The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

The Great Unmaking - I

Content warnings (may contain spoilers)

This chapter depicts graphic animal death.

Kori changed everything.

With the woman on their side, time became an ally. And with such an ally, the balance swung heavily in their favour.

That much, Liss knew from the minute the priest explained what she could do. All at once, new ideas began to accrete from the loose matter of her half-formed plans.

“How far does your power extend?” she murmured.

“I exert my power in a sphere around myself,” said Kori, when asked. Her grasp of Orsandin was much firmer than Liss’. “The size changes according to my strength on that day. Some days, it is only whatever is within arm’s reach. On others, I can influence ten arms’ lengths around me.”

“Can you make a rowboat move faster?” asked Liss.

“I have never put it to that use. So I cannot say for sure.”

“In theory?”

“In theory, yes.”

“And how often can you do it?”

“As many times as I wish, until I lack the strength to continue. An hour a day, perhaps.”

“Any other limits?”

Kori yawned. “Counterspell,” she mumbled. “I channel the same energies as spellfolding…cannot be done inside a counterspell…”

The effect of the fireplace’s warmth was too powerful, it seemed, for Kori to harbour any more distrust. She joined the trio in their camp, curling up in front of the heat.

While the rest sank back into their slumber, Liss dwelled in the dark hall with a burning twig, beginning to explore the shelves.

There were drugs of many sorts she could not identify, firesticks which needed a sash to ignite, and an assortment of heavy tools piled in the last, unused corner. By now, her mind had been overcome with a fervour that kept her plotting well into the night. Even while the fire guttered, she lay awake thinking, a firestick clasped between her palms.

When the morning stretched its pale limbs through the gaps in the roof, she held in her mind a nascent plan. There was only one part she was uncertain about.

“Lacar,” she called as he rose and stretched. “Back in Madan…were there ways to communicate at a distance?”

Lowering his arms, he turned to the girl. “Huh? Better question: who's catching breakfast?”

Liss sighed. “I'll do it. If you tell me what you know.”

“Fine, fine. Get us some good, succulent fish, and then we'll talk.”

---

Liss emptied her pockets of coins and nails, replacing them with pebbles littered about the door. In the doorway, she paused, and waved for Noma to follow. 

“We're catching breakfast,” she said. 

Noma trailed Liss out the door, beginning to search for fallen rose apples—but rather than pay the pink apples any heed, her friend marched off in the other direction, towards the lagoon. Only now did she see that Liss held a fishing spear in her hand.

“You're in charge of spotting,” she said.

“Why do I have to spot?” Noma whined as she caught up. “I'll tell you whatever you need to know. Then I'll go back and pick some rose apples.”

“Come on,” Liss cajoled, tugging on her arm. “There’s deep water here. Let's spear us some tuna. It'll be incredible.”

Noma’s face fell farther. “Do you have any idea how big tuna are?”

“I've seen the tuna the fishers hauled home. We can take one. Let's get the rowboat.”

“I don't want to spear tuna!” Noma cried, even as she let herself be dragged towards the beach.

“You don't have to do any spearing. I'll take care of it. Tuna are no match for me.”

“They might be!”

Noma put on a show of refusing, though her feet no longer resisted. She followed Liss to the rowboat, and watched as she dragged it into the water, then climbed aboard after her. Together they rowed out of the lagoon, keeping themselves on the far side of the island from Madan.

Today, the sea was a translucent floor beneath them, ten stories deep. In the green and blue, they followed grand curtains of prey fish as they swirled around the jutting remains of some sunken old ruin. “Why can't we just catch some sardine?” asked Noma. “Look, there's so many.”

“Sardine are the consolation prize. We'll take some if there's no tuna—look!”

From the endless wells of blue beneath them, a flock of swordfish darted through the ball of sardines, splitting the current of flashing flanks like a poker through coals. They watched the hunters pierce through the veins of fish, snatching them in their mouths.

Then, a new, sleek beast charged through the fluttering veils of sardines like a knife, and launched through the surface with a smaller fish wriggling in its jaws.

“Oh! It’s a mammal!” Noma cried out as it burst through the waterline with a misty spout—but no sooner than her words came did Liss’ spear flicker past and thud into the creature’s hide.

The creature bucked and chittered, yanking on the rope.

Liss’s victorious shout was overtaken by a yelp as the rowboat tipped with the force of the creature caught on the barb. Without even a moment's thought, she sprang from the thwart and dove into the water, swimming after its flashing tail.

Noma gasped as the rowboat rocked, but she could not stop watching over the hull’s edge as the flash of pink and white that was her friend flew through the blue, latched onto the predator larger than herself. They skimmed through the surface once, twice, each time in a different posture. When the beast came up for air in a chimney blast of spray, Noma saw that all Liss was doing was clinging, white water trailing them with every toss of the beast's tail.

Then on the third ascent, there was a hiss, and a boom that made the water bubble. Blood swirled up through the foam. Noma screamed Liss’ name. Froth parted, and out of the current bobbed the girl’s head, spitting saltwater.

She kicked towards the rowboat, trailing red. Noma rowed madly to meet her. Treading water with her hair floating untied around her shoulders, Liss thrust the gleaming carcass over the hull—spear, barb and all—so heavy the rowboat began to list to a side. There was a gaping wound where its mouth had been, spilling blood onto the deck.

Its hunter sprang aboard after, and grinned, touching Noma’s arm with one bloodied hand. It was all the mammal’s blood, mixed with water. Liss was bathed in blood, from waist to arm.

“And there is breakfast, and lunch, and maybe dinner too,” she said with a grin.

Noma, caught between wonder and terror, unwrapped her wrist straps and began to wipe the blood off her arm. “You are like no one else I’ve ever met,” she muttered.

“I know,” Liss replied.

---

“In Madan, and across the Greater Isles, we all learned to drum and dance.” So began Lacar as he skinned the creature, which he had called a porpoise and appeared impressed they had hauled home. “From childhood, we learned to dance in our cots. We stamped on floor planks, banged our fists on walls. We all spoke the language of rhythm.”

The part of the hall Liss had esteemed to be a tavern bar revealed itself now as an old kitchen, with knives hidden in boxes and bins. They had passed Kori near the exit, gathering kindling from the ground, and now they heard the crunch of her feet on twigs outside.

“There were the harvest dances—we would drum and dance the night of the equinox away. War dances—our kings and queens would play the tower on the square, and we would know our ships were to sail. Tap the beat of the spring dance and every citizen of Madan would come out dancing in the snow. We rowed to a beat, and marched to a beat. It was who we were: people of dance and song. But now, our drums are gone, and the drum tower has been made a storehouse for rotting food. All coated in purple and black.”

“Why do you speak of the dancing as if it’s in the past? Madan still lives.”

The porpoise’s hide was as thick as a finger. Rolling it aside, Lacar laid out the butchered meat and began to fillet it. “Madan…is not quite what it was,” he answered. “Our old king was slain in our final stand. The new king is in Orsand’s pocket. The day they took the city, Orsand had all our drums taken and burned. First the ceremonial drums. Then the ones in our homes. Now there’s nothing left to call us together.” He slid a strip of meat to the side.

Liss wrapped her arms around her knees and frowned. “They keep taking what matters most to us.”

Lacar began to slice the meat into thick, fatty slabs. “I’ll tell you what. Orsand has made an art out of conquest. We of the Greater Isles were the first artisans of war. Then we were beaten at our own game, and we could not but grudgingly respect it, when we were kicked to our feet. You see, they took not what mattered most, but what united us. Our dances were not just important: they gathered us—the Being spoke through the beat. And our king, too. Orsand bought him, because they knew what he meant to us. Without those things, none could rally us.”

Liss frowned. In her mind’s eye, the memory of the occupation of Henkor played again, like a document of history opening before her eye. “They broke our trust in our neighbours,” she muttered. “When one erred, we were all punished.”

“Exactly.” He pointed the knife over his shoulder. “Break the bonds and break the people.”

“Then to mount an insurgence…more than warships and weapons…we must unite Madan again.”

“Perhaps. But that cannot be done now.” Lacar paused, picking up the next strip of meat.

“Why not?” Liss propped up her chin on her knees. “The king. He still leads?”

“In a way. King Vicola, son of King Lecsan… You see, unlike on Henkor, our people and our port were the prize for Orsand. They needed our loyalty. They had to keep us a king. So they executed the dissident father, and made the son their puppet. Thirteen when he was crowned. Too young to assert his will.”

“Would he rebel, given the means?”

“Can’t say. If there’s any rebellion in him, he hasn’t shown it.”

“I think he will. There is an Orsandin yoke on his back—but once it is lifted…”

“I wouldn't have quite so much faith in him. He’s done nothing but parrot the governor’s policy to us.”

Liss gritted her teeth. “No, I think I will. When you're thirteen…and you watch your father get slaughtered for insurgency…what do you do, but fall in line? And when you're eighteen, and a window opens…”

At this, Lacar paused, laying the knife on the counter. “Do you truly…intend to help us take our city back?”

Liss glared. “There is no other way,” she answered. “I fled Henkor in search of a way to free my homeland from the shadow of Orsand. Now I see…we will never be free while this filthy breeding ground keeps churning out new soldiers and ships.” Her eyes narrowed. “Henkor cannot be free until Madan is. We win freedom together.”

He sighed. “You children…you get these wild ideas of what you can do, and then…we end up here, plotting a foolhardy revolt.”

“Do you think a felled city can never stand again?” Liss snapped. “Madan is still here. Still breathes. In all but name. You have told me everything I need to know.” She leaned back in her sack, rolling onto her side to peer up at Noma, who sat fiddling with two bags of herbs. Noticing her friend's attention, she let the bags fall into her lap. Her eyes smiled, though she tried to hide it.

“Well, pray, share your plans, then,” Lacar muttered. “Over this wondrous meal of porpoise, if you must.”

”Soon, soon. It will begin with a boat in the dead of night…”

---

It took all of lunch for Liss to convince both Lacar and Kori of her plan.

She watched as their sceptical interrogations shifted, by the minute, to a kind of complicity; their questions were like the shore waters that tested the hulls of boats before they were set upon the sea. And their questions became suggestions, and extensions, until they were all plotting together.

“…start at the mill houses…no one will want the conquerors gone less…”

“…no, no, not a day before. Once the first pole falls…everything will follow at once…”

The plot was wild, and strange, but there was something in Lacar and Kori’s eyes—a look of glee like when one is shown a hidden back door for the first time—that told Liss there was more than a sliver of a chance it could succeed.

“Before they leave to cross the Mouth of the World,” said Lacar, “all ships must call at Madan. There is no other city among our isles that can stock a boat for two weeks’ sailing. And that means a chokepoint. We can take them by the necks.”

*

On the matter of boats, it turned out that Lacar was not only a seasoned sailor, but also knowledgeable enough in shipbuilding to erect a mast on the rowboat. Hidden under a rocky overhang near the inlet of the lagoon was a shipwrecked single-handed canoe, its sail still intact though its prow had caved in. He decided, on an inspection, that it would be easier to transplant the sail to their vessel than to repair the prow, and then he spent the rest of the afternoon doing just that—sawing, lashing, sealing holes with fat.

Through this all, Noma had kept her distance from the plan. Over lunch, whenever Liss had turned to watch her friend, she had only seen the girl listening with a furrow in her brow.

While Lacar toiled at his work on the edge of the water, Liss found Noma, sitting on a rock some way up the mound into which the warehouse was recessed. “May I join you?” she called out from below.

“Sure.”

The mound was easily scaled, sloping gently enough that her momentum from running carried her up to Noma. She was in the midst of tying blades of grass together, threading the tip of one through the loop of another.

Liss crouched to sit in the undergrowth. “You've been very quiet about my plan,” she said. “Are you against it? Is it too ambitious?”

Noma turned. The same frown had reappeared. “I’m not against it. You’ve thought harder about this than I could possibly imagine.”

Liss folded her arms to think. “Can I be honest about something?”

“What’s that?”

“If any of this sounds like a bad idea, you need only tell me. If you object, I will rethink it.”

Noma stopped tying a knot in the grass. She hugged her knees close and watched her unwaveringly. “Why?” she murmured. “My opinion isn't special.”

“Because I admire your sense of judgment. You’re discerning and careful. And I’m not. So tell me if anything doesn't feel right.”

Hiding her chin behind her knees, Noma’s eyes darted away. “You know, back when you caught that porpoise, the water was full of blood. For a moment I was worried it was you who was bleeding. But when I found out it wasn’t…the fear didn’t go away. It was just…so much red.” Her throat constricted on the last syllable. “I’m worried. About what will happen, if you succeed. If you really do drive Orsand out of the Greater Isles. What if they bring retribution upon us? What if they send bigger warships, and leave fewer people alive this time? That sort of thing is too big for me to imagine.”

Liss turned the question in her head, for she knew.  that it was important that she knew her answer to it. “Lacar said something earlier. Orsand is smaller than the Greater Isles. And nowhere else in its empire does it have the right climate and soil for aroca. If they can use our resources against us…then we can use them against Orsand, too.”

“That may be true…but do you know what you’re really opening the door to here?” Noma murmured. “Do you know what you’re going to start?”

“Retribution,” Liss answered. “Emperor Milaston should have known. He’s the one who doesn’t know what he’s started.” Noticing then that her companion’s dour look had not lightened, she let her voice soften. “You know, you’re the person so far who’s had the most faith that the plan will succeed.”

Noma turned away. “Well, you’re good at what you do…and believe you can do anything you decide to, so…”

Liss smiled. “I can’t say I don’t have limits…you know this.”

A smile cracked through her grimness. “You really thought I wouldn’t notice how sore you were yesterday.”

“Can’t hide anything from you, can I,” she sighed, and let her head drop to her friend’s shoulder.

Both fell silent for several minutes, or perhaps a tenth of a day. Green birds fluttered through the trees, showing their hidden lavender plumage in flight. Against the gentle rumble of waves, Lacar’s saw scraped against wood. Soaking in the warmth, Liss began listening closely to Noma’s breathing, and only then began to notice that it was agitated.

At last Noma began to squirm, before slipping her shoulder from under Liss’ head.

“Noma…don’t go…” Liss propped herself up on an arm.

Noma flopped onto her side and curled up. “Don't lean on me like that.”

“Alright, alright,” Liss sighed, patting her shoulder. “I’ll go salt the meat, silly.”

---

Unlike with Henkor, Orsand had taken pains to give Madan the illusion of retaining control over its production and commerce. Farmers still carted farm goods to the marketplace to sell. The citizens of the port were largely sailors, captains, and others who were needed to keep a city running—administrators, maintenance, constabulary.

But there were also the ones who lived off the crust fallen from the table, and though Orsand had deterred these strays into hiding, they still thrived, worming into the cracks.

All of this was held together at the seams by Orsandin Peacetime Law, as it was known—a total Orsandin control of policy and foreign relations, delivered by the mouth of King Vicola. There was no aroca here; there was no need for it, with the counterspell affixed to the land by iron poles. An iron rule it was, iron smelted from the Orsandin homeland stock, brought here after the first fleet to prop up the newly subjugated colony. The counterspell may as well have grown full-formed from the land.

It was on the dim night of the new moon, when no great light hung over the sea, that Liss and Lacar rowed through the swamplands not far from where they hadlast departed, wearing a scarf over her head. There would be constables watching the roads at the city limits, and she would not chance it—she had made enough of a ruckus when she had slaughtered six police. Rather, Lacar had shared his own favoured route—down into the heathland and through the old culvert, the water only foot-high at this time of the year.

There was a half-collapsed hut on the edge of the city, where Liss broke to scarf down seaweed and salted porpoise. Then it was onward through the heath, to the yawning hole in the dark. She crawled in among the roots, boots soiled and squelching. Pulling a lamp and a nail from her satchel, she lit it with a spark.

She listened to the sounds above as she crept through the maze of culverts under the city—always take the upward paths, Lacar had said, and she only had to backtrack once. The trickle of water and the splash of her boots was soon joined by the muffled creak of a mill, always slowly spinning. And then, finding handholds carved into the wall and a steeply inclined pipe through which the current dripped, she climbed out of the culvert, showered in water, to find herself beside that decrepit wheel.

She had never seen a mill in the middle of a city, nor one quite so small, cut to its niche. Its wheel spun in the stone channel that emptied into the drain, in whose mud she now stood, sulfurous and cracking without the monsoon floods to feed it. The banks of the channel cut between two buildings, their chimneys like spires into the purple predawn sky.

She climbed, then, towards the first gap between the walls she saw, and then the scent of old grain and new smoke reached her, a ghost of a past that was no more. The mill rose out of the industrial corner of the city; these edifices had dwindled in use since the arrival of Orsand, who had moved manufacturing closer to the mines.

But still, they were not devoid of life. When Madan had been taken, Orsand had reassigned the city houses to citizens by pay grade. First to the navy. Then to the police. The people who ran the industries, the locksmiths and builders and shipwrights. And everyone left without a place, for lack of need, could leave for the hills or stay on the streets and beg. And beg they did, though their brethren called to arms by the conquerors kicked them into the ditches and scattered their homes.

These rough sleepers had needed shelter and a store of food. The old mills had both. The slums had sprouted in and among the storehouses, the old brick alleys now playing host to makeshift canopies teetering on wooden sticks, and begging bowls, the scraps crawling with roaches.

This was where Liss’ work would begin.

*

With a face not much different from most other Makora people and tattoos similar to those sported by other enlistees, Liss could get around unnoticed as long as her dawn-coloured hair was covered. For a week, she lurked in the hovels, spreading the whispered secret of a coming revolt. A week, no more: long enough that it began to disperse upon its own strength, but not so long that the constabulary could start to suspect her.

