act before her mind. She sprints up the steps to the dais, screaming at the bellows of her name. It lights up as she crosses the threshold, like runes, humming to life beneath her feet. Felix is on the other end of the dais, hands flurrying across the controls in barely comprehending anxiety.
When he looks over his shoulder, he yells a warning and slams a button on the dashboard. Glass hisses shut over every opening, all the windows and doors, severing them from the sounds outside.
One scientist bangs on the glass. Beyond, the lab doors fly open again. Three officers crash in, pointing pistols at her.
Within two seconds, the shouts beyond the glass are drowned out by the crescendoing rumble of the machine. It rattles with the power it’s guzzling; beyond their chamber, the lightbulbs of the room brighten.
It is in these electric throes that Adelaide feels the first warping of space sweep over her, like the pull of gravity surging and ebbing even though the ground is still. She stumbles to Felix’s side as sparks ignite somewhere beyond the chamber.
The scientist has retreated. The police are aiming their guns, barrels pointed at the panes. Her feet leave the ground, then connect with it again. The machine starts beeping, out of rhythm with the alarm outside. A bullet cracks the glass.
“Hold on tight!” Felix calls out, snatching for the rail along the edge of the control panel, and her hand with the other.
She feels as if she were inverted for moments, and her head spins wildly. Beside her, Felix leans against the dashboard. “It's working, it's working—” His voice, too, is pulled and pushed, as if distorted by the Doppler effect.
The room grows hot. A row of ceiling lights blow out. Yes, the wormhole portal is drawing a volume of current that nothing else in the building has remotely been designed to handle. All the bulbs flash dark, and the room is lit by the machine.
And then the bulbs are no longer there, nor is the room, nor are the police, for everything has been pulled into thin threads, like strings of melted plastic. Her companion disappears in the pulling and tautening of the world.
Moments before the snap, Adelaide feels Felix’s fingers tear away from her. Immediately she is seized by despair like nothing she’s felt before, a deathly fear that she no longer knows where, nor who, she is.
She begins to fall, and she keeps falling for eons, and closes her eyes as she cries, the distant roar washing over her.
Adelaide lands on her knees in dust and darkness. Her fall echoes softly in the silence. Beneath her is not the bumped metal floor she expected, but a woven carpet.
She looks up—and sees vaguely that she is inside a metal cage of sorts, over which is draped a velvety sheet, like an old stage curtain, masking out all but the faintest light.
“Addie,” whispers a voice she knows.
She jolts up, and sways, feeling like she’s just been spat out by a clothes dryer. “Felix?” she answers, noticing how parched her throat is.
A gentle glow fades in over the space. Felix is standing with his back against the frame of the structure—an octagonal chamber that arches above their heads, scaffolded with wrought brass. His wide eyes sweep the room, coming to rest on the single sliver in the drapery where light glows through.
As she meanders towards him, his face goes slack with wonder—and as she reaches him, he laughs and pulls her into a hug.
It is no perfunctory embrace. He buries his face in her hair, and she can hear the shortness of his breath, sense his composure crumbling.
“We've made it. This is the one. This is where I was meant to arrive!”
His words register, but her thoughts are momentarily awry—with how unlike him this joy is, and how it delights her.
Eventually, to her dismay, he lets her go with a clearing of his throat. “Up there,” he says, pointing overhead at where the scaffolds arch and join in a starburst in the centre, like the top of a birdcage. A structure like a gyroscope—a disc mounted on an axle within a spherical frame—hangs down upon a chain from the joining. “That is a planar focus. While the Tunnel Machine would punch a hole into the fabric of space and channel the traveller through it, this planar focus was responsible for attracting the traveller back to a singular destination upon this plane. The Trapper’s Cage, we called it. Alas, it must not have accounted for the existence of other worlds.”
She stares upward at the hanging gyroscope. It is her first sight of a world she’s never seen—and she commits it firmly to memory. “Then…are we in…your San Francisco?” she says.
“Let us see,” he replies in a whisper, parting the curtains with an arm.