Some of her listeners laughed, baffled at her bold words in such dangerous times. Others demanded her silence, then asked her to visit their alley pubs later. It was from these small footholds that she planted the news, and a firestick or two—“but you cannot whisper a word of it to the constabulary or the navy.”

They took her to the house of poets, who wrote the underground press, and they fed her and housed her, though she refused their wine. The press had a web of informants; they knew who could be entrusted with these words.

Here it was, among these downtrodden dreamers and makers, that Liss saw the true face of Madan. A second soul, surging deep beneath the surface, there were fathoms of starving anger housed here—a war that wanted to break loose from the caging peacetime law. Many still had their sashes, hidden in the folds of sleeves or in cracks in bricks.

So, for seven long days—she counted them religiously—Liss laid inroads under the houses and through the veins. Then, on the eighth, long before the sun had set, she crept through the sewers—sheltered by a tavern musician’s sheepskin cloak—and emerged in the port, to begin the great unmaking.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

The Great Unmaking - II

Content warnings (may contain spoilers)

This chapter depicts graphic injury, firearms, and explosions.

For a week, Lacar and Noma had camped and slept without Liss, feverish with the fear of silence. Daily, on the western coast of the smuggler's lagoon, they had watched the patrols skim by, timing them by the shadow of a branch in the sand. Six patrols in the daylight hours. Perhaps six more at night.

There was no telling if Liss was still alive on the other side of the yawning blue. If she had failed her part, then they would be flying headfirst to their deaths tomorrow.

But Liss did not simply fail. Noma committed that certainty to her own preparations, learning from Lacar, rehearsing the motions, until the eighth night, when the fateful flight was to take place.

*

It began with a boat in the dead of night. Bolstered by its new sail, the stolen rowboat flew like a gull, all four oars put to use. Between them, a sack of coins, nails and nuts jangled and clattered with every gybe.

They darted through the window between the patrols, into the sulfurous swampland east of Madan. Stowing the sail, they threaded through the mangroves with their oars. Colonnades of tree roots gave way to the stone and wood of wharves, and leafy canopies parted to show the seaport’s edifices.

The Orsandin authority had made their base among the houses of the port: the governor, the admiral, and the chief of constabulary. Lacar had only walked by their gates before.

The water scattered the thin moon’s reflection into a thousand slivers, blurring them into foam against the piers. Hugging the jetties, they passed the slumbering brigantines. One, two…there were six on anchor in the harbour. Their cannons stared, their hulls lit blue by the clouded half light.

In a gentle arc, they glided to the stone ladder. It ascended from the briny sea to the esplanade, a column of thin rungs that jutted from the wharf’s sheer stone face. Noma was already studying it by the time they came to rest, bobbing unevenly at its foot. Lacar turned to nod at her. She rose to her feet.

“Ten minutes till the next patrol,” he whispered, eyes cast forward.

With a dizzying leap, Noma flung herself onto the first rung. For seconds, her whole weight hung by her aching hands, her feet scrabbling about for purchase, her heart screaming where her mouth could not. The medicine bag on her hip swung, unsettling her centre of gravity.

But she found a foothold in the stone before her fingers could slip. Then she launched herself upward to the next rung, and then the next, palms scraping against barnacles. She glanced up, briefly, at the counterspell knots fluttering in the sea breeze overhead. Her blood roared while the boat swooped away, nothing but the pounding water beneath her now.

Lacar and Kori were destined for the dockyard ramp. While they were preparing their part of this great ploy, Noma had all of the night, until the final bang, to complete hers.

---

Liss had learned, through the stories of elders, and then through her escape from Henkor, that the world never denied her. But it was not some divine right, never something she was granted freely.

It was that she always knew exactly what had to be done, and she had to wherewithal to do it.

Victory was earned in blood and sweat, and where most faltered before any blood was drawn, she did not stop there. She would gut the corpse, if need be. She would snap its bones to suck the marrow out.

All through the noble neighbourhood of the port, patrols of constables watched sleeplessly. Liss dove into shadows under parked carts, watching pairs of boots clack back and forth in counterpoint, catching snatches of a murmured conversation in Orsandin. How's it going with your lady? She keeps returning later than I ask her to. She ever come home with coin? Horse hooves pawed at gravel.

There was a ditch on the other side. She waited for the pair to pass her in the middle of the road, right in front of her line of sight. Then, in three breathless seconds, she darted out and rolled into the ditch. The horses made no complaint.

Through the stench of the muddy ditch she crawled, peering up now and then in search of the golden fences. When she found them, there was a guard in leather armour, their back up against the glimmering gate posts.

Liss knew, from talking to Lacar, that these nobles were too cautious to sleep with unlocked windows. She could spend hours picking at their locks, or try unlatching a window from outside. But here was the beauty of this plan: she had to draw attention for this to work.

With a deep preparatory breath, she sprang up from the drain, hands outstretched.

The guard only had a split second to begin to shout, before the fence beside them turned to pounds of explosive force, dashing their head open against the road.

As the boom that shook the street, the well-oiled machine of the Orsand constabulary kicked into action. A cavalry of thudding boots and clinking weapons stirred, shouts crossing between the streets. Spurred by the awakening buzz, Liss leapt through the smoking hole in the fence and sprinted up the feeble lawn. Locks, devised to resist human hands, human ingenuity, could do nothing against her. The admiral's front door exploded off its frame. 

She kicked it down and barreled inside, plucking a nail from her pocket. His was a house with an antechamber, two staircases arcing up to the main hall on either side. But Admiral Ecata had been woken by the noise, and he was stumbling in the next hallway under his shelves of wineglasses when she found him, wearing his nightcap.

Liss flung the nail.

A boom rattled the shelves and doors. Wineglasses tumbled from the wall and smashed on the floor around the admiral while a puddle of blood pooled beneath him.

So far so good, but now time was bearing down on her. If she was ambushed on the streets too early, she would be all out of luck.

This house was strange, all hard edges. Cool, polished stone gleamed dimly beneath her feet. As she sprinted to the far end of the hall, stories burst into her mind, of kings and queens in palaces built by the hands of slaves. She had never set foot on any floor like it before.

But Liss was not here to linger. Already she could hear the clatter of the door behind her, the thunder of boots. She unlatched and threw open the arched window at the far end of that hall, clambering out to land in the backyard, beyond which was a service gate—easily unlatched once the lock was gone—and a drainage canal. The back of every house faced into this canal, which carried their stormwater and refuse away. Peering over the roofs to her right, she found the pointed turret of the town square tower and sprinted towards it, past one fenced property then another, past square compounds with gardens, all hewn of mountain stone. She leapt the gap over the canal and climbed the lattice fence of the last house before the tower.

The governor was an Orsandin woman, sent here from the homeland itself with orders to reform the city. Lacar had met the governor once, on the day of his officiation into the navy. She carries a blade at her hip, he said. Even when she sleeps. She told me she would never be caught unarmed.

When their eyes met in the doorway of her bedroom, Liss did not step forward. She saw the uncomprehending stare of a predator turned prey for the first time, before she squeezed her hand into a fist—and a blinding, bone-shattering boom tore the woman’s leg from her body and a shriek of pain from her throat.

While the Governor collapsed onto her side, Liss tackled her to the ground and shoved a coin into her throat.

Before she could choke, her head, too, was asunder in a rattling of shelves and windows.

By then, she had shot away down the hall. Through the arched windows, Liss saw constables drawn by the noise towards the ex-governor’s door. Brawls were breaking out on the streets, too.

Back out the way she came, she met the canal again, and traced its bank towards her final stop. By now she was starting to pant with the effort of running, but greater than the exertion was the thrill, goading her ever forward.

The last house was an easy find: two storeys, a stone base and a wood framed upper extension. The Chief of Constabulary had to be the last, for a few reasons.

This door went as easily as the last two. Through surly corridors she ran, searching for the path to the inner chambers, till she found the spiralling staircase that ascended to the loft. Even now, boots pounded the stones of the street. Eventually they would smoke her out, but they wouldn't have to.

When Liss found the Chief of Constabulary,  he sat awake in his silk bedding with a musket over his shoulder, eyes glittering in the light from his window.

Perhaps hearing her arrival, he had thought to arm himself. But he was too slow. Before his finger had twitched on the trigger, the stock was already overheating.

She ducked back out the door as an explosion painted the room, the ball of flame setting aglow the unlit sconces outside.

The echoes settled back down, but not to silence. On the street, through his door, shouting and stomping surged to fill the hole. Liss crept back into the bedroom, past the butchered remains in the bed. There was not a window, but a balcony.

Before she emerged, she paused to take stock. They must know exactly where she was by now—lines of constables had tightened around the offending house. The roar of the wind and water was like the city drawing a breath. She calculated her path from the balcony to the fence. From the fence into the crowd.

Then, she stepped out into the open, into the last shadows of the night. Liss saw it all laid out before her like a map. The streets of Madan, now a swarm of police, thickening on the road outside their chief's stolen home. The royal tower up the road, defaced with Orsandin banners, where a lone light flashed through a lower window. The view of the port beyond the roofs of the offices. The pre-dawn beyond the roofs, starting to bleed purple.

Liss stepped up to the wooden railing and gazed down upon the milling crowd, one voice then another calling their allies attention upward, and then a cascading glint of gun barrels. Heart booming, she searched the audience for straw-gold hair…

…And there she was, waving a stick with a smouldering tip.

The moment Liss leapt over the railing and onto the creaking iron fence, twenty barrels flashed towards her. As she raced down the tightrope of the fence, towards those ranks and files, she pointed her index finger at them. Officers cried out and flung their weapons away, the stocks too hot to hold.

With every wave of her hands, guns began to detonate on the stones, blowing feet off legs and knees off thighs. Even then the ruckus brought more police, coalescing and tangling like kelp on a reddening tide. Twenty, thirty, a military in all but name—trying to retain formation even while their allies fell in the minefield of their own making.

For seconds, Liss felt euphoria roar through her. She waved her hands, and bullets exploded before they had left their barrels—and she held her position long enough for Lacar and Kori to climb up into the cart, holding their sack between them.

With a grin, she met Lacar’s eye, across that windy river of blood. She sprang along the remaining length of the fence, readying for the leap.

“Now!” she yelled, and she jumped.

With a great heave, Kori and Lacar threw the sack high into the crowd. The fabric began to open. Hundreds of coins and bolts rained over their heads. She flew from the fence, rebounded off the shoulders of a shrieking constable and cleared the last head in the crowd to land on the far bank of the street. As she sprinted to the cart, Lacar threw his arms over the side and, grabbing her wrists, boosted her up into the seat in one fluid movement.

Meanwhile, Kori had turned to face the crowd. She lifted one hand, then another, drawing a circle with them. Then, everything on that milling street—every stepping boot, every waving arm, every swirl of wind, every shout…began to slow down.

“Let’s go!” Kori shouted, safe beyond that lethargic bubble. Lacar flicked the reins. Liss pointed her open palm up the street. Slow as sunrise, slow as melting, every inch of metal—guns, bullets, nails, coins and all—began to crack open, revealing fire in their cores. In slow motion, constables tumbled apart. Beyond the horizon of the spell, the wheels whirred and the cart lurched away, up the road and away from the police.

As the crowd left the range of Kori’s magic, they were released from the thrall of her spell.

A boom like thunder shook the street. Even hurtling away, they felt the wave of heat blast over them. A ball of fire swallowed everything, mushrooming into the sky, like sunrise before sunrise.

Before the shockwave had settled, the explosion was answered by another boom from far away. Then another, reverberating from all around them.

But this was not from an explosion. It was a resonant sound, of mallet to skin, rippling through the stones of the streets.

*

When Noma’s shoes found dry land, she wasted no time in sprinting. She swerved around the back of the portside lavatories, two feet from the edge. In the medicine bag that bumped on her back, she had stowed a lamp, bags of herbs, cloth strips, and flasks of wine.

For all of the two minutes she was running, she neither saw nor heard any sign of humanity. She leapt at moving shadows, but it was only ever a leaf blown in the wind.

The tower loomed high above the port, an easy signpost she could follow. She ran past offices shuttered with wood, through bumpy alleys between offices. As she came under the shadow of that singular forbidding tower, she stumbled up its steps to the recessed entrance, huffing and puffing.

Lacar had said that the building had become a dumping ground for the refuse of dock workers and patrolling sailors. She smelled it before she had even wrenched open the door. Grime and rat droppings streaked the grey walls. The stench of refuse slammed bodily into her, then the skittering of rat’s feet as she nauseously strapped a herb bag over her nose.

Striking a tinder, she lit her lamp, squeaking as cockroaches and rats swirled around her feet. In her flickering firelight, she could see that the tower’s barrel tapered upward above her, stairs spiralling along its circumference to the balcony at the top.

The floor in front of her was piled with bags of decaying scraps, some split open from being tossed, and rat dung. But at the very edge, she saw that the wooden floor was split in two by a seam, two airtight sliding doors that kept the skin protected from wetness. On the opposite side of the shaft, there stood a pair of winches.

Noma began at once to shove the stacks of bags away. Fruit peels and maggoty bones cascaded onto her. She feared she would never wash the stench away. Still she pushed and shoved, ejecting pile after pile of trash out the door.

Halfway into the task of clearing the tower, an explosion cracked nearby, making her leap. That was it. Liss had begun her charge. The noise spurred her on, piles of squelching, wrinkly, wriggling trash tumbling out the door with every push. It took everything in her not to hurl.

It will be worth it in the end, she told herself with squeezed eyes. It will all be worth it, when Henkor is finally free.

Only once every bag and scrap had been swept off the doors could Noma finally proceed to the next step of her task. Almost the instant she kicked the last apple core int the drain outside did she hear another explosion, closer than the last. Gasping she shot across the circular hall to the winches. She put the lantern on the floor and snatched the wine bottle from her bag, then a rag, wiping her hands, and the leathered handles and their grey patina of mold.

Drawing a huge breath, she grasped the larger winch with both hands. The mechanism was rusted stiff and the corners of the leather tattered from years without keeping. The first rotation was the hardest. Then the ancient wood budged, with a screech so loud that Noma leapt and checked the doorway. She kept turning.

Slowly, the two semicircular planes of the floor began to groan apart. A thin shadowy mouth opened between them, rust and rot ground to dust as Noma pulled and pushed. Slowly, winch by winch, the secrets beneath the doors were revealed to her lantern’s firelight. A great fur-clad wooden mallet, its head almost as large as the girl herself, hung from a tarnished axle in the wall by a great metal swivel joint.

Beneath the mallet gleamed a moon-white drumskin, aglow in the lamplight despite the scattering of dust. This was the quarry of her search. She winched the doors fully apart, and then—

A boom—much louder than any other, loud with finality—rent the air in the tower, making her ears throb, scattering roaches. She saw light bloom in the window. She felt her own heart rattle. No mistaking it.

She let go of the first winch, flew to grab the second, and began to turn it.

It’s important, Noma, Liss had insisted. It’s more important than you could know. This won’t be the first attempt at insurgency in Madan. The difference, this time, is the drum.

What was the beat, again? What if she couldn’t drum it with the right pulse, the right spirit? Just turn the winch, Lacar had muttered. It will come to you.

Noma, who had never trusted anything to come naturally to her, began to panic as the mallet came down. The first great boom shook the tower. Shook her bones. Rats and insects scuttled away.

Throughout the occupation, despite draping the tower in their flags, the Orsandin conquerors had never understood its true use. A place of symbolic power was all they had understood it to be.

But it was also a soundbox. Tunnels radiated under the streets of Madan, carrying sound to the corners of the port. And in the basement there was a great drum, played by this very ratcheted mallet.

Even as Noma kept winching with aching shoulders, the memory of the beat, taught by Lacar hitting the countertop with his palm, began to warm her hands. He had been right; it came to her like the rhythm of a sentence. One clockwise rotation was one beat on the drum. One anticlockwise rotation was four in succession, one for every quarter-round.

It was simple arithmetic—three forward, three-quarters back.

“Come on, Noma!” she cried out. “Think of what Liss will say!”

Dum, dum, dum da-da-dum. 

Dum, dum, dum da-da-dum. 

She eased into the rhythm of the war dance, once cycle after another. Would this really do it? She had learned it diligently, but not felt any strong way about it.

And indeed, for a minute, nothing happened.

Then the cavalcade of explosions began.

*

“Flawless!” Liss shouted. As they flew along the promenade, she saw the two counterspell poles that Lacar had pried up from the ground, a gaping hole that could easily be patched if not for what would come next. When her gaze returned to the front of the cart, she saw that Kori had lifted her hands again.

Beyond the bubble of their cart, every flutter of wind and flicker of fire began to flow like mud. Sound fell away. The drum grew deeper. Leaves ceased to wave. Spray hung in the air and waves dragged sluggishly to shore.

But it was not the world that was slowing: it was they who were moving faster than everyone else.

“Liss, do it,” Kori said.

Liss did not answer; she did not have to. She pointed a finger out in front of the cart, at the feet of the poles.

One by one, fireball by fireball, the poles came down, and with them, the chain of knots that strung the counterspell across the Port of Madan. Slice by slice, the stifled city cracked open to the flow of the Being once more.

Kori lowered her hands. The waves crashed. The leaves flew. The drumbeat roared through the streets.

Dum, dum, dum da-da-dum. The Madan war dance. Windows creaked open, and wakers saw a threadless sky.

*

The cart rolled past the last row of roofs, till the masts of the Orsand brigantines rose into view again, pricking the violet sky. They veered to a stop by a boat ramp, where their makeshift sailboat bobbed in the gleaming sea. They leapt from the cart and scrambled down the ramp into the vessel, Kori clinging to Lacar’s arm.