He extends his other hand towards Adelaide, who grasps it with her own. Then they step out through the curtain. As her eyes acclimatize, she sees that they are inside a wooden hall. Intermittent windows reveal pieces of the city beyond, and lamps glow down from sconces. Crowded around the Trapper’s Cage is a maze of other large structures, similarly draped in cloth.
Then, near the end of the hall, they hear a door slam open. “Hello? Is someone there?” The voice is ragged from panting.
Both straighten at the shout as it echoes across the hall. They creep around the circumference of the veiled Cage, in the direction of the voice.
There is someone standing at the double doors—with messy brown hair, barely reined into a ponytail. “You two!” the newcomer calls. As they inch forward, the stranger's eyes follow them.
“We two, indeed!” Felix answers. “Good day to you…and at the risk of sounding mad, may I know our current year and location?”
The stranger wears a brown coat that hangs to her knees. “The year is 1894, and we are by the wharves of San Francisco,” she says.
Adelaide and Felix glance at each other—his eyes widen, and a smile spreads on his face. “Wonderful! Oh, pardon my manners,” he answers, extending a hand. “Mercer, Felix. Pleasure to meet you…”
“I’m Vesper,” she replies, stepping forward to shake it. “Or, er, Captain Lovelace if you will. Forgive the rush, but we have been searching for you both. Would you come with me, please?”
The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 2
The Translocation
By now, it no longer startles Honourless when she finds another world in the forward direction. Now that they have found seven, it is hard to say how far the chain may go. If there are seven, why not eight, and if eight, why not nine?
Yet her heart still races each time she lands in a new world living in its own time, and her eyes still widen at its strangeness next to every other she has seen. If she were free—if she could ghost as she pleased—she would keep going and going, till she reached the end of this stack of worlds.
These are the thoughts that occur to Honourless as she lands in a dim metal cage, and realises that the air here smells…different. It is not icy like the last, nor pristine like the one before. It is…woody, and smoky, like incense.
Perhaps that is only by virtue of her current location. Finding the only gap in the drapery, she pokes her head out. The cage stands inside a warehouse, stocked to the brim with other mystery structures similarly hidden by cloth.
Exiting the building only involves following the wall to an open window that gazes upon an alley. She leapfrogs the sill, races down a ramp, and bursts from the shade into the view of a clanging, clattering dockyard. Chains are winched up to the tops of metal scaffolds, plucking wooden crates off the decks of so many ships.
Hong Yi has asked her to investigate three things about this next world: transport, lighting, and people. And here and now, the first thing that comes barreling into her attention is a brass-framed carriage, pulled by no beasts like the ones in Vesper’s world, yet more graceful in its make, and almost as quiet as a horse carriage. It does not rumble, but clatters, the whir of its gears audible without the growl of machinery.
More pertinent details rise into awareness. Each vehicle is adorned with glass panels, spread facing upward on metal branches like the leaves on a tree. On both sides of each street, the lights ascend, large globes upon iron poles. Through their glass she can see their filaments, though it is too bright for them to be shining.
Strangers brush by, but take no offence to her gawking. She ducks around a corner and finds three people in round brimmed hats, talking and smoking pipes. Averting their gazes, she sprints back up the way she came, into the shadow of that alleyway. She closes her eyes to focus on the Duchess in the next world, and on the memory she will spend next.
*
When Honourless lands in the Dikson hostel, she makes a beeline for Orobelle. She speaks for a full minute, and though of course Hong Yi doesn't share a word of her vocabulary, he can hear the fascinated thrill that peeks through her typical gritty nonchalance.
The duchess turns to Hong Yi. “The next world has carriages powered by no visible mechanism—no horses, and no engines,” she says. “The streets have electric lamps like the ones in Vesper’s London. And there is a dockyard, and people smoking pipes.”
Hong Yi frowns. “That…doesn’t sound like a specific era I know. No engines?”
“They had…glass leaves,” Orobelle translates.
“Well, it could be the eighteen hundreds, or it could be the twenty-one hundreds,” Hong Yi answers with a shrug.
Honourless mutters something. “She’s volunteering to take you along to scout,” Orobelle interprets, then with a thoughtful frown, she adds, “That seems wise…lest we land in yet another peril akin to a ‘core blast zone.’”
“Sound fair to me,” he replies. “I’m flattered you trust my judgement on the matter of safety, by the way.”
“You are—knowledgeable,” she says through gritted teeth. “The less time we spend fighting for our lives, the faster we can move.”
“Finally, something we can agree on.”
But by then, Honourless has taken Hong Yi’s wrist and, nodding at each other, they make the leap.
*
The pair land…in a cage under a sheet of cloth. Hong Yi crashes to his knees with a yell, propping himself up on his arms to kneel.
As he dusts himself off, he noticed Honourless frowning, already pulling her notebook out of her pocket. She hands him the translation glass as he sways to his feet.
This isn't right, the page reads. Give me a minute.
Again she bounds from the floor and pops out of reality. Several seconds later, she lands in the cage again with a crash, her brow furrowing. She repeats this manoeuvre once more, and the third time she pops back into the cage, she slumps back against the bars and pulls out her notepad.
I can't seem to land anywhere else in this world but inside this cage, she writes.
Do you think that the cage itself is causing this? Hong Yi writes back. He glances about, and squints up. Overhead, there is a hanging mobile of rings, and a sphere—a gyroscope, perhaps.
Honourless’s gaze follows his. She hands the translation glass back and resumes writing.
You may be right. I shall bring the rest here. Perhaps the duchess knows what's happening.
The next time Honourless disappears, she is gone for a few minutes. Hong Yi drags himself to the side of the cage and props himself up against the bars, gaze lifting. It smells woody here, of shavings and rust. Beyond the walls, he hears a distant ringing of metal on metal.
His reverie is interrupted when Honourless snaps out of space and time bringing a tumble of bodies that he soon discovers to be Artur, Marcia, and Vesper.
All three land on the floor around her feet, Artur still groaning in some disoriented agony. Marcia is helping Vesper to her feet, while he crawls onto his knees unassisted, staring listlessly at the bars.
“Hey, you okay?” Hong Yi asks, shuffling over.
“I don't…understand,” Artur says, all his gruffness gone. “How?”
“Welcome to the next world,” declares Vesper’s voice from above them. Both gazes lift. Her silhouette leans against the cage frame, arms folded. “And, congratulations on your first interdimensional leap.”
For almost a minute, Artur does not speak. Then he mumbles, “How is this…possible?”
Hong Yi smiles, clapping him on the shoulder. “I don't know either, but you'll get used to it.”
*
While Honourless sluggishly departs to retrieve the duchess and her protector, Marcia forges outside. Through the drapes, she emerges into the hall encasing the cage, contemplating its peculiar details.
There is something airy about it all. It is a storage house of some kind; the walls are lacquered and sanded. In rows around them, other large structures tower over her, each draped in a dust cover, silhouettes only hinting at the secret of each defunct monument. She can hear the sounds of industry outside—of a factory or a port, busier than any she has seen in her time.
As she rounds the back of the cage, there comes the chill down her neck, again, as if there were someone or something—a disturbance nearby. But she walks a full round of the cage, tiptoeing over the wrinkles of the tarpaulin, and sees no one.
Then, as her eyes sweep the floor, she spots the shoe prints. They are fresh, and not like any of her companions', left by some ribbed sole in the dust.
She stares at them, then in the direction they point. There is no one hiding in the shadows.
Marcia shakes her head. Twice is not enough to conclude a pattern. She rejoins the group in front of the cage once more, where the velvet drapery parts. Orobelle is querying Honourless, who sits on the ground clutching her forehead.
*
“I've never seen anything like it,” Orobelle mutters. “Could this cage have been built to trap us?”
“Surely if it were a trap, it wouldn't have a gaping hole in the bars,” Vesper replies.