Lacar’s decades of seafaring showed as he ran across the deck, unmooring, setting the sails, reading the wind. He moved as if entranced, or dancing, every step and pull timed with the beat of the faraway drum. He lashed the ropes. He tacked the sail. The wind lifted them out onto the harbour. He tapped his foot and raised a fist as they skirted across the grand dock towards the moored warships.

The foremost ship was the admiral’s vessel, proud and adamant, the octopus of Orsand surmounted on its purple flag. There was a golden woman on the prow, some goddess dignifying the ship with the right to massacre. The cannon maws gaped like eyeless beasts into the amethyst morning, twenty cannons on either side—that gargantuan, godless titan, no souls there but those of the ones it had slain.

Lifting her eyes to meet it, Liss drew in the deepest breath she had taken today.

For a decade of her life, she had wondered if there was more to this explosive talent of hers than coins and hooks, pranks and vandalism. She had wondered what she must do to reach it, what she must become to be worthy of its full glory.

Then she had savoured the briefest taste of something beyond when she had fired the rocket into Ylcor’s head.

Liss stepped onto the central thwart of their unlikely little boat, and her soul reached out to the ship, across those torrents of waves. The war dance thundered on from the land. She wanted to dance. She heard Noma’s hand in every pounding beat.

Ylcor, Glena, and this.

She knew what always awakened her from her self: hatred, hatred deeper than the empire before her.

Washed by the salty ocean gale, she lifted both hands, clenched her fist, and pulled. Pulled on the link between herself and the ship. Between herself and Emperor Milaston. Pulled on the flow of the Being.

A kingdom of fire rose from the hulls, in castles of splinters and smoke. The cannons stared, and then the cannons were blooming into fireballs so bright that all three of them had to turn away. The brigantine deck collapsed into this second sun, masts and rigging, sails eagerly bowing into the blaze.

Then the next ocean breaker tore through its foundering body, and then the task belonged to the sea, as it hungrily pried the vessel in two, dragging its blood-soaked beams into its jaws.

*

Liss did not know if there were humans aboard that ship. But if there were, there were no survivors.

By the time they had sailed back to land, the streets were awash with light, with the people of Madan. Torrents of rebels tore through the roads, echoing the drumbeat with their shouts and their stomping, banging on empty barrels with the guns of the police. Columns of smoke rose from every street of the administrative district. Everywhere they saw fighters tearing down banners, wrestling the constables, knocking down Orsandin doors with sashes that lived and breathed again. 

Upon the statue of Milaston in the city square, they had mounted the three corpses, their blood dripping down the obsidian robes. And in the tower of the port, the beat drummed ever on.

Liss was the first to sprint to its door, eyes searching the milling heads for the entrance—only for her to be tackled from the side with a hug from a familiar pair of arms.

“Noma!” Liss cried out. “I thought you were—” As they sprung apart, she pointed into the tower, at the balcony protruding from its turret.

“I was!” Noma shouted. “Did you hear it? See it? People started to come out through their doors, and then they came into the tower, and now there’s ten, fifteen people taking turns to play—they really did know the beat—I didn’t know it would be so quick—”

“Of course it was!” Lacar laughed. “We learned the beat before we learned to talk! It is like the beat of my heart, right here!” He hammered his chest to the beat as they marched them into the crowd. “Now—there is one thing left to do. We must find the king and bring him to the tower.” He pointed up at the turret. “Oi! Friends! Does anyone know where King Vicola lives these days?”

“Oh, I know! We found him!” screamed a long-haired stranger, head bobbing out of the crowd. “We tied him up at the mill!”

The crowd began to chant—the mill—and buoyed by the chanting, the group of four were ushered into the nearest constable cart. In the vigour of the chanting, and the concerted movement of feet, Liss could see the spark of Madan’s spirit being roused into a pyre by the bellows of the beating drum.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Touchdown

“Searching for us!” Felix exclaims. “Why, were you sent by my father?” 

Vesper chuckles. “Your father? No. Well…it is a frightfully long story, but perhaps Orobelle is the best one to explain it.”

He turns to Adelaide, and whereas he has done his utmost to obscure his surprise, she wears it plainly, her face slack and eyes glittering. “Orobelle?” she asks.

“Duchess Orobelle. Though I reckon Supreme Overlord suits her better. I'm here under orders to take you to meet her.”

“A duchess! Well, I don't see why not…we haven't any other plans. But, er, Addie? What do you think?”

Adelaide glances from one face to the other. “I guess I don't really know what else we could be doing right now.”

“Why, then, lead the way, Captain Lovelace,” Felix says, and with a small nod, Vesper takes them out the door.

The guard at the booth waves out the warehouse's strange arrivals with the sort of boredom that makes Felix think he witnesses this at least thrice a day. As they march out of the storehouse into the glowing afternoon, he muses upon the city unfolding before him. San Francisco is as hilly as it is in the future, the streets presided over by a mix of gas lamps and electrics.

It is warm even in early autumn, yes. It was summer when he left.

“If I may be so rude, Captain,” he murmurs, “are you from here?”

Vesper doesn't turn. “First of all, please call me Vesper,” she replies. “Second of all, no—I am not from San Francisco nor from this world.”

“Are you from mine, then?” Adelaide bursts out.

She finally looks over her shoulder, eyes flicking between the two. “Unlikely, but possible. What year is it where you're from?”

“2060, I think.”

“‘Fraid that doesn't sound like mine,” she replies. The way Vesper speaks is strait-laced, matching her gait, with a reined-in West Country lilt. “Where I'm from, it's 1945.”

“There's a third world?”

“There are more than three. I have seen four, and none of them include yours.”

As the words roll over Felix, he stares, heart racing as if the earth has fallen away, endless universes drifting beneath his feet. “Then you also arrived here by means of your own machine?” he asks.

“Well, not quite. Orobelle has someone under her employ who carries us between universes.”

“A person?”

“Oh, yes. You'll meet her in a few minutes.”

*

As Vesper walks the two newcomers through the now-familiar streets, she uncovers the story of their past weeks—how Felix hails from London in this current universe and became a passenger of the Tunnel Machine, a device of his father's dreaming. How the machine's core function—tearing a tunnel through the folds of space—did not account for the existence of other universes and left him stranded in the wrong one. How Adelaide was a prisoner for eleven years for gene altering powers that her world feared too much to leave in the open, and that she has chosen to flee it for a different one.

This conversation soon leads her to the discovery that in this world's London, the boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea have been merged into one. “And the rich twa—” she pauses upon realising that Felix is probably one of them— “the citizens took that lying down?”

“Oh, not at all, there was a proper uproar,” he replies. “The redrawing of boundaries was an administrative convenience. No one in the boroughs was especially pleased about it. But as it goes, the law was passed anyway, and all the grumbling and protestation was for naught.”

“Guess that city's the same in every world after all,” she sighs. “Well, as far as strange powers go, I am pleased to say you'll be in good company, if you should join us.”

“Join you?” Adelaide whispers.

“Yes. In short, our little duchess is amassing something of a platoon of personal protectors. She can better explain. She has a knack for it.”

“Is the duchess the, uh, team leader?”

Vesper chuckles. “She is the axis of the multiverse, thank you very much.”

The doors of the boutique hotel are propped open for the afternoon. Walking right by the lift doors without so much as a glance, Vesper marches them up two flights of stairs, waiting at the top for her companions to catch up. Then up at room 3A, she knocks on the door.

“Is that Vesper?” comes the duchess' voice from inside.

“Orobelle, I found them. You were right, they were at the cage.”

“Perfect timing! Get them a room.”

Vesper turns to the guests. “Will you share a room?” she says. “We're all full otherwise.”

Felix turns to Adelaide. “What do you think?”

“If we share, it'll save us money.”

“Oh, worry not about matters of money. I need only make a withdrawal from the bank, and that should set us right.”

“I want to share a room,” she replies.

He pauses. “Then…let us do so.”

Vesper notes a frightened clinginess in Adelaide's voice. “If we needn't finance your lodgings,” Vesper says, raising her voice, “I'm sure Orobelle wouldn't mind, either.”

“Not at all!” the duchess answers from inside.

“Well, I can certainly organise that,” Felix says. Excusing himself, he begins back towards the stairs, and Adelaide, glancing between one and the other, finally decides to do nothing, lowering her eyes to her shoes.

---

When they return from making their bookings, Orobelle is standing at her door. Adelaide thought she sounded young, but now she can see that the duchess is no older than twelve, pale as ivory and wearing a number of ribbons and frills that she has only ever seen on a doll.

With someone Adelaide assumes to be her retainer watching over her shoulder, she inspects them both with her nose to her golden instrument, then declares that they are in fact the ones she has been looking for.

“A free gift,” she calls them. “We're only one short now! Let us take a few days' repose. What do you think, Dorian?”

“I think a rest would not be amiss, my Duchess,” he answers with a voice as gentle as his manners.

No sooner than she retreats back into her room does Adelaide leap when an arm encircles her shoulders, pulling her and Felix into a huddle. “I came as soon as I heard we had new recruits!” declares the bespectacled newcomer, poking his head between them. “Hello, I'm Hong Yi—welcome to the team.”

Recruits? Adelaide spends just a second pondering the choice of words. He is just a little taller than she, with tan skin and dark hair, rectangular glasses perched on his nose—and something about the way he speaks feels warm, like home, though they have never met.

“Ah, hello,” Felix answers meanwhile. “Felix Mercer, pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Hong Yi moves like a whirlwind, sweeping them into the room beside Orobelle's before they can react. They see Vesper yet again, this time reclining in the bed to the right of the door. Up against the facing wall, a second occupant lies staring at the ceiling, though she turns as they enter. To their left, a third lies curled up in slumber.

Vesper props herself up on her arm as Hong Yi guides them to the couch by the bookshelves. “Well, here's the rest of us,” she declares. “Myself, Hong Yi,” she points at each one in turn, “Honourless—that's our universe hopper—and Marcia.”

“Oh yeah, there's one more guy you haven't met,” Hong Yi puts in, nodding at the wall. “Artur is next door. He's probably just shy. Anyway, how are you? I heard you landed in the cage, too.”

With those gazes eagerly taking them in, Adelaide and Felix introduce themselves each in turn. And indeed, every single one of them has abilities akin to their own. Vesper fires an electric arc at the doorknob. Hong Yi lifts the desk with one finger. Eventually, Artur does poke his head in through the door and give his name in a single word.

“Marcia is asleep right now,” says Hong Yi. “But I think the only thing you need to know is that she recently recovered from rabies. Without a doctor.”

“Wait,” Adelaide breathes. “She did what?”

“Oh yeah…she just administered herself the vaccine with her powers. Basically.” Then he turns to their most recent inductees. “Anyway, I gotta ask. You two have powers, too, right?”

Adelaide halts before replying, but Felix gives an emphatic, “Yes!”

Perhaps he has been spoiling for this chance to show off. Lifting a hand, he swipes it through the air in an arc, and then the room is no more. Instead, it is a dazzling night market on a city street, the details head spinningly clear, though the buildings scatter to blurred specks overhead.

“No way,” Hong Yi whispers. “What's this, photon manipulation?”

As always, the lack of sound gives lie to the vision. “I believe so,” Felix replies.

“So, wait, do you use your powers to prank people?”

“I most certainly do, or—I did. More so when I was at school. But I much prefer to put it to constructive uses. Like making sure Addie isn't caught.” As he says this, the vision collapses, and the bright room returns.

When Hong Yi turns to Adelaide next, she leaps with surprise. “So…how about you?”

She weaves her fingers together. “I…don't know how to demonstrate, it's not that kind of power.”

Hong Yi grins. “You don't have to. What do you do?”

“I guess something like rewriting genes, and changing gene expression,” she answers. “But I mostly just…change myself.”

“For real?”

She nods. “Yeah. I wasn't born with this…hair colour. Or eye colour.”

“No way—I wish I could do that!” he shouts. Adelaide falters into silence. Hong Yi clears his throat. “I mean. Neat! Anyway, thank you for humouring us! We hope you have a pleasant stay with, uh…we don't have a team name.”

“Orobelle's Circus,” Artur mutters, still leaning on the doorframe. He says it in such a deadpan that the rest begin to laugh, except for Adelaide, who nervously smiles in the hopes that it is the right reaction.

---

“Well, what do you think?” asks Felix as soon as their door is shut behind them.

Adelaide does not speak until she has pulled her green sweater off over her head. “I don't know…everything's happening so fast.”

Felix paces to the window. The two-storey shophouses that form the facing terrace are none too different from the ones he knows.

“They are a lively lot, aren't they?” he says. “They're our people, in the most literal sense of the phrase. And I do believe we are meant to follow them.” He turns back and begins towards her side. “Certainly a way to spend our first hour here.”

It is a minute before Adelaide finally sits down on the bed closer to her.

Felix sighs. “We must recoup our supplies. I left our luggage in your world. And my poor little Cel…you will be missed.” He wanders up to her bedside and takes a seat beside her. “Addie, now that we are in a world that doesn't know you and hasn't ever contrived a theory of genetics…I believe there is no further need for masks. And I hope you feel at ease leaving my side.”

She stares at him, then past him, seeming lost in a world of thought. Then she says, “I never got so far as imagining this. I don't know what I'm meant to do, now.”

“Whatever you like,” he replies, with a trace of a smile. “I shan't be leading you by my whims and fancies any longer. And I hope, if need be, that you won't mind us losing sight of each other once in a while. Not that I dislike your company…” He closes his eyes. “I simply worry that I have let my will overrule yours for too long.”

She scrunches her brow in a frown. “No, you haven't. It's because of you that I even made it here. I'm not choosing to stick close because I'm scared—it's just—I was alone in a room for years, and I don't want to be alone again. Please?”

As she says this, Adelaide's fingers tug on his wrist. Her eyes are awash with desperation, as if she truly believed he might evaporate into thin air right then.

Her hand is colder than he thought it would be. By some reflex, he lays his own upon it.

“Oh, Addie, of course not. If this is what you prefer, then I couldn't possibly deny you.”

Before he has finished saying these words, she has gone rigid. Her gaze barely hangs onto his. A crescendo of confusion, disquiet, darting eyes—then she snatches back her hand as if burned.

She recoils with that same rosy shyness he has been noticing more often. It takes all the temper of his upbringing not to react.

Adelaide says nothing else, and Felix cannot think of a way to ask her what has come over her in these last seconds. She sits frozen in place till he finally rises and occupies himself with searching his coat pockets, pretending not to think too hard.

*

Adelaide's head reverberates with a thousand signals, crashing, interfering, garbling each other. She buries her face in the grey blanket and balls her fingers on the lint.

Don't do that again, she repeats the reprimand in her head. Don't do that again.

When she reads a genome, she perceives every nucleotide not as a letter but as a note in a song. She has tapped into the songs in flowers, in berries, in feathers and fur…but never in humans. She has never let herself, even if she has the chance. She has long lived by that commandment.

Until now. Five minutes ago, when for a vertiginous second she believed Felix was trying to distance himself, their fingers met and, as if she had longed to this whole time, she read him.

…and he was a score open to her rewriting, and her world was reverberating with his code, and her entire being pulsed to his meter and his possibility and suddenly, she wanted to…

She flings her mind away from those thoughts, focusing on the summer warmth of this strange new San Francisco. As she does, she makes an effort to breathe slower.

The room is almost quiet. Felix is doing a good job of not intruding. Her eyes cross the other half of the room: there is a shelf of books along the wall past her feet, its lacquered foliate carvings gleaming with the afternoon sun off the facing roofs. The room is permeated by the perfume of old pulp, safe and sure, comfortable.

The buildings in the window are unfamiliar—few of these remain in her time. There was a fire…she isn't sure if the fire will befall this copy of the city, gobbling the books in its hungry jaws.

This warmth is too gentle to be fire. The window is tall and sunlight floods in through its twelve panes. Broad-leafed trees sway on balconies. The after-images of today are already melting away—police guns, cracking glass, dusty velvet drapes, a brown-haired stranger dragging them into an old city—all coming apart at the edges.

It would be nighttime in her own version of San Francisco. The fears make her ache, but the exhaustion is stronger; her mind begins drifting. She peers at her companion through half-closed eyes. He takes off his vest. She watches guiltily.

Then he settles down on the facing bed and turns to smile at her, perhaps not knowing their eyes are meeting in that moment.

Don't do that again, she thinks, despite everything in her crying for another taste.

---

By the time evening falls, Marcia knows there is something afoot. She sees a curtain rustle in the dining hall, just on the edge of her view. But when she excuses herself to check, there is no one.

Then, again, as she is settling into the bed facing Honourless’, she thinks she hears gentle footsteps pace the corridor and halt nearby. Thinking it may be one of their companions there to visit, she opens the door—and sees an empty hall.

It is when Dorian starts asking around for his missing key that Marcia decides, at last, that there is a pattern.

Finding the duchess in her room, Marcia speaks to her about these hints she has observed in several different places. The misplaced footprints, the stray crackles, the moving curtains revealing no hiders.

Half expecting Orobelle to dismiss her, Marcia is startled when the duchess’ voice drops to a hush. “Don't let them find out that we know,” she whispers, piercing grey eyes threaded with worry. “I thought the missing key seemed bizarre. I expect that it is I whom they are spying upon. Switch rooms with us tonight. You and Vesper come here. We'll do this quietly.”

They make the switch when the lamps are guttering, with Honourless outside to watch the hallway for strangers. Vesper is apprised of the situation by then. There is a solemn certainty in her eyes that barely softens even as they close the door to the silent corridor. There is too much of a sense of a mission there this evening for any caprices to ensue.

---

The night is inching up towards 2 A.M. according to the clock in the hallway. Adelaide paces past the doors towards the windows at the end, pulling her arms close. She needs to be anywhere except in the room with Felix.

She pauses at the sitting area at the end of the hall. It looks out the western window onto the wharves, where all the streets are dimmed for the night. She knows it is the west because she remembers maps of this city, even as different as it is here: the coastline where the Presidio's lights end, giving way to the scattered boat lamps in the bridgeless sea beyond.

She walks to the tall armchair and sinks into it—then leaps when a pair of glasses gleams at her from the neighbouring couch.

“Oh! Adelaide!” It is Hong Yi, his face barely lit by the streetlights. “Didn't think I'd see you here at this hour.”

“You too,” she whispers.

“So…any reason you're up and about?”

“I'm anxious.”

He snorts. “That makes both of us.” He clasps his hands together, propping his chin up on his lap.

“What's wrong?”

“I mean, it's kinda silly, but…I've been worrying that Artur doesn't like me.”

Adelaide makes an “o” with her lips. “He seems like a moody person.”

Nodding, Hong Yi leans on one arm of the couch. “Yeah, but I'm pretty sure he's ignoring me on purpose. He barely answers anything I say. And when I got back to the room after dinner, he kinda just…left. The timing was too close for it to be a coincidence.”

Seeing him frown strikes a discordant note in her, even having known him for just a day. “You're a very friendly person,” she replies after some thought. “He might not be used to it.”

“Yeah, you might be right. Except…I don't really know how to stop being…friendly…”

“Sorry, I don't know how to help with that.”

At this, Hong Yi finds it in himself to grin again, and the wrongness of the scene is gone. “Oh, hey, there's no need. I'm honoured you're even listening to me. But enough about that. How about you?”

Beneath Hong Yi's stare, Adelaide swallows. “I, uh, just need to be away from my room, too.”

“Oh? Because of Felix?” She nods. Hong Yi's eyebrows rise. Streetlights glisten in his lenses as he leans in. “I thought you two were friends.”

“Yeah, it's just that today, it got…weird.”

She can barely meet his eye, but when she does, he is watching with a deepening frown. “Did he do something to you?”

She shakes her head. “No. I…I was the one who did something I shouldn't have. This is hard to explain, but earlier on, when we were talking, he touched my hand. And when he did—and this never happens—I started to read his genome. Like I couldn't help myself.”

“Oh, like…with your powers?” She nods. “Then what happened?”

“Please don't judge me…”

“No judgement from me, ever. Promise.”

She takes a deep breath. “I could see all of his genetic code, and I felt this compulsion, like I never have before, to memorise it all, to take it all for myself, and exchange pieces of it with my own—and I knew I could have, and it scared me how much I wanted to, and then I felt gross so I—” She becomes aware that her voice has risen above a whisper, and she feels the blood roar into her head. “Sorry, I feel so ashamed even describing it.”

“Aw, don't be,” he whispers, leaning across the gap to pat her arm. “You didn't discover anything compromising, did you?” She shakes her head. “Well, then, no harm done. And honestly…I think that's the most romantic thing anyone has ever said about genes. Just imagine the pickup lines you could make out of this. ‘Wanna trade genes? I couldn't help noticing you have a recessive allele on locus 29—’”

“Romantic?”

Hong Yi meets her eye. “You don't think so?”

“Is that what it is?” she croaks. “Is that what this feeling is?”

“I mean, you're the best judge of that.”

“How do I tell?”

“Uh, well…do you wanna kiss him?”

She freezes as she tries to picture it. A kiss on the mouth. She only gets as far as imagining him leaning towards her, before her head feels like an overfull hot air balloon.

This emotion is different from the ones she felt looking at pictures in books. It is fiery. It has teeth. She wants to keep soaking in it. She wants nothing to do with it.

Shaking her head profusely, she whispers, “How do I make it go away?”

Hong Yi's smile is just enough to keep her feet on the ground. “It's okay,” he whispers, “you can't control how you feel about someone else. So step one is accepting that it's normal. And, I mean. He broke you out of the lab and then spent a month taking care of you, right?” She nods. “So, you caught feelings. That's totally understandable, if you ask me.”

“I feel like I'm not allowed to feel like this. Is there really no…” She rifles about for the right word. “No cure?”

“Well, the fastest way to make it go away is to tell him how you feel and see what he says.”

Adelaide begins at once to play multiple versions of that conversation in her head. What would he say? She pictures it—speaking earnestly and unflinchingly in the quiet of their room. Taking his hand on the staircase at a high society dance. Being Lucille. But…

“I'm scared.”

“Oh yeah, it is so scary. But he seems like the kind who would be flattered.”

“No, I mean, he's from 1894, and I'm pretty sure he's heterosexual, and—”

Hong Yi's eyes widen with attention. “And?”

“Do you…um, are you familiar…” She inhales. “Do you know…what a transgender person is?”

He blinks a few times too many. “Uh…yeah…I am one?”

Her thoughts crash together. “You?”

“Wait, you?”

Her head spins. This is too much for two in the morning. “Yeah—sorry—I didn't realise…”

But by now, Hong Yi is doubled over in breathless laughter, a fist hammering his knee. It is about half a minute before any intelligible words leave him. “I was gonna say the same thing,” he wheezes. “Oh my god. This is going down as my favourite two A.M. conversation of all time. Did you actually transition with your powers?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, Addie, you're the coolest person I know.” The sound of Hong Yi's laughter has dissolved some of her worry. He rubs tears from his eyes. “Okay, okay, I'm good now.” He smooths the mirth out of his face. “What were you gonna say?”

She halts to retrace her mental steps. “I'm scared,” she replies, “that he'll be weird about me being trans. Or that it'll change his mind about me.”

“If it does, then I'm punting him into the sun. I'll do it, just watch.” His gaze has settled into a warm sympathy. “Seriously—I'm so sorry it's something you have to worry about, but I totally get it. And honestly, I think your safety is more important than his comfort. If he is weird about it, then I don't think he's worth your time, because you deserve better than that. And, well,” he shrugs, “there's only one way to find out what kind of person he is.”

Adelaide starts twiddling her fingers on her lap. “So…I have to talk to him.” Her face softens with worry. “I'll think about it. I just don't want to make things awkward, if we keep having to be around each other.”

“It'll be awkward anyway! So you may as well.”

“That's true. Everything you say makes so much sense…thank you.”

“What can I say, I have to share my sagely wisdom.” Hong Yi pretends to stroke a long beard. “But seriously. You can always call me in for help, or talk to me if it doesn't go well. Or if it goes well, too. I'm kinda invested now.”

Only now does Adelaide notice that the leaden weight in her chest has lightened. Sitting for a while in the soporific comfort of the dwindling lights, in her companion's relaxed attention, her eyelids begin to droop.

Then a shout explodes through the hall. Then, a scream.

Both spring from their seats, peering up the corridor. Beneath one of the doors, lamplight flickers on. It's the farthest door up the hallway—Orobelle and Dorian's room.

No. It's Marcia and Vesper's.

---

Marcia does not intend to sleep a wink that night, but her exhaustion tests her. Her body still remembering the fever heat, she lies with eyes half closed, inspecting every inch of the dark room second by sluggish second just to keep her mind awake.

Then, it happens.

It is like in a ghost story: the door clicks, creaks gently open, and a dim figure shifts through the gap.

At once the drowsiness evaporates. She hears the faceless visitor creep towards them, footsteps dampened by the interlocking wooden slabs. She keeps her eyes narrow as slits.

Then, as she watches, she sees a rectangular sheet of paper extend into her vision, grasped by a thin hand—

—and that is when she leaps.

Like a pouncing snake, Marcia springs to snatch the arm in midair, shouting, “Got you!” While the captive cries out, she launches herself off the bed and drags them, kicking, towards where Dorian's rope hangs ready off the bed's baseboard. She tackles the intruder against the wall. The spy screams and convulses against each knot Marcia ties, but they are scrawny and untrained, no match for a seasoned warrior. Still, they kick and knee, once or twice landing a square blow that makes Marcia clench her jaw.

Then from the other bed, she hears Vesper's cry, sees the flash of her passing as she flies at the intruder.

One touch, a snap, and the spy tumbles to their knees. Marcia catches the stranger's shoulders in a vice grip, and they drop their book and the page they were about to plant. Vesper swipes the lamp kindling from the wall ledge. The golden flame clicks on while Marcia is tying the spy to the window grille.

This part, Orobelle declared necessary. There are few ways a spy could track them across multiple worlds. The simplest explanation is also the most dangerous.

The light flickers on, and for the first time, Marcia sees in full the captive they have bound: a girl, no older than sixteen, with messy dark hair, brown skin, and a sash tied around her waist.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Gamechanger

“Please! Don't hurt me!” the spy screams when she comes to, straining on her tethers at the windowsill.

With the kerfuffle out of the way, Vesper can see that the girl is no more than that—a youth of schoolgoing age, shuddering with tears as her messy locks fall into her eyes. She has skin and hair about as dark as Marcia's, but her frame is much scrawnier, and her grasp of English is firm even in distress.

Rising from her kneel, Marcia meets Vesper's eye and nods in the direction of the wall. “Orobelle,” she says, in syllables they both understand.

Vesper takes her place beside the captive while the door clicks shut behind her. “Who are you?” she mutters. Now that she can see that their spy is completely unequipped, she doesn't feel any inclination to kick or shout or employ any of the tactics she learned from LTC Clarke.

The girl chokes out her reply. “If I tell you—if I tell you—I'll be in trouble.”

“Aye? In trouble from whom?”

A creak of the door interrupts her, and in strides Marcia, bringing Orobelle and Dorian—and Hong Yi and Adelaide.

The Duchess marches up to their captive, scrutinising her bindings. “State your name and your purpose,” she snaps.

“She says she'll get in trouble if she tells us,” Vesper answers, leaping to her feet. Marcia pushes through the group and crouches in Vesper's place, laying an arm on the girl's shoulder. Then lifting her gaze to Orobelle, she says something—interrogate.

Orobelle frowns at the captive, tucks her hands behind her back, and paces back and forth before her. The spy's huge, tear-stained eyes follow her. “What a terribly unusual spy. And not even a weapon to aid you. Whoever sent you must not think much of your life.”

The spy bows her head and continues to say nothing.

Marcia speaks then—she's sad—and then, from the pocket of her jeans, she hands the duchess a rectangle of paper. Orobelle nods to Dorian, who passes her a translation glass.

She peers over the sheet for a minute, then meets the spy's eye with a flaring of eyes that makes Vesper's blood run cold. “Who is this message from?” she says in a velvet-soft undertone. The spy shakes her head profusely, eyes half-curtained by hair. Orobelle toys with the pendant on her necklace, then flicks the hidden blade out with such force it makes the captive flinch. “I have ways of making you talk.”

“What do you want to know? What do you want? If I say too much—if I say too much, she'll blow me to pieces—”

“‘She?’”

The captive's face contorts. “I can't say more. I can't say more. Please.”

“Alright, then, an easier question. How did you follow us across two worlds? Do you have powers? The power to ghost between universes at the expense of memories?”

The captive freezes. No words leave her lips, but Marcia, with fingers spidered over the girl's arm, murmurs, yes, she does. Orobelle considers her quietly, then the spy, who shrinks back.

“I thought as much,” the Duchess carries on, slinking closer with the blade brandished. “So, this person who sent you. What does she want? Why is she so intent on capturing me?”

Her wide eyes follow the blade. Orobelle jabs it in her direction, and the spy recoils again, words tumbling off her tongue: “She is a god in the making. She will tear down empires and end suffering in her world.”

“Spare me that nonsense!” Orobelle bursts out. “A god, I'm sure. A god wouldn't resort to sending her little serf to drop off cryptic letters in my bed. A god wouldn't need to take hostages. I am more of a god than she, I reckon! Pray tell, where is the hostage she took?”

“I—I don't know,” the spy stammers.

Orobelle squints. “What was that?”

“I don't know. I don't know where the hostage is.”

“Enough lies.”

Orobelle slowly presses the point of the blade against her throat, and the girl freezes, teeth bared, eyes scrunching up—until Hong Yi bursts out, “Orobelle, please don't!”

The duchess relieves the pressure. Vesper cannot see if she has left a mark. “Tell me everything you know about the hostage.”

“That is all I know!” she weeps. “I don't know, I don't know what she did with Freesia—”

From the corner of her eye, Vesper can see Dorian's eyes widening. Orobelle has caught the whiff of an opening, and she leans closer in interest, the machinery clicking behind her eyes, then—

Vesper sees the ropes go slack. She shouts as the misdirection suddenly clarifies itself—there is only a split second between the spy wrenching her hands out of the coils and her entire body winking away into nothingness, leaving Marcia's hand hanging in midair.

Space smooths back into place around the fallen ropes, like skin released from a pinch. Marcia lowers her hand and rises to her feet, gingerly, as if she might disturb it again.

“Light burn me!” screams Orobelle, kicking at the loose coils of rope. “The slippery little worm! We almost had it, the key to our enemy's plans—”

Even as the girl descends into a tantrum, Marcia walks wordlessly to her bed. From under her pillow, she slides out something rectangular—a ring-bound sketchbook. She lifts it up, the cover turned towards Orobelle's eyes, and says something, starting to turn the pages for her.

The duchess falls silent, and the rest of the room follows. Page by page, Marcia reveals the book's contents: maps, sketches, haphazard blocks of text in scratchy pencil.

Vesper remembers how it fell from the intruder's arms to the ground just minutes ago, when she collapsed from the electric shock. If it had remained there, she would surely have snatched it back.

The foresight it must have taken, to know to hide it away…

Marcia hands the book to Orobelle. The Duchess’ face slackens as she begins to scan the text through her lens. Line by line, her surprise morphs to amazement.

Her grip on the book changes. She flips to its covers and presses it shut, handing it to Dorian in both hands. “Protect this. With your life,” she says, then her eyes sweep the gathering. “Return to your rooms. We shall convene about this in the morning.” 

*

The paper note that the spy meant to leave is inscribed in careful letters, as if to obscure the writer's identity. In that foreign script that Orobelle has seen once before is written a brief message:

Well done! You have found seven of the eight cores. But here is where I must let you down. For I, your villain, am the last core. Yes, I am your quarry, and you are mine. We are at an impasse now.

I already know my next move. Do you know yours?

---

Orobelle scarcely knows what to do as she watches everything she knows about her mission thus far turn on its head.

She knows. The villain knows. She knows about her search for the Cores.

And the villain is the eighth of them. No, there will be no eighth in Orobelle's phalanx. Her circle must remain incomplete, for the villain can never join her.

But then this book in her hands, this dog-eared ring-bound volume, rewrites everything yet again. In its pages resides a brand new opening, a secret gate into the fortress.

From before the first rays of sunlight filtered grey through the window dust, Orobelle has sat poring over this priceless tome, rooms traded back with Vesper and Marcia. Dorian meditates behind her, cross-legged on his own bed in shirt and trousers.

So far, the contents of the book have been dominated by a rapturous excess of maps depicting different parts of an island called “Havaiki.” But more interesting than the maps are the notes scattered between them. Somewhere close to the middle of the book, she uncovers a page largely populated with written text.

And among those writings, she spots a list of locations and names:

• future world: [untranslatable]

• steam world: simmons archive new york - by victor riparius

• dead world: russian academy of military sciences - by sanjaya hartono

A list of archives and libraries…and authors, perhaps?

Her villain, Orobelle understands all at once, has been on the hunt for knowledge. Outside of navigational directions and lists of tasks, it seems that she has told her employee little. Still, what the Duchess sees makes her brow furrow. How can this villain know so much about so many worlds? It makes her heart sink with fear. Every war is fought with information. Any strategy can be thwarted with foresight. So she was taught.

If a god this villain were to become, then perhaps these texts are a map to her apotheosis…

“No! It's all drivel,” Orobelle mutters under her breath. Dorian's head briefly turns at the outburst, but he says nothing.

Her eyes return to the list of places. There is a barely-comprehending disjointedness to the scrawls, as if written without looking, and she can make no sense of the first item through her glass. Rendered in a different script from the other two, it seems that the writer did not understand the words she was writing.

But among her entourage, there must surely be someone who recognises the script. That someone is probably Hong Yi.

This is just as well, for he is the very first person who knocks on her door that morning, there to ask about precisely the matter of the book. “Perfect timing, come inside,” she says, waving him in. Dorian opens an eye as he passes. She shifts aside so Hong Yi has a view of the sketchbook page on her desk. “This book is proving a peculiar trove. It appears there is information here about three repositories of knowledge…”

He nods. “I can see that. In fact, I can read it.”

She lifts her head. “All of it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Then you can tell me what that first one says.”

“Your translation glass doesn't tell you?”

“No, I do not think she understood the words. So the glass cannot unearth its meaning, either.”

He taps his chin. “Yeah, you can kinda tell from her handwriting too,” he replies. “Well, that says ‘Future World’ in English, then ‘the Sect of Multiversal Truth, Dalian - Chen Shanying’ in Chinese.”

“‘Multiverse,’” she murmurs. A chill like the shadow of a stormcloud creeps over her. “The villain is researching cosmogonical matters.”

“Huh. Why do you call her ‘the villain’? Are we sure she's the villain here?”

“That is how she signed her letter off,” Orobelle growls. “I am using her own terminology.”

Hong Yi shrugs. “What a weird thing to call yourself. But, well…” He points out the names of the three worlds. “It sounds like these three texts are in three different universes. This second one is the one we're in now. The third is the one we just left. But that first one…”

While he has been saying this, Orobelle has moved the translation glass down to a diagram drawn beneath the list. It is a rectangle subdivided horizontally into six, each annotated with a name: islands, home, modern, future, steam, dead. She points at steam. “So, this is where we are,” she says. Her fingertip moves right, to dead. “This is the one we just left.” Then her finger moves back left, crossing over steam and coming to rest at future. “That means that the ‘future world’ is the next one along the chain. And these…” Her finger drifts slowly onward, towards the other three rectangles. As she does, a shiver rakes up her back. “There are three more universes beyond it.”