The duchess extends a hand in Dorian’s direction, and he hands her her corefinder. “What of our search? Are we doomed to keep returning to this city?”
“Reckon so.” Honourless groans, leaning against the velvet with closed eyes. “Go find lodging without me. I will…be here.”
Without deserting her frown, Orobelle points to Vesper. “Keep watch over her,” she declares, then glances at her corefinder. “The rest of you, follow me. We shall solve this mystery once we… There isn't a Core here!” Screeching wordlessly, she whirls around to jab a finger at Honourless, lying sprawled on the floor. “You get one night.”
*
As they walk on, Artur's thoughts float suspended in a concoction of disbelief. There is something unreal about the scenes that envelops him, like technicolor film, their shades and sounds too vivid to exist.
The doors of the warehouse stand ajar for the group as they leave, but they halt at the watch house by the gate when a mustachioed guard peers through. He looks up from his logbook to inspect them, then declares something in Mandarin that Artur can only make out a quarter of: didn’t see…
He understands Hong Yi’s answer only slightly better. “Sorry…a box…in a boat.”
It's a lie and a half, but with little more than a shrug, the guard waves them along, attention vanishing back into his ongoing task.
A field of masts cast shadows over the dockyard; leaving them, they march into the city proper, where sloping terraces of stone facades take over. By now, Artur can already feel the sweat pouring down his back, and this is not assuaged by tearing his snow jacket off.
He has never seen this city before, but that is not saying much, given he has never left the coasts of Asia and the Arctic. There is green on street corners, alive and growing, and threaded through the walls too, ferns peeking through cracks. He wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a city in a different world and one from his childhood, before the bombs fell.
Led by Orobelle, the sweaty troupe encounter a parade of hotels one block up from the piers. Past a few open doors they stroll, before the duchess stops in front of the next. The signage, all hand-lettered English encircled by marching lights, informs them they are entering The best hotel in San Francisco. A name he has only heard in hazy memories of children's books.
The lobby gives the sense of being two centuries older than Artur’s time, yet it is all so lustrous and in perpetual motion, crisper than the paintings and the dour photographs. It has enough velvet and leather that he senses that it will be a cushy stay. It is by querying perplexed strangers across the carpeted hall that Hong Yi manages to tease out the current year: 1894.
Standing close to the booking counter, the duchess turns to Artur. “Go bring Honourless and Vesper here,” she says.
Artur barely spares a moment to be surprised at the command. Wordlessly, he tosses his jacket into an acceding Hong Yi’s arms, and turns to march away.
All considered, Artur is a little relieved for the time alone, after the discombobulation of the journey here. He has never flown in an airplane, nor a space rocket, but he imagines that riding those contraptions must feel that way—the world zipping away in streaks, the body weightless, the ground dissolving. As he goes, he soaks in the glow of the streets again—the golden sun hanging in a cloudless blue sky, igniting colours on the streets that he forgot existed. The corners are alive with the ringing of bells and the rattle of carriage wheels. The ocean is teeming with sails and smokestacks and chains reeling in crates.
At the booth by the warehouse, he greets the security guard in simple Mandarin, then carries on inside. He walks in on Vesper writing a message in Honourless’ notebook.
“We found a hotel.” Both lift their eyes. “Duchess wants you back.”
Vesper rises to one knee, slipping the notebook back into Honourless’ pocket. “Come help me,” she answers. “I don’t reckon she can walk just yet.”
Lifting their scarred travel companion takes no discussion: Artur crouches to offer his shoulder, Vesper follows suit with a nod, and Honourless gets the message, crawling into position with an arm over each shoulder. Both pick her up from the warehouse floor in a single motion.
The walk to the hotel takes them past hawkers under canopies, a polite crowd of ladies and gents in top hats and fascinators, painters sitting with easels, and drains exuding stenches that would belong better in a latrine. Everyone speaks with that odd American drawl that he has only ever heard in old movies.