There is silence in the room while the reverberation of the new knowledge settles.

“Twelve universes,” Hong Yi breathes. “At the very least.”

Orobelle pulls her arms around herself. “That is too many.” Then she grimaces. “It does not matter.” She steels her face as she turns to him once more. “I only know one thing: the game has changed. Our villain is a step ahead of us, but we have a chance to get back at her. She does not know we have this book—not yet. I think that this is the best lead we will ever come by to unravel whatever twisted plot we are entangled in. The contents of these ‘documents’ may answer many questions.”

Hong Yi nods solemnly. “I think you're right. How much longer do we have till the villain's rendezvous date?”

Now, Orobelle picks up her pocket watch from among the rest of her stationery. “Fourteen days, in Queendom time,” she says. “But I have observed that time moves about twice as slowly in most worlds. So we have twenty-eight days.”

“Whoa. If there's three documents in three worlds, we'd better hurry.”

“Now you are starting to see sense.”

He sighs, leaning on his left foot. “I think seeing the spy, hearing what she said, watching that whole thing unfold…it's made the whole thing much realer. Before that, I really didn't get why you were pushing us so hard, but now…”

She frowns. “Have I seemed unreasonable?”

“Uh, a little? You do know how sick Marcia was, right? I have never had a fever as high as the one she had, and frankly, I have no idea how she's still alive.”

Orobelle's eyes unfocus. She knows a dozen ways to dismiss him. 

This is what you must always do, Orobelle. They say most rulers rule by either love or fear. But the best ruler holds her people by both tethers. Take away their food and clothing, then feed them and clothe them, and they will become your most loyal. They cannot defy their lifegiver. But do not capitulate when they make demands of you. They ask for copper today, and tomorrow, gold. You must always appear to act by your choice alone.

But I do not want to, Mother. Why shouldn't I do what I believe is right?

You cannot rule by instinct, child. You cannot act without forethought, simply because you believe something to be right. Rashness makes idiots of the wise. You hold the script in your hands, and it is called the Diamonds’ Playbook. We have spent centuries planning this glorious insurgence, and you will bring it to its denouement.

“Yes, Marcia has done well,” Orobelle answers carefully. “She caught us the spy that no one else knew was following. She was indispensable at the interrogation. And she is the reason we have this book.”

“She's pretty amazing, yeah.”

Orobelle nods. “Tell the rest we meet here after breakfast. I am starting to form a plan.”

---

Adelaide manages eventually to fall asleep after slipping back to the room in the wee hours of the morning. She sleeps deeply and unbreakingly, and is woken too many hours later by the sound of the door opening.

By then, the sun is already well above the roofs, casting thin parallelograms of light across the floor.

She flips over in bed and blinks her eyes open. In the doorway stands Felix, a hand on the doorknob. “Good morrow, my dear,” he says. “Did you sleep well?”

She hugs her blanket. “Yeah. Better than I thought I would. There was a spy last night…a ghost like Honourless. I was in the room when Orobelle interrogated her.”

“So I have heard,” he murmurs, then turns to reveal he is carrying a plate of croissants. “Care for some pastries? Orobelle has called a meeting in a few minutes. I didn't want you missing breakfast for it.”

“Oh…thank you.” She finally crawls to sit, lowering her gaze as she takes the plate by the edges. Hong Yi's words repeat in her head. “Um, hey, I…I have been needing to tell you something.”

“Oh?” Felix pauses and turns to her again. He sinks to a kneel at her bedside. “Pray tell.”

Adelaide did not plan much farther than this. She certainly did not plan to have this conversation looking straight into his eyes. “I, yesterday, I…” She begs her brain to give her words for once. “I accidentally read your genes. I'm sorry.”

“I see.” He cocks his head to the side. “Well, I scarcely know how I should feel about that. But I don't think you have anything to apologise for. Unless you discovered some sordid secret of mine. Did you?”

“No…I don't think so.” She shakes her head. “Genes don't reveal quite that much. Um, most I got was that one of your parents has gray eyes, and the other, blue, I think.”

“That is correct.”

“And I can infer that your children would most likely have blue eyes, too, especially if their other parent has them.”

“You have blue eyes,” he murmurs with a smile.

“I… I…” The plate wobbles in her hands. “I…don't know why I said all that.”

“Well, I found it all quite fascinating.” He chuckles. Lifting his index finger, he brushes hair out of her eyes. “I was the one who suggested you change your eyes to blue. How rude of me.”

“I—thought it was—a good suggestion—” she squeaks.

Felix rises to his feet again. “Well, anyhow…I don't half mind that you have read my genes. In fact, I am curious what else you saw. You ought to tell me sometime.”

She crams a croissant into her mouth. Crumbs scatter on her skirt. He laughs, reopening the door. “We meet in five minutes in Orobelle's room. I'll see you there.”

---

Now they are all gathered, Orobelle begins to wish she had not suggested meeting everyone at the same time. There is room to spare, and everyone finds a seat on the edges of both beds of her room, but the warmth slips from comfortable to barely tolerable within minutes.

“Everyone!” she declares. All chatter fades at once. “For those who are not yet apprised, there has been an incident. Yesterday night, we caught a spy sneaking around in this very room. She divulged that her leader, the one whose threat has gathered us all as a team, is the eighth Core. Our villain has been watching us, and the spy was under her employ. But what she didn't count on was that Marcia would retain one of her things: this.”

For effect, Orobelle lifts up the ring-bound sketchbook for their eyes. Everyone watches as she waves it through the air.

“A book in which the spy has been jotting her navigational notes. I have spent the morning decoding it, and it has precipitated a rather dramatic change of plans. Needless to say, we will not be seeking out the eighth Core, not yet. Rather, this gift of knowledge is what we will pursue—a window, perhaps, into her plans. We now have three documents to find, each with a known location and author. Each one has been of interest to our villain. And each one is located in a different world.”

The chatter, withholding itself till now, finally spills out.

“The first text was authored by Chen Shanying, and is housed in the next world forward—the one that Adelaide and Felix have just arrived from. It lives with the Sect of Multiversal Truth, which appears to be based in a place called Dalian. The second is by a Victor Riparius, and it is held in this very world by the Simmons Archive in New York. The third, authored by Sanjaya Hartono, is in the world we just left, the one where we found Artur. It is with the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, though which city—”

“Moscow,” says Artur.

“Moscow. We have barely any time left before we must make a move against our villain. A little less than a month, in the time of these worlds, to retrieve all three.”

“So let's do all three at the same time,” Vesper says immediately. “I doubt we need a team of eight for every single document.”

“Yes, three concurrent missions is an excellent idea,” Orobelle calls out. “Why don't you tell us which of these you'd like to take on?”

“New York.”

“Good. Who else?”

Felix lifts his hand. “I say I am of most use in the world I know best. And, I reckon my father would have connections with the Archive, he was a frequent traveller to New York.” Vesper rolls her eyes.

“Good, two with the archive, how about Dalian?”

“Me, probably,” Hong Yi answers. “That's my home region, and I'd much rather the future than the past.”

“I'll join you,” Artur says.

“Not Moscow?” asks Hong Yi.

“Not Moscow. No. Irradiated in my world. Completely ruined. Dalian is closer to my city than Moscow.”

Hong Yi's eyebrows rise. “Vladivostok?”

Artur manages to crack a smile. “You know geography.”

Orobelle claps her hands once. “Good! Then—who goes to Moscow?”

“‘Completely irradiated’ Moscow?” asks Hong Yi. “Er…who fancies the risk of dying just by standing there?”

Orobelle fixes her eyes on Honourless. “You have the means to move rapidlly between worlds. You would need the least time there by far.”

“And I could do my research in a different world, perhaps?” she drawls. “I could learn from a different version of it.”

“A sound plan. And you two,” she glances between Adelaide and Marcia. “Adelaide, you know the most by far about your world—the politics, the societies, the state of science and technology…”

“I am a wanted fugitive in my world.”

“In Dalian?”

She pauses to consider. “If I disguise myself and don't bring my phone, they may not be able to find—”

“Then do your teammates a favour and go with them to your world.” Adelaide does not answer; she glances at Hong Yi, who offers an apologetic look. Orobelle whirs to face Marcia. “And you? Your pick. We have two in New York, three in Dalian, one in Moscow…”

Marcia nods slowly. “My familiarity will diminish the farther from my era I move…and none of those places are familiar to me so, strictly speaking, I have a greater chance of being useful in the earliest of these…that is, this world.”

“To New York with you, then.” Finally, Orobelle whirls to face Dorian, who is already awaiting instruction. “You stay with me. We shall keep our place in this city so they have somewhere to return to.”

“Of course! Send your allies to the wasteland while you lounge about doing nothing,” Honourless mutters. 

“Hardly nothing, you ingrate! I have far too much to do, for instance, plotting our route back home!”

“How horrible, making more plans. How long do we have?”

“Five days in Duchy time. Ten days anywhere else,” the duchess snaps. “So—to repeat. Honourless, you are taking Vesper, Felix, and Marcia to New York in this world. And Hong Yi, Artur, and Adelaide to Dalian in the next world forward. Then you go to Moscow, one world behind. Do this tomorrow morning. Everyone else—the locations and authors should take you to a cache of information. You have ten days to locate and retrieve a copy of everything you find.”

“Ten days? For everything?” Hong Yi shouts.

“You are Cores, for crying out loud! You will figure it out. Honourless—come to me the instant you are done, and at the ten day mark, you will extract them each from their respective worlds. Again! Five days in the Duchy is ten days in any of these worlds, but not precisely. Be done well before then, if you can. We will come find you.”

There is a feverish mutter through the room as the two trios coalesce. Amid this reorganisation of the crowd, Vesper raises a hand. “I'm noticing two issues here,” she says. “First…Marcia shares no language with either of us.”

“Oh. Yes,” Orobelle answers, her voice briefly faltering before she rebuilds her vigour. “I do have a solution. But it will have to wait until later. What is the second issue?”

“The cage,” Vesper says.

“The Cage,” Felix answers. “We need only detach the planar focus from the top and place it outside.”

Orobelle sighs. “Who is on the cage demolition team?”

---

The demolition team, consisting of Honourless and Hong Yi, arrives at the Cage to find their work already half done. The “planar focus,” or so Felix called it, hangs by a bent chain link, the gap not quite wide enough to let the next slip out.

“Well, props to her for trying,” says Hong Yi with a shrug.

Rubbing her hands together, Honourless does as she does—leaping into the neighbouring world, then rematerialising halfway into the air, both hands snatching for the lowest ring as she falls so that she dangles from it like a gymnast, the gap in the chain link groaning wider.

Hong Yi nods to her and, grasping her legs, begins to weigh her down. The pair grow heavier and heavier, till Honourless is grunting with the effort of holding on.

Then, with a twang, the half-open chain link snaps. Hong Yi has only a split second to readjust the gravitational pull on Honourless before she can crash and break a bone. They both tumble backwards into the cage bars, grinning.

They stare at the assemblage of metal rings in her hands, and then each other. “I think that should do it,” Hong Yi declares. Honourless does not understand him, but she nods, pointing out the way they came.

The pair return to the hotel to find Orobelle's door tightly locked. She does not admit them even after a knock. While Honourless continues inspecting the gaps, Hong Yi heads up the hall to find Artur, Adelaide, Vesper and Felix in the sitting area, all watching the corridor intently as he arrives.

“Hey, what's going on?” he asks, which brings the conversation to a grinding halt. “Did Orobelle banish y'all from the room?”

Vesper leaps off the couch armrest. “She has business with Marcia,” she says.

The rest look at each other. “Her Grace looked very solemn indeed,” Felix answers. “She wouldn't let us stay.”

Hong Yi paces a loop around the couch and the armchair. “Why does this sound so…spooky? I sure hope it's nothing we should worry about.”

Artur shakes his head. “Marcia must know. She was not scared. But surprised.”

“How did you go with the cage?” Vesper puts in.

“Oh, yeah, all dealt with now. I think the spy had already had a go at it…less work for us.”

They are interrupted by footsteps shuffling towards them from the hallway. Honourless marches straight up to him, holding up her notepad and translation glass. She points out the new sentences on the page as he aligns the glass with his eye and reads, and as he does, his eyes go wide.

A ritual, she writes. She is investing Marcia with the power of her blood.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

The Story of the Queendom - II

Deep in the violet overtures of their first evening in San Francisco, Orobelle hears her door click open. Cross-legged in her bed, she lowers her diary to look.

In the doorway, Dorian clears his throat. His hair is tied and draped over one shoulder. “My duchess.”

“What is it?” Her gaze darts to her half-written notes.

“Hong Yi and Vesper have entreated me to ask if you will give them another translation glass. Marcia shares no language with them, you see, and Hong Yi’s device is not always available.”

“I know.” Orobelle closes her eyes. For too long she has felt this conversation impending, and perhaps it is time to have it. “Dorian. Do you recall what I told you about the True Queen and her Gift?”

Eyes widening, he comes to join her on the edge of the bed, and at once the summer heat grows milder. “You have told me about your ancestors—the first matriarchs. Candoresse and how she split the Queendom.”

“Yes,” Orobelle answers without turning. “The Gift of comprehension, the one you have received, is not given lightly. The True Queens inherited it by blood, mother to daughter, and with it they could comprehend all words spoken. But it was only one of the many powers they had—and when the lineage was split—”

---

—the Gifts were not split evenly.

The House of Hearts received the Gift of control. Whomever the Queen applied her will to—particularly if willing and unresisting—she could influence like an extension of herself. The queens made servants in this way, moulding minds with their powers.

We, on the other hand, received the Gift of comprehension. To speak and always be understood, across lands and cultures, was a deceptively simple boon—one whose true use we did not see for a very long time.

But it all rose to clarity once we discovered your world. After Queen Rosanthe and Duchess Arminella came four hundred years of subterfuge and war, of matriarchs bringing armies to bear against each other. Of the very many things that were always edging us towards bloodshed, one of the most potent was the World Gate.

For almost as long as the Queendom has been divided, the Duchy has upheld the conquest of the Cracked Land. When we found the Gate inside our borders, the Gift of comprehension at once became a bridge between our worlds. We took control of the route and the lands beyond that portal, established a monopoly on the trade of resources and servants across the boundary.

For the first decades or so, we let the Queen and her forces pass through our lands to use it. But in time, as successive Queens made their intentions of reunification clearer, my ancestors saw that the Gate was much too precious, too capable of tipping the balance of power, to be shared so wantonly. After all, the Queen of Hearts could only unite our bloodlines if she could convince one of us to join her cause. But Duchesses of Diamonds are not like the other matriarchs: we would never bow to her might. No, the only way she could ever unite the Queendom was by force.

So we asserted our claim upon the World Gate, and we began to repel those under the Queen’s employ from its gantry. It took no time for these tensions to rise to a boil: first old Queen Gemina talked of capturing it, then her successor, the tyrant Melliona, did.

In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter which Queen was ultimately the one to compel the attack. It was inevitable—in the same way carrion brings flies—that she would one day send soldiers across our borders in an attempt to take it.

And once she did—once Queen Melliona made herself an enemy to our lands—the Duchess’ succession was never challenged again.

*

It was after fourteen generations of descent from Candoresse that my mother was born, the new heir to the seat of the Duchess. Her name was Adamanta the Unbreakable, and I was perhaps the only one who could make her smile.

Adamanta’s life came at a pivot point in our history—that fervent moment when centuries of plots were coming to a head, where her every move became critical to the fruition of the plan.

Just as a mistake had splintered the Queendom itself, it was a simple but costly mistake that had brought all this fate and history spiralling around her. For you see, Adamanta's mother, Cotaria, was the firstborn daughter of Queen Drachen, yet she was never Queen. She was passed over—for the sole fact that Drachen had believed her to be a man.

To the Queen up till then, and to the public, the most eligible successor for the throne was Cotaria’s cousin, Caeli. Accordingly, Caeli was named the heir before her daughter had made her womanhood known to the public.

When Cotaria did at last disclose to her mother the truth, Drachen was struck by a great terror—for in the Queendom, any royal descendant may inherit the throne as long as she is a woman, even if she wasn’t always known as one. Cotaria knew this, and her mother did, too: she was the one who should have been placed upon that throne, and she could split the Queendom over the succession if the people were to come to know this.

So Drachen pleaded and begged and wailed that her daughter reconsider—that she retain her life as her son.

In a rage, Cotaria left the palace. She vanished, seemingly, from the face of the world, and for years Drachen was pleased that she had gotten what she wanted.

That was until one fateful summer when Hellene, then Duchess of Diamonds, declared she had married. The matter of marriage among matriarchs is never kept quiet about, and Hellene gathered the crowds on the streets beneath the water tower to declare her wife to the world: Cotaria, daughter of the Queen of Hearts.

There were whispers that Cotaria had entered this arrangement as an act of revenge. Others believed the couple to be truly in love. But she was a perfect Queendom noble—that is to say, shrewd, discerning, strategic about what she said to whom—and none in her life but Hellene knew the truth.

All I know is this: my mother, Adamanta, was the daughter of that union. She was taught from birth that she was the heir of both the Duchess and the woman who should have been Queen—and whatever Caeli did to prop herself up, some would always know she wasn’t meant to wear that crown.

By her own birth, my mother had incarnated something that had never existed till now: the union of both Hearts and Diamonds. Quickly recognising the utility of her position, she took good care to maintain connections with the remaining two houses—the Spades and the Clubs—and when the time came, used these bonds to resolve, at last, the grand plot of five hundred years.

*

Of particular interest to Adamanta was Blackrain, the young heir to the Spades and six years her junior. Always dressed in black and blue, and always dyeing her skin to match, Blackrain at first seemed impenetrable to my young mother, but she pressed on. The Baroness-in-training was a useful connection—her father was the older brother of the Countess of Clubs, and—more interestingly—she had a brother.

The two found, despite the dooming circumstances, that their wits matched each other’s, and they talked of political hypotheses like children comparing toys. Soon enough they were friends, in the only way matriarchs can be friends—as colleagues in theory who would soon be pulled apart by the currents of power—and one could say my mother had a way with burning bridges.

One day in their youth, at a function with too much wine, Adamanta saw Blackrain’s brother Murkvane from afar. She appraised him through the flickering lanterns, this young man of the same stock as his sister, with hair long and white as his sister's was dark.

It was not his beauty that captivated her, but the beauty of the plan, into which—unbeknownst to him—she would stop at nothing to tangle him.

*

On that day, my mother first hinted her intentions with my father to his family. But it was not until three years later that they finally married.

You see, Murkvane, the twin brother of the Baroness, had many suitors. He, like every nobleman, was a prize for his parents to give away. They were protective of him, and my mother's political prominence was a point to her disadvantage.

But anyone who knew my mother also knew this: she always had her way, one way or another.

No one in the towns was sure if it was she who gathered knowledge of every man and woman who wanted Murkvane’s hand. But the record attests that there were no more suitors within three years. Some had committed suicide. Others had fled the Queendom for distant lands.

I have the privilege of knowing that she was the one who orchestrated those deeds—every last one of those sixteen deaths or exiles. She writes about it in the Playbook, and it is part of the familial memory passed down to me.

Adamanta was methodic, percipient, and ruthless. She knew the web she was spinning would soon ensnare her, too. She also knew that she could win any contest if the opponent did not know they were in one yet. But always, she remained aware that she was merely the penultimate link in the chain: never to be the final glory of the Duchy, but the last step to the pinnacle. 

And so she spent every inch of her life, her body, her love, laying the road to that victory.

With all her charm, she wooed my father, and he—now bereft of all his lovers and threatened by the towering spectre of the Duchy—had no other choice but to marry her. Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades—the four suits, assigned to the four sisters in that fateful game of cards, were united again under their wedding canopy.

With all her wit, she won the Knot of Worlds. Pregnant with a daughter, she welcomed the previous bearer as a guest to the Duchy, and with a slow poison put him in a sickbed. She had her doctors exaggerate the diagnosis and made a show of nursing him, speaking sweet words about who should inherit his role. Not one week later, he declared that his successor would be her unborn daughter. Only then did she let him die.

With all her rage, she brought me into the world: her decades of plotting crystalised, all four birthrights in one body, unkillable, unerring, perfect. Yes, I was the prize of those generations of plots: my mother, and her mother, aligning planets within their design.

*

Adamanta’s life was never to last. She writes of this in the Playbook—that she knew she was courting death, that in wronging so many lives to further the House of Diamonds, she had accrued an untold debt unto a hundred families.

But once I was born and taught every lesson in the Playbook, such a future became a warm certainty. For her death, in her eyes, would be a final revolution of the cycle of vengeance—the impulse for my final coup.

And I would, she thought, inherit none of her guilt.

It happened one day that they were riding in a carriage—Mother, Father, and their protector Talon—on their way to the Queen’s City for a nonexistent summit. Somewhere on the road, before they had crossed the border, Talon drew his sword and slew them both.

I was ten years old at the time, and I only heard of it from the coachman. I felt my grief for only a brief time, before it was drowned out by the awareness that it was time for me to ascend.

Talon, the man hired to protect my parents, had been bought by the Queendom. The one they had entrusted with their lives was finally the one to end it.

When I ascended as duchess, my first decree was to have him executed.

And of course, Baroness Blackrain, sister of my father, came to hate us all. She tore herself away—as well as she could—from this web of treason and death—all friendship and enmity, all liabilities and debts. We do not speak, but there is no reason we should, not until the day I ascend as Queen.

---

“And this is how you came to be my guard,” Orobelle ends simply. “I, granddaughter of Cotaria, am just as legitimate as any heir Gertelina chooses, if not more so. Because my bloodline is the one with truer continuity to the Last True Queen. Whether the common people will agree is the only uncertainty.”

“I only knew part of this,” murmurs Dorian, a storm brewing in his mind. There are many things he could say, but does not. “And is that why you have been amassing forces—”

“Shh, don’t say that too loud,” Orobelle whispers, then shakes her head. “It is important for you to know this, Dorian. The Gift of comprehension that you bear is more than just a boon. It is an officiation into our web of counterplays, its secrets and dangers. No one too callous or gregarious can have it.”

Then she draws a deep breath, and Dorian can tell—despite his efforts to ignore it—that the Duchess is nervous.

“But Marcia…she could hold her own in my court. She knows her way around battle and subterfuge both. And if her inability to dialogue with her comrades should be her greatest stumbling block in protecting me…then I think there is no better candidate to receive the Gift.”

Dorian’s eyes widen, but even as the words cross him, their truth rings clear. “Yes, you are right,” he replies, and this comes with a slight wavering of emotion. “I would trust her with the Gift, if you would.”

---

Two years ago was the last time Orobelle initiated someone into the Gift of the Last True Queen by her blood. That person sits in this very room, motionless as a sculpture.

The drawing of the curtains was the first step in the ritual. The room is made a secret within that rich golden light.

Facing Orobelle in the centre of the woven carpet is Marcia. Her eyes are questioning but not fearful. She watches the duchess’ hand move across the blade hanging from her neck.

“Marcia,” she says. “What is your full name?”

“Junia Paetina Marcia, for all intents and purposes,” she replies.

“What was your name at birth?”

“I do not know. Is that important to the ritual?” She sees the dreamlike desert market flash in the back of her eyelids. But no faces, no names.

“Well, is the name you have given me your truest name?”

Marcia mulls over the question for a second. “What makes a name true?”

“It is a name that connects you to the history to which you belong.”

She closes her eyes. “Then yes.”

“Good. Junia Paetina Marcia. I wish to give you the Gift of the Last True Queen, which will accord you the ability to understand all words as spoken. This ceremony has political significance in the Duchy of Diamonds. Dorian the Hopeful was the last to undertake it at my hand, when he transited from his world to mine.” She nods at him. “There is no prerequisite to undertaking it, besides my assessing your worth. But I have no concerns about your worth. In the week I have known you, you have proven yourself wise, brave, shrewd, and resilient—qualities that recommend you as a candidate for the supreme gift of the Queendom.”

“Is flattery part of the ritual?” Marcia murmurs.

“It is so that you know that this gift is not given lightly. But I am also choosing you for you are the only one here who shares no language with the rest.” Other than Honourless, they both think. “I would rather only have nine possessors of my gift at a time. But you will be my tenth.”

She dwells upon the words, the gentle warmth of surprise rising through her. “Then I am honoured to receive it,” she answers.

“It is by this ceremony that my councillors become members of my court.” There is a practised steadiness to Orobelle’s words as she speaks them, as if she had spent hours rehearsing them before a mirror. “You need not hold office, but in spirit, you will become my vassal. It can be revoked whenever I choose. I shall grant you the gift of comprehension, and you will understand and be understood by all.” Then she pauses and casts a glance aside. “We are, er, all out of cards, and I have brought no card to meld you with, anyhow.”

“All the better, because I shudder at the thought of turning into one,” Marcia replies.

“Then…unless you should ever change your mind…it is settled. And your magnanimity is appreciated. The giving is sealed by a passing of blood.”

Orobelle finally lifts the pendant that hangs from her neck, a crystal that Marcia knows hides a blade. She pushes the metal out of the gem, lifts her own right palm and, with all the stony resolve of some soul far older than herself, slits it. Blood beads on the cut, dark against her pale skin.

She looks at Marcia. “Are you certain you are recovered from your illness?” she asks then.

She closes her eyes. “I think so,” she replies. “But I cannot be sure beyond a doubt that is completely gone from my body.”

Orobelle nods. “Then, take my blood with your finger,” she replies, “and swallow it.”

This, of all things, is what makes a chill run down her back. She has heard tales of blood rituals aplenty, though her own people did not practice them.

But where pools of blood have never fazed her, this cut brings a momentary fright. She lifts a finger and wipes the dark liquid from the wound. What a child this must be, she thinks, who enacts such magic without an ounce of fear.

“The blood of the True Queen runs through me, she who receives her power from the Light of the cosmos. I, fifteen times descended from True Queen Candoresse, and I, Knot of Worlds, invoke my bond with her bloodline, which sprang from the universe itself. I solemnly offer her gift to you. Do you accept?”

“I accept,” Marcia replies. And in that red-gold light, beneath the mad joy of the duchess’ unsmiling stare, her hand seems to move of its own accord. She touches her bloodied fingertip to her tongue, and swallows.

As she does, she feels the rusty taste grow to warmth. Warmth radiates down her throat, piercing her chest like heartburn, blooming like flames through her head and throat and lungs.

For a minute, agony seals her lips, as if she might spew fire if she parted them. Then as the heat drains away, she croaks, “How do I know when it’s done?” Her mind feels buoyant, borne on the hazy pain, already fading.

Orobelle wipes the blade on a prepared handkerchief and shrugs. “It is done,” she finally replies. All at once, the moment’s grandeur scatters from the scene. “Go speak to someone.”

“Ah…that I shall.”

Heart booming at the words, Marcia turns to leave. Dorian meets her eye as she goes, and as they smile at each other, he says, “Take care, my sister.”

*

She catches a glimpse of all six of the others—sitting in the sunlit chamber at the end of that amniotic hall. She drifts towards them, starting to distinguish them into individuals.

But the one she looks at first is Honourless.

Of course, the unfairness of it all is not lost on her. Honourless was here first. She is the one who has toiled tirelessly, wringing every last ounce of force from her body to carry them between the worlds, in the distant hopes of someday being free. Without her, they would still be stranded apart.

But Orobelle has decided, in her own cruel duchess’ way, to withhold from the Ghost the gift that she has willingly offered Marcia.

“Honourless,” she calls, laying a hand on the taller woman’s shoulder, where the rough skin bears the marks of teeth much bigger than wolves’. “Do you hear the words I say?”

Honourless spins around. Her eyes meet Marcia’s, and widen, and keep widening, until there is white all around her irises. Her mouth widens in a crooked, toothy grin, the scar over her nose wrinkling. “I hear you!” she cries out, and flings her long, sinewy arms around her in an embrace. Her gravelly voice speaks the words of Latin, but she hears them in her own accent—her own vocabulary—and there is a homeliness to the sound that makes her heart soar. “You hear me—she gave you the power she gave Dorian? Oh, I am so pleased.”

“Yes!” Marcia answers, then her smile clouds up. “But Orobelle should have given it to you.”

Honourless’ rumbling laughter crescendos. “You would sooner squeeze water from a rock.”

Marcia, too, laughs. “Then I will translate for you whenever you please. The duchess cannot prevent it.”

Honourless leans out of the embrace, but continues to hold her shoulders. “And this is why you are the one who received it.”

Now that they have parted, Marcia’s awareness finally expands to encompass the rest of the room. Only now does she notice that everyone else in the sitting room is wearing various faces of startlement.

But the first to burst through it is Hong Yi, who flies off the seat and shouts, “Gods above! You received the translation magic? We can talk to you now? This…this changes everything!”

She laughs. “I don’t know what possessed the duchess,” she answers as he leaps to her side. “But I cannot begrudge it.”

“How did she do it?”

“There were…a lot of words that she said. Then she cut her palm, and I took her blood—”

“Hong Yi, are you speaking Mandarin?” asks Adelaide from her seat.

He turns. “Oh, I—yeah, I heard Marcia in Mandarin. Huh! I have an odd thought.” His voice effects a deeper monotone as he says, “Marcie, do you understand me now?”

Marcia blinks. “Yes?” she replies.

“Oh, no way! This time I heard you in English. We have so much science to do—”

“Marcia!” She recognises Vesper’s voice long before she has seen her, leaning out from behind the armchair. “What a delight—I’ve longed to talk to you.”

Marcia freezes, hearing her in words she can understand for the first time. The measured steadiness of her voice is clearer now, like a fortress of steel and stone. “Us both,” she answers. “We have so much to discuss.”

For Artur, Felix and Adelaide, it is a matter of far less shock, for she has barely spoken to them to begin with, through the fogginess of her recovery. But where there was dead silence between them before, words now cross the gap.

“I look forward to working with you,” is Felix's concluding remark, and she senses there will be more soon to come. Adelaide, still glued to her chair, is not talkative, and deeply inexpressive when she does talk, though her face always shows when she is flustered, like when Marcia asks her one too many questions at once.

Artur is even less talkative than Adelaide, but weighed down by some leaden lethargy that he must have learned somewhere. Felix and Adelaide leave together, and then Artur does—then it is just Vesper and Hong Yi, the latter lying on the couch and the former taking a seat on the armchair.

“Excuse me,” Marcia says, drawing a long breath, looking each of her companions in the eye. “Has Artur always been like that?”

“If you mean, ‘like he hates everyone,’ …yes, but I can’t really blame him, I guess.”

“He’s working through a lot right now,” Vesper puts in, gazing past them at the corridor. “He really didn’t want to come along with us. He had a rough time letting go.”

Hong Yi hums in agreement. “And that’s fair enough. He only talks to Vesper, for some reason.”

“I’m not surprised,” murmurs Marcia, draping herself over the back of the armchair. “I imagine you could charm anyone with that smile.”

Vesper turns to look at her, blinking daftly. “Me?”

Marcia laughs. “Yes. Your name suits you, have I told you? You would look right at home in the heavens.”

“Well, goodness me,” Vesper gasps. “You certainly have a way with words, and now I can hear them straight from your mouth.” Then she chuckles. “Thank you, though. That’s very kind.”

Marcia turns to Hong Yi with a helpless smile, but he is busy rubbing his temple. This, it seems, is not just a problem of translation.

---

The morning dawns in greys and blues, dusting every inch of the hall. Honourless sits in the armchair in her shirt and pants, awaiting her clients—or so she likes to imagine.

This, she thinks, is a welcome change of pace—no longer a gradual agglomeration of people, straining her physical resources with every successive acquisition.

The trio bound for the current world is the first to reach her, each with a separate load of luggage—and all are dressed in clothes they could well have plucked straight off the street. Marcia in particular is eye-catching in a gown of deep red, rippling like a lake at sunset. Vesper wears a grey-green shirt and white breeches, a coat draped over her shoulder, hands always adjusting her cuffs. Only Felix is dressed about the same as he always is, in what she has come to recognise as the formalwear of his society.

“Look at you, you’ve even costumed yourselves,” Honourless laughs.

“And I cannot complain about it.” Marcia answers, swishing her dress about.

Honourless watches appreciatively for a second. “So, lovely lady, where are you headed?” she asks.

“The city,” she answers, “is the same one where we found Hong Yi, but in this present world. Nu Joric. New York? If I am pronouncing it right.”

She steeples her fingers, gleefully playing the part of coordinator. “One can work with that,” she murmurs. “But tell me something about this New York and where inside it you are headed.”

The three glance at each other and dive into a brief exchange. “It contains the first and only air-port in North America,” Marcia says. “And there is a building—tallest in the world in the current time. Somewhere close to that building would be good.”

“That’s better. Will you need funds?”

Marcia takes a sidelong glance at Felix. “No,” she answers.

“Come now, then.” Trying to envision how something like an “air-port” might manifest, Honourless rises from her seat, extending both hands. They form a circle with her—Vesper to her left and Marcia to her right, and Felix only follows suit once he has understood that this is the procedure.

“We go through Adelaide’s world—it’s safer,” Honourless says once the circle is complete. Marcia repeats her for the benefit of the rest. The trio nod to each other.

As has come to be familiar to all of them, the world begins to warp where they stand, as if to pop them off its surface, and in one rending second, like the piercing of a needle, they tear through the skin between the two spacetimes.

---

Hong Yi, Adelaide and Artur arrive at the sitting area to find it empty. For about ten seconds, they stand contemplating the spot where they were told Honourless would wait.

“Well, let’s just…” Hong Yi drops into the neighbouring couch, “...hang out till she gets back, I guess…”

Artur sits down beside him, but with a generous gap. He wears his shirt with one button open, fanning himself with his hand. “Never come back to San Francisco,” he mutters.

Adelaide meanders behind the seats, wearing a long green dress bought at a boutique a few streets down. In her hands, she holds Felix’s reset phone, and at her feet sits her newly stocked luggage bag. 

“Sooo…either of you been to Dalian before?” asks Hong Yi.

Artur nods slowly. “Long, long ago. Before the bombs. Beijing, Dalian, beautiful cities.”

“Oh, you've been to my hometown?” Hong Yi calls. “Gotta say, your pronunciation is spot on.”

“I had Chinese customers, they taught me,” Artur answers, quietly smiling to himself.

“Addie, will you need help with language?” asks Hong Yi.

She shifts her bag off her feet. “I get the feeling my helpfulness will not be in communication.”

“Fair! We’ll probably spend the first couple of days looking stuff up, anyhow. I haven’t the least clue where this sect would be based.”

“I’m worried about that part,” she says. “Are we meant to do the research in those ten days as well? What if we just…don’t find it?”

Hong Yi shrugs. “Surely Orb can give us more time if it turns out to be that hard.”