Halfway up the road, Vesper and Artur stop to rearrange their grips on the half-conscious Honourless. “Does Honourless not have a…less terrible name?” he mutters as they do.
“Well, s’posedly her name was erased by magic,” Vesper answers. “No way to get it back till she finishes parole.”
“Magic…now I have heard everything.”
She grins. “That’s the least of it.”
He nods, more startled than anything that he has no strong feelings about this. He rather likes knowing that there is magic—believing in the fairy stories of his childhood again.
The hotel is right where they left it, though the lobby is a few guests more crowded. Orobelle is arguing with a bellboy about the handling of her luggage—and Dorian is standing haplessly with all three bags upon his shoulder. Hong Yi, however, has already been relieved of his, and he has handed off Vesper’s, too.
“Jacket?” Artur asks, coming up to Hong Yi.
“Oh, I, uh, shoved it in my luggage.” He grins sheepishly. “Come get it from me upstairs, we're rooming together.”
*
“Upstairs” is accessed by means of the world's slowest hydraulic lift. The five passengers watch the operator pull the lever, then listen to the floor rattle upward with the weight of its passengers. Artur stares at the key in Hong Yi’s hand—Room 3B. No one utters a word, or moves, beyond some shuffling.
The room matching their key is not far down the corridor. Hong Yi opens it with a flourish and grins, pointing out his luggage already awaiting them upon the polished parquet floor. There is the scent of leather and recently dried laundry. The upholstery is a welcoming, perfectly-kept tan hue, and there are two downy soft beds at the facing walls of the room.
“That Dikson hostel must've left a bad taste in the duchess’ mouth,” Hong Yi chuckles, flopping backwards onto the couch. Artur stands inspecting from the door, before finally strolling up to the window. He sees the facade of their facing neighbours, his silhouette gleaming back from their window. Hong Yi rolls over. “Anyway, uh, up to you which bed you take, but choose quick, ‘cause I'm dying for a nap.”
Artur nods wordlessly, returning to the luggage bag to unzip it. The corner of his snow jacket peeks out; he yanks it out.
“Told you it was in there. It’s a nice coat, by the way.”
“Yes, thank you.” Hong Yi seems to have a predilection for not shutting his mouth. But he supposes this is a step up from perpetually fearing for his life.
*
Miraculously this time, Orobelle has put her funds towards sufficient beds to house everyone—a room of two for Hong Yi and Artur, three for Honourless, Vesper and Marcia, and two for herself and her ever-uncomplaining protector.
Honourless’ hopes that she is finally mellowing are quelled when, true to her word, she barges in on the women’s room in the wee hours of dawn “Up,” she snaps.
Honourless flips over. “No.”
“What did you say?”
“No. I can’t do it. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”
“Excuse me? Do you realise we are now eighteen days from the villain’s deadline?”
“Villain? What can she do to you, anyway? All powerful duchess, the one around whom the worlds spin?”
“If I do not make the rendezvous, she will destroy the rest of my city.”
“What a burden being a duchess must be! Well, I am no machine. And I can’t do something just because you demand it.”
She grits her teeth, and Honourless can see her doing battle with herself. “Report back the instant you are well enough to move us.”
“To carry a burden of six? Alright, give me a few minutes to stop having a migraine.”
Orobelle, who appears from her answering scowl not to know what a migraine feels like, turns around and huffs away, already fishing her two instruments from her pocket. On her way out, she mutters about fools and ingrates, panic shaking her voice even after the door has slammed behind her.
Honourless scans the room till she finds Vesper sitting at Marcia’s bedside with a hand to the latter’s forehead. Vesper's eyes dart to the recently slammed door, and she shakes her head with a sigh. Then she casts Marcia a sympathetic smile, which the other woman returns with a blink.
Then the door crashes back open.
In hurtles Orobelle, her skirts and hair aflutter, her eyes wilder with shock than they have ever seen.
“They’re here!” she shrieks, waving the corefinder for their eyes. “Two Cores. They just appeared out of nowhere! One of you, go get them!”