“Orb?” Adelaide giggles. “Is that short for Orobelle?”

“Shh, don't say it so loud.”

Before Adelaide can answer, there is a heavy trudging of feet up the corridor stairs, and then from around the corner shambles Honourless, lifting her hand with a limp wave. Hong Yi returns the gesture, picking his phone from his pocket, on whose screen his instructions are already prepared.

She throws herself into the armchair, takes in a gigantic breath, and plucks the translation glass from the pocket of her cargo pants.

Honourless nods along as she squints over the text. Dalian is a port city near my hometown of Beijing, where we have been once, in the bunker. It was once ruled by Artur’s country. The land reaches subzero temperatures often, but it was made a port because its ocean doesn't freeze.

Pulling her notebook from her pocket, she answers: I can use that. Let me give you your funds. Then, she begins to trawl her pockets, from which she starts to pull wads of United States Dollars.

Hong Yi stares. “Okay…first stop, money exchange.” He takes the bills, because neither of his companions seem keen on handling it. “So, since this is your first time ghosting,” he says as he takes Adelaide's hand, “hang on tight, to us and to your luggage. Anything loose will vanish.” Adelaide pushes her notebook deeper in her pocket and loops her bag around her arm. Hong Yi, with his arm likewise through the handle of his trolley bag, takes Artur’s hand and waits with his head bowed.

Honourless starts to grumble, as if at a chore. It's the happiest she has ever been to do it.

That is Hong Yi’s final thought—before they are torn away, out of the San Francisco of the ninth world and into the breach.

---

“Your move,” says Orobelle, hands laid upon the villain’s note and the pages of the sketchbook.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Cords and Chains - I

Standing on the warm stones of the temple in the morning sun, Liss grinned at Pala. The sky was clear and boundless today. A good day for fishing.

In Pala’s body, Liss saw a loophole in the universe, a window to a million futures. But among those possibilities and potentialities, only one of them mattered. All other worlds, all other things, were secondary to this.

Somewhere, in some world she hadn’t yet seen, there lived a singular individual of monolithic power condensed in one body—the power of the universes revolving. Some called them the Axle, others, the World Tree—the one whose consciousness held all universes together.

All that potential wound up inside a single body—yet alone they could do nothing with it. A key without a lock. A chisel without a hammer.

There wasn’t a road to the destiny she saw, so brilliant like the sun on a spotless horizon. A road denoted a marked and trodden path. No, there was a route: a lengthy plan, to be executed in countless steps—one that a lesser individual would write off as impossible.

But here stood Liss, with a Traveller in her thrall, and she was already closer than anyone else in the universe could ever dream to be.

“Pala,” she said. She took the girl's arm as gently as she could. Together, they strolled in the sun to the feet of the obsidian sculpture.

The sculpture was a shadow of its old self—defaced with someone’s dinner and a string of offal, stinking of urine and rot. While Pala considered it from head to foot, Liss laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Let me tell you a story. The story of my homeland, Henkor. Once upon a time, the people of Henkor, my people, lived full and happy lives. We had fishers who brought catch from the sea, and farmlands that we cycled year to year. We had miners who mined black rock from the volcanic mountainside—my best friend Noma was born of their family. And we lived from the land and water, and the water gave us all we needed.

“But then, this man, Emperor Milaston—this man came from across the ocean, and tore it all apart. He seized our towns and farmlands, and turned them into aroca plantations to fuel his conquest. He captured this city, the city on whose soil we stand, and turned it into a factory of ships and sailors.

“He has wrought more death and pain than you could possibly begin to fathom. Million slaughtered across the world. Bloodlines extinguished. Nations brought to their knees. All because he wanted to own the world, to elevate his people as its rulers.”

Pala nodded slowly. “There are empires like that in my world, too.”

Liss turned. “Then you must understand. You come from an island too, don’t you?”

“It has a volcano too.”

Liss nodded. “Yes. The volcano gave us life. Then he came along,” she jabbed a finger at Milaston’s statue, “and turned my island into a link in his web. And now, I am going to rid the world of his control.” She turned to Pala. “And you, Pala, are going to be one of the most important parts of that plan.”

Pala blinked back, the blithe nonchalance replaced suddenly by a shrinking-away. “Are you sure? Can I do all that? Just by…Travelling?”

“Oh, Pala,” Liss sighed, shaking her head. “You don't yet understand just how much you are capable of. But that’s no matter.” She smiled. “I know what you can do. You're a little rough around the edges, but I will guide you. I am a god in the making. I will show you your own power. And we will scour this empire from the face of the world.”

A moment's terror flashed through Pala’s eyes, then she bowed her head. “If you will show me how…I will do my best.”

Liss turned to look at Milaston’s sculpture again, and observing this, Pala followed suit. Liss lifted a hand and pointed it at his head.

With an ear-rending boom, the head exploded into a million shards, the stones shaking beneath them. Shrieking, Pala leapt behind Liss and cowered away till the shards had finished raining onto the square.

Liss turned to Pala. “Don’t underestimate yourself,” she said. “You’ll show everyone what you can do. We both will.”

---

Pala whisked the trio back to the temple with its ring-shaped platform, seeing the image of a long beach on the insides of their eyelids, to be replaced by the temple garden in its muted greens once more.

Liss led them through the arching doorway, waving at the guard on duty, then along the curved corridors around the circumference of the sandstone edifice. On the inner wall, doors stood at even intervals, now and then opening into a passageway into the heart of the ring. On the outer wall, arched windows gazed out onto the treetops and the glimmering sea beyond.

“Behold,” Liss declared as they came to a halt an unnameable distance along the corridor, in front of a dormitory door. “These rooms will be your base of operations. Room twenty-five for you, Pala, and twenty-six for Fen.”

It hadn’t occurred to Pala until now to find it strange that Liss could communicate seamlessly in English, until she pointed at each of these doors in turn, and Pala realised that the symbols carved on their plaques must be numerals.

But before she could give voice to her questions, Liss had turned to leave with no more than a grin and a wave.

The pair looked at each other. “At least we aren’t tied up this time, I guess,” he murmured.

*

It quickly became apparent that the lodgings were not equal: Liss had set aside a well-furnished bedroom for Pala, and a storeroom with a bedroll for Fen, each stocked with clothes in the local style.

Down the hall were more facilities, which they shared with devotees: a tub of water filled by rain for bathing, rooms of locker boxes, and a sunlit sitting room where they often found training priests reading. Despite their efforts, the lack of a common language meant they could only ever converse in timid gestures and pointing.

For the next two days, Pala and Fen took to the space as best they could. It was like a school camp, with odd rooms and rough but serviceable beds, and no such luxuries as computers. Without a charging point, their phones ran down, and both found themselves making good use of their pencils and notebooks. Sometimes they met in Pala’s room to talk and to draw. At other times they peered out the windows or ventured through the halls. They discovered the dining room well before their very first meal there.

Fen did not think much of his storeroom furnishings. But no one came to check on them in their slumber, as far as they could tell, so the pair switched rooms, sometimes sharing from the same pool of clothing and supplies.

Now and then, when Pala closed her eyes under the woven covers, she could imagine that this new life might not be so terrible. But always she felt the cord clinging to her wrist, and began to notice the unease creeping beneath her skin—the tiny drops of comfort quickly dissolving in the oceanic dread that slept beneath.

---

The morning after their return to the temple, Liss saw not one inch of Noma at breakfast. No one took the seat beside her—everyone knew who that space was reserved for—and its usual occupant did not show her face.

As Liss ate with the eyes of the priests upon her, she could not shake off the unease of Noma's absence. Lacar, one seat away, seemed to glance across the gap inordinately often, and when their eyes met, he finally said, “You should talk to her.”

“What?” Liss breathed. “What do you know about this?”

“She’ll tell you. If she’s brave enough.” Then he stretched his arms over his head and yawned, and she recognised that he meant to say nothing else.

In the middle of eating her flatbread with lentil butter, however, Liss became aware of a person casting a shadow in the southern exit of the dining hall. Curly hair up to the shoulders, she could not mistake the silhouette for anyone else.

Once she had noticed, she began to eat faster, cramming the bread in her mouth.

Then she wiped her mouth on the napkin, slammed her cutlery into her plate, and rose from her chair. Without a goodbye to Lacar, she sprinted across the hall, towards the shadow.

Noma shrieked when Liss flew through the exit and snatched her shoulders. “Noma! Why didn’t you join us? What’s wrong?” she said, but Noma only glanced quietly away.

Liss drew back and watched, and waited. Though her friend looked anguished, she did not budge, either.

“Noma,” Liss started again, spreading her arms in a gesture of surrender. “I must have done something to upset you. I don’t know what. But whatever it was…I’m sorry.”

Noma considered her, her breathing the only sound she made. Then she began to walk away—but three steps off, she glanced over her shoulder, as if to check if her friend was following.

Liss only started walking then. She followed Noma quietly up the stairs to the foyer, then along the northwestern arc of the ground floor terrace, on and on till they were almost at the northern portal. They passed windows through which lacy fern fronds waved. She could see the wild gardens rustling, the Isle of Sand bathing in sunlight, visible through cascades of leaves. The halls were empty for breakfast; they were the only ones here.

Noma stopped beside the northern portal. The foliage was denser here, an ocean of leaves shading the garden bed. She peered down at the fluttering shadows on the stone path, before descending, sunlight scattering on her hair. She took a deep breath, like the tide drawing away from the shore.

At some point along those silent hallways, Liss had stopped wondering where this was going. But now, as Noma leaned against the sandstone wall and glanced up at her, the question returned.

“I usually come here to run away from my problems,” Noma murmured while Liss leapt off the second last step to land on the grass. “I always have a spot. In Henkor it was…” She shook her head, wincing. “The top of the waterfall.”

Liss’ heart ached; her eyes unfocused on the horizon. Only the retaining wall peeked through the trees, built of the same golden rock.

“Which problem are you running from, now?”

“She followed me here,” Noma answered.

Liss frowned. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, even though she hadn’t a clue what she was apologising for. She picked her way through the scraggly grass, to join her companion at the wall. “What did I do to upset you? Was it that I went off to a different world without you? Was it recruiting Pala?”

At this, Noma cringed. “You tied the knot with her. Right?”

Liss lifted her wrist and glanced down at the loop of rope. “I did, but I had to,” she said. “It was the only way to be sure I could find her again. I don’t think its ceremonial meaning makes it any less useful.”

The dappled light brushed Noma’s face, softened by a sorrow that made Liss’ heart hurt in ways she hadn’t known it could. Her skin was dark as mahogany, set aglow wherever the petals of sunlight fell on it, and her hair hung in curls around her face—always inexplicably well-kept, even when they were living in forests and aboard ships.

The physician’s tattoo sat under her left eye—Liss had seen tears rolling over it before. But there were no tears today, even as her face contorted. “Why did you use a marriage knot, of all things?” she burst out. “Didn't it mean anything?”

“Because it can be used with the axis machine to jump to her in any plane—do you think I actually wanted to marry her?” Noma’s trembling silence gave her the answer. “I have no interest in Pala as a partner. I just didn't know it concerned you so much.”

As she spoke, Liss’ mind raced to lay the facts side by side, every possible path and eventuality unfolding before her like it did when she was orchestrating a mission. But this time, she began to realise that the trail of clues ran backwards, on and on through the years.

Something she had never understood was how Noma always looked at her, somewhere between mourning and awe. No one else looked at Liss like that. All at once, suspended in this flicker of time, she wondered…

“I’m sorry,” Noma sputtered. “You’ve already explained yourself, and I understand, though I don’t really—I know it was the best way to get this done. And I don’t want to get in the way of your plans. I just…don’t know how to say this…”

“Noma,” Liss said, “how do you see me?”

Her friend’s eyes widened. “I think you’re…” She closed her mouth, opened it again. “Let me—think.”

Noma lowered her gaze again, frowning. Liss waited silently, closing her eyes, feeling the warm stone against her back. Another five minutes passed. Speckles of sunlight danced over them, and the leaves and fronds rushed, casting their whispers into the silence.

“I think,” Noma finally croaked, fingers curled, “you’re like a sunburst. Like the light that comes through clouds, in beams, on the sea. The sight still takes my breath away, however many times I‘ve seen it—so far away and grand. It reminds me of how big the world is. And I keep trying to watch, to take in every last detail. But when the sun pierces through and hits my eyes, it hurts too much, and I have to look away.” She shuffled her feet. “That’s what I think of you.”

The effect of these words was instantaneous, and incomprehensible. Liss’ heart raced, as if she were readying to leap across a mile-deep ravine, and she was sweating. It was like she had felt this a thousand times before, without noticing, but it was sharpened now by hearing Noma speak.

And she wanted to feel it again.

Liss snatched Noma’s wrist, with perhaps a little too much force, because it drew a gasp. “Noma!” she laughed. “If you want me for yourself then you only have to ask.”

Noma’s despondence evaporated from her body, and she jolted away. “What?”

“Just ask. And I could not say no. Because it’s you.”

“Me?” she squeaked.

“Yes! The only good person in this world. The only one I could want beside me forever."

"Stop, stop, stop!"

By now, Noma had grown so hot that Liss could feel the fever through her fingers, like one of her coins, about to explode. "You don't like that?"

Noma snatched her hand away. "Yes, I do! I like it too much. Don't tease me like this!"

“I'm not teasing you! How come you can say nice things about me, but I can’t say them back?”

“Because it’s getting my hopes up, and I don’t want—”

Liss grabbed the escaped hand and lifted it. Even while Noma watched, ear tips reddening, she bowed her head and pressed her lips to the girl’s fingers. Then she met her eyes. “The reason I didn't care what the marriage knot meant was because I couldn't picture tying the knot for real. Because it wasn't ever going to happen. No one could ever like me that much.”

“That isn't true,” muttered Noma.

“It was true for a long time. And I thought I couldn't love anyone, either. Not my mother, not my neighbours, not the people I worked with…” Liss glanced up at the leaves rippling above their heads. “But…there was this girl in the mining village. I always ran to see her first thing after my classes. She was the only person I could ever bring myself to care about, and I cared about her so much. I wanted to protect her from everything she feared—which was a lot of things. And I'm so glad she ran away with me, even so, or else I would never have gotten to tell her how much I’ve needed and admired her…” She sighed heavily. “Come on, let's go somewhere comfier.”

“I, ye—yes.” By now, Noma was all but a hot, blubbering mess. Still grasping her hand, Liss led her down into the shadows of the sprawling tree, where the grass was short but dense. She sank into the soft verdure, and Noma followed cautiously. She tried to remember what couples on Henkor did, but she hadn’t been paying enough attention.

Haltingly, Liss reached out and looped an arm around Noma’s back. The closer their bodies pressed, the more she found some unexpected habit taking over. She brought her other arm to encircle her. She was too strong for Noma to resist, not that she was resisting at all. She pulled her in, and then a spike of some alien, familiar pang struck her—and they swayed and toppled together into the green, Noma shrieking, while the aroma of broken grass blades tided in.

Liss buried her face in the other girl's hair, the sweet scent of hair oil and soap still fresh from a morning bath. Her lips unexpectedly found her ear, and she gave it a kiss. 

Noma let out a squeal. It was half a minute before she could form any words again. “This can't be real. I'm going to wake up soon. In my dorm room. Right?”

Liss grinned. “Then you can say whatever you want, right?”

Noma squirmed. “Maybe.”

“What do you really want?”

She swallowed. “More of this. More of you.”

“Is that so?”

Liss was only teasing, but Noma squeezed her eyes shut and burst out, “Yes! I don’t know how long it has been, but I can't bear it much longer! I think about you when you're not around, and when you are, I can't think about anything else! It made me feel ill thinking you might have married someone else and not me!”

As each sentence barreled into Liss, she felt her heart boom louder. Perhaps there was something that rivalled her hatred, after all.

Laughing, she cupped a hand around Noma’s cheek, nudging her head around till they were facing each other. “I wish you had said that sooner,” she murmured as she stared into those eyes, more familiar than her own heartbeat. “Because it took hearing it from you to realise I'd like it, too—to wear your rope on my hand. To be bound to you. Because it has to be you…you and no one else. But this time, I want to do it properly. And I think we should wait until all of this is done, until we win. So we can be sure we have a world to come back to…”

“I'll wait. If you would too.”

Liss grinned. “Of course I will. How long have we known each other? Eight years? Almost nine years now. And I would have said yes if you had asked me years ago, too. Even when we were children. Even if I wouldn't have understood the meaning back then. I think I understand enough to say it now, though—I'm here to stay.”

Wreathed in the songs of insects and the rustling of leaves, Liss reached past Noma's head to pick a long stalk of grass. She slipped the stalk under Noma’s arm, and began to tie it around the other girl's wrist while she looked away.

Through gaps between the leaves, the sky was too blue after days of rain. It made the scene feel false, like a vision in the mind’s eye from a favourite tale.

And maybe it was. Maybe Liss was the one who was dreaming here. But they basked in each other’s heat, warmer than the sun, and she did not mind if it was all false, if only for the chance to feel it once.

*

Liss and Noma did not leave each other’s side for the rest of the week. They plotted together, and in the course of that plotting, Liss explicated a year's worth of plans and ideas.

Noma always had something useful to say, some new angle on every matter. It didn't make sense to keep Pala on such a tight leash; she would fare much better and be more willing to help if she was held as an equal. Pala and Fen could come and go—the marriage knot did away with the risk of them slipping out of reach.

“Except if they figure out how to remove it,” Noma murmured.

Liss pondered this. “Not likely, but not impossible. We should research it.”

“You've been reading so much,” Noma whispered with a smile. “I never thought you would willingly visit a library.”

“You'd love the books here,” Liss answered with a grin of her own. “I'll see to it that they let you browse, at least the upper floors. They can't deny me—I’ve done more good for them in the time I’ve been here than they’ve done in the past hundred years.”

One blue evening later, as they stood in the southern arc of the second terrace, holding hands while they gazed out at the lights on the lower floors, they heard a throat cleared behind them.

Lacar said, “I see Noma was brave enough.”

“Lacar!” whined Noma. “Did you tell her?”

“I think you did most of the telling,” Liss answered with a nudge.

Lacar laughed. “Ah, young love. Well, don't miss dinner for the stars.”

The rest of the temple wised up soon enough. For Daranth, the oldest priest, it almost seemed a banal revelation, as if it more surprised her that they hadn't already been partners before then. For others, like the trainees closer to their age, it became hallway gossip. Perhaps the young tyrant does hold affections after all.

All at once Noma, usually the one lurking in the corners, was catapulted to the centre of attention. She could have done without it, but she didn't mind that she was now greeted everywhere she went. 

The library was for devotees only, but even while telling Liss so, Anessa—who was Doganira like herself—whispered that they could not prevent her from sharing the books once they were borrowed.

And so it was that Liss and Noma delved together into the knowledge kept in those peerless archives, in the hidden rings far beneath the ground.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Cords and Chains - II

Content warnings (may contain spoilers)

This chapter depicts decaying corpses (described), intravenous hypodermic needles, parental abuse and trauma response to abuse.

Don’t underestimate yourself. You’ll show everyone what you can do. We both will.

It was upon that statement that all of Pala’s resolve now rested, and all her fire, for she had never heard such words in her life before, so glowing and so certain—so certain of her.

The morning Liss was to brief Pala on her first mission, she dressed as tidily as she could. She pulled on a blue tunic, slightly too long, and tied a silver sash around her waist. She met Fen in the hallway—the purple tunic he wore was embroidered with subtle black flowers. Together, they climbed the wide stairs from the foyer to the prayer hall.

Pala had been told to bring note-taking materials. She clutched her sketchbook in her hands, a pencil slotted into the rings. “Did you sleep okay?” Fen asked as they walked in step.

She nodded. “Best sleep since we got here.”

A breeze rustled the leaves like paper; he inhaled as it billowed in through the windows. In place of panes, there were slanting wooden slats that could be lifted to let air in, or closed with a lever, perhaps to keep rain at bay. No mosquitoes here. Not like home.

This prayer hall had been made for an audience of five hundred, but today it was empty. The arching windows soared, open to the elements, and the floor had been built to withstand them too, sloping to shallow edge gutters which fed into drains. As they walked, footsteps amplified by massive echoes, Pala began to imagine standing in this hall in the downpour.

She was quickly disturbed from that exercise when she noticed that they had been the last to arrive. Noma stood at the altar transcribing a book. Liss lay on the altar top, head propped up on her elbows, watching the other girl write.

“Two minutes early, what a pleasant surprise!” Liss called out as they arrived at the altar steps, her voice booming across the hall. Together, Pala and Fen ascended halfway up the stairs, and by then Liss had sprung off the table. “Today is a momentous day, Pala. Your very first mission without me! The task is very simple. I have been made aware of the existence of a number of scientific documents that I would very much like to have. But they are scattered across a few worlds.”

“A few?”

“Oh, yes. There are more worlds than just our own, didn't you know? They have been travelled and documented by scholars of old.”

As she spoke, Noma stepped from behind the altar and exchanged a nod with Liss. She descended the steps to meet Pala and Fen, holding out a sheet of paper she had just filled with writing. She could not speak much English, but she relayed her words to Liss, and Liss did the speaking for her.

“The paper contains the titles and locations of the three documents. Read it carefully. Memorise it or take notes—we will be taking it back. This task is governed by a number of terms of success. Now, pay good attention…”

Pala flipped open her sketchbook and began to take notes with her plastic pencil—facetious utensils, hardly worthy of the gravitas of the instructions she was being relayed. Every one of Liss’ words rippled across the hallway, the pillars repeating her voice back to them.

Never before had she faced someone quite so blindingly terrible and grand. If her parents terrified her, then Liss was twice that: never unsure, never showing anything but the most transcendent of conviction. So sharp was the blade of her will that she felt it could cut anything, even space and time. And there was a cord on her wrist binding her to this towering being.

How could she be everything that Liss believed she was? But how could she bear to disappoint her? Liss gave absolutely no ambiguity in her instructions. “I expect all documents gathered in fourteen days or less. Am I understood?”

“Yes, Liss.” Pala bowed her head for good measure. Fourteen days was plenty to make six jumps.

“Wait, two weeks?” Fen burst out. “We have to get home sometime. I have medical appointments I can’t miss!”

Liss had never spared Fen the same cajoling circumlocution as Pala. To his interruption, she narrowed her eyes. But then Noma turned to her with a quick whisper, and Liss said, “Have as many visits as you need to stay alive. Pala can bring you there. But don’t you dare delay her work.”

“Sure, whatever,” he grumbled.

”Pala, I’m trusting you to keep a watch on Fen’s diversions. If you aren’t back in two weeks, I will come find you. Understood?”

“I…I understand.” Pala glanced at Fen, but he was still glaring at the floor.

“Good! Now, head back to your rooms and start preparing.”

---

Just like that, the freedom to move had been thrust back into Pala’s hands.

The first thing they did with it was to attend to the overdue matter of Fen’s obligations. It had been five days since they had left. Though, on tumbling out of the breach into his living room, Taito and Diyana flew into a furore and paced rantingly around the dining table, there was no panic at the pair’s half-baked excuse about a surprise vacation.

“Don’t frighten us like that again!” Diyana cried out while Taito patted her shoulder. “Next time tell us if you're going away. Okay?”

“Okay, okay,” Fen murmured.

Taito folded his arms. “You missed your appointment, my goodness. I thought you started writing them down?”

“I…it was just bad timing,” he mumbled. He didn't know how to tell them the truth, even now. How could he make it make sense?

His father sighed. “We can book another one, but you know they need a week.”

“Yeah. I'll stay until then. Then I gotta go again. Pala will come collect me.”

“No! No going anywhere,” Diyana cut in, with the sort of gentle force that always stopped him in his tracks. “We drive you home. And you stay put. No questions.”

“But—wait—no—”

His mother clicked her tongue, and Fen clenched his fists beneath the table, but that was the end of his protests. He exchanged a helpless look with Pala.

One awkward lunch later, the pair retreated to Fen's room to lounge in his bed. Rough fabric, too-thin blanket, all smelling of home—it was so soporific and drowning that briefly he did wish he didn’t have to go—that he had dreamt up that entire ordeal.

But Pala was here, sitting beside him, and on her wrist there was a knotted cord. Chances to linger were in short supply.

“Will you be able to get away from them?” Pala asked.

Fen’s eyes darted to his door. “Come get me when I’m done,” he answered. “By Travelling. You can do that, right?”

Pala’s eyes widened. “Yeah—but—won’t they get angry?”

He shook his head. “Even if they ground me after that, what can they do? I'll let them ground me a hundred times if it means I get to help you. But will you be okay doing Liss’ job without me?”

“I will be, I think,” she murmured. “I’ll just…focus on you when I Travel.”

“You can do it without me. I know you can. But—wait, let me give you something.”

Tumbling from his bed, Fen crouched by his desk and opened his drawer, rooting around among dried-up pens and unused notebooks until he pulled from its depths his spare key. Then he dug some more, and came up with a piece of string—dark red, the kind that students made friendship bracelets with, threading beads onto the strands.

He was long past those pastimes, but he could still thread the key onto the string without looking.

“Take it,” he said, stretching out to place it in her cupped hands. “It’s the key to our front door. That way…no matter what happens…you can always come home.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, looping it around her neck, like a charm. “I think…well, if you've gotta stay, then I should head off. The sooner I go, the sooner I'll be back.”

Fen’s face twisted with a frown. “Yeah, that's true. I'll see you…soon.”

She offered a wan smile, then leaned over and pulled him into a hug, both desperately clawing back these remaining seconds together. “Good luck at the doctor’s,” she whispered.

“And good luck finding those papers.”

Clutching that key in her fist, Pala slid off the bed, taking her warmth with her. She waved, eyes welling up, and made the next leap from his bedroom floor. 

Then, Fen was staring at his stacks of dog-eared textbooks, space snapping back into place where his friend had been.

---

Fen was right: Pala was capable of Travelling alone—though she never was truly without him, warming his key in her palm before each jump.

She quickly learned she did not have to worry about food, drink nor sleep when she had five worlds at her fingertips. She could pilfer food from a picnic table or a supermarket, cook it on a stove in the next world over—instant noodles were her friend—and eat the meal anywhere that she pleased. Her backpack grew heavy with stolen snacks.

Sometimes she forgot where she had stolen them. Sometimes she forgot more important things. The English name of the tree that produced sweet white blossoms. The street number of her parents' house.

Although Travelling was mostly not taxing, she found that doing it thrice or more in a row made her too dizzy to walk. She began to space out her leaps by hours, taking ten minutes here and there to bathe and change.

She had avoided Havaiki entirely—she knew, if she thought too hard, that she would pop up next to Fen again and land him in hot soup with his parents. Instead, she chose empty hospital wards and campsite beds, places no one would check for days at a time while they were not in use.

It was in adventures strung together by those tiny comforts that Pala found the first document. Hidden two worlds past her own, the files were stored in a database on an island. But she soon found that with its author and the name of the lab, she could locate a hardcopy in the office of an employee who had thought to print and label it. She brought the dog-eared copy back to her temple home base and stashed it in a drawer.

The second document was in the locked room of an archive. The locals spoke English, so she asked about the text at the counter, and was gruffly told it was not available to borrow. But now she knew where the copy was held, it was easily uncovered and plucked from its place, for the lock had not been designed to protect against people slipping in from the gap between worlds.

*

The third document, or so Liss’ notes indicated, was in a Russian military base. 

The lands around it were bleak and snowy. Pala found the edifice collapsed into a pile of rubble, spanning horizon to red horizon.

A second leap, back and forth, brought her into a chamber so dark she could not take two steps without stubbing her toe. She needed a torch. She leapt forward two worlds, aiming for a shop with lighting supplies.

She found herself in a souvenir store where every sign was in Spanish, a speaker somewhere blasting the local music while tourists milled about. A bottle opener torchlight with the name of Buenos Aires in blue would have to do. She snuck it away from that plane and returned to the world of reddening snow.

Once again, creeping through that icy, subterranean dark, Pala clicked the torch on. The thin white beam cut through the twirling dust. She shivered and pulled her arms closer. She could go get a jacket…but no, she had already leapt four times, and the dizziness was starting to set in.

The light beam met a fallen shelf. She tiptoed around it. It was too quiet, and the stench of decay was growing noxious here. As her next footstep crunched, a rat skittered away towards the fumes of decay, and she shrieked and stumbled to find herself…

…face to face with a person. A person, or their remains, slumped over the shelf, with no eyes in their sockets. Their spine showed through the decaying rags of their skin, and the sweet, putrid stench was so thick it seemed to stain the inside of her mouth.

Pala felt her stomach roil, her lunch threatening to come up. She could not scream, for she was sure she would vomit first. When she closed her eyes, she saw Liss throwing her to the ground, hitting her with a cane like her mother did. When she opened her eyes, she saw the corpse.

“I can’t—I can’t!” she choked, clutching the key that hung from her neck, and leapt, and she did not stop till she had Travelled four worlds up.

---

The memory of the decaying body carried Pala three hops. By then, all she remembered was having seen one, but none of its details.

When she crashed onto the clinic floor, right at Fen’s feet, he almost ripped out the cannula from leaping. “Pala!” he shouted, leaning resolutely back in his chair.

Across the room, the nurse dropped his phone and shouted, “How the hell did you get in here?”

Pala crawled to her feet while the horror settled upon her. “Fen, I can’t,” she croaked, tears spilling down her cheeks.

The nurse, much taller broader than she, seized her arm and dragged her towards the exit.

The last she saw of Fen while she was plucked through the door was his stricken, glassy stare.

*

Fen’s parents were waiting in the chairs outside the clinic. When Pala was sent out, they both straightened with surprise, with Diyana pointing. They called her name and waved her over. She sat down beside Taito, head hung, saying nothing.

Taito cleared his throat. “Um. Thanks for visiting Fen. I didn't know you were here.”

“Yeah. Of course, had to be here for him.”

“Did you really stop going to school? Why?”

“Er…I…decided my parents were right…”

Twenty minutes of increasingly nonsensical fibs later, Fen reappeared in the same hallway with a plaster over the needle site. He seemed in a greater hurry than he should be, for having just been on a blood drip.

“Can I talk to Pala for a minute?” he burst out.

His parents looked at each other, then at her. “Don't be too long,” said Diyana.

Fen grasped Pala’ hand and dragged her in the direction of the water coolers. Once out of the parents’ line of sight, he said, “Is everything okay? What happened?”

Pala shook her head. “I…I got two of the documents. But the third one…I ended up in a collapsed building, and there was—a corpse. I could see stuff I didn't want to. I saw a corpse and I just had to leave, and I forgot everything about it to make the jumps. But the document, I don't know where it is, and I can't go back, I can’t go back…”

He grasped both of her hands. “Hey. If it was in a collapsed building, just tell Liss that. The building was in ruins, the documents were destroyed.”

“You mean…lie?” Her eyes widened.

“It's not a lie if it's a reasonable conclusion based on what you saw.”

“I…guess so. It still feels like I'm making something up.”

“I know. It’s harder to say something than nothing.” He glanced at his parents. “Let’s just…go back to Liss’ world, okay?”

“You don’t want to tell them anything?”

He sagged, eyes drifting to his parents again. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we could just…tell them the truth.”

*

The pair stood before Taito and Diyana, glancing shakily at each other every few seconds. And Fen was the one who began to explain.

That Pala was a Traveller, that she could hop between universes, that she had been bound by a stranger beyond their world, with powers unlike anything they had ever seen before.

“Okay, stop telling tall tales,” was the first thing Diyana said. “What are you really sneaking away for?”

Pala and Fen looked helplessly at each other. “Nothing,” he pressed on. “It's the truth. I won't lie about something important—you know that.”

At first both parents raised their eyebrows and frowned. But then, Fen supposed, such oddities were whispered about often enough in Havaiki that they shifted quickly from disbelief to concern. And when Pala showed them her new rope bracelet, then leapt out of existence and fell back into the universe behind them, that concern became a confused terror.

“It's real? You're not making it up? There are… Oh, Fen. This is a lot!” Taito clutched his head.

“Why would I make this up?” Fen snapped. “Wouldn’t it be way easier if I’d come up with a more believable reason?”

Diyana frowned. “So this stranger, Liss…is stalking Pala? And she can explode things? With her mind?”

Fen nodded slowly. “I know it's very hard to believe, but we really need to go back. Please. If we don’t…I’ll be in a lot of danger.”

Diyana sighed. “If it's all true, then we can’t stop you from leaving,” she murmured, with a sort of halting surrender. “Right?”

He nodded again. “I'm only telling you this because I don't want to hide it from you. It’s not because I am asking your permission. I love you, Mama and Tā, but this is so important that I will break your rules for it. You can ground me for a year after I come back.”

With a sad smile, Taito clapped a hand on Fen’s shoulder. “I’m worried about you. I always am. You're a good boy—but you keep getting into all kinds of trouble. Giving us both heart attacks!”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I promise I'll keep as safe as I can.”

“I know. You’re sixteen, you can decide for yourself. Just don't forget next month's appointment, 'kay.”

Diyana turned to Pala. “You…keep our son safe, okay? With your…magical powers?”

“I'll try my best, Aunty,” Pala murmured.

He couldn't tell if his mother truly believed them, or of she was simply playing along while she processed everything in secret. They both seemed to be beginning to come to terms with it by now—that if he said he was leaving, that was that: they would open the door tomorrow morning and find his room empty.

Still, the dread in their eyes wrenched him in two.

Fen dashed forward and pulled both of his parents into the tightest hug he had ever given them. They both pulled him into their arms, snug as a sweater on a cold day, and he could see the glistening of their eyes when he looked up. “We'll be back. I'll make sure.”

Then, as they pulled apart, Pala reached out to take his hand. “Let's go report back,” she whispered.

Fen nodded back, returning her grip. It had to be done, one way or another. “Mama, Tā, I'll see you soon.”

---

Out in the vivid dusk on the Undying Ring, Liss sat with Noma on the temple’s highest terrace, beneath the shadow of that forbidding tower and its highest ring. They warded off the evening chill with each other’s warmth, arms twined together.

“I've known you so long, and yet I'm still learning new things about you,” whispered Noma.

“I'm learning,” Liss murmured, “that you're very easy to tease.” She shifted her grip so she could nuzzle Noma’s neck, drawing a tiny squeal.

“Liss!” Noma gasped, arms squeezing tighter. They sighed as they sank into the embrace, Noma burying her face in Liss’ shoulder. “Liss. If I can be honest…”

Liss grinned. “You can always be honest.”

“Well…so much is happening. Travellers…strange universes…you’re doing so much that I still don’t understand, no matter how much I read. And I can’t quite connect it all together, I can’t see how finding these documents is going to free us from Orsand.”

“That's all fair,” Liss murmured, musing in her mind's eye upon all the cords and chains that linked her grand plan together. “You remember what we discussed on the smuggler's island, don't you? None of us are free until we all are. So as long as there's a single place in the world that Orsand still controls…they will keep crawling back. No, Orsand doesn't exist without conquest. All its scientific knowledge, its secret technologies, it used to lord over the rest of the world. And now, we will use ours to eradicate them.”

Noma nodded slowly. “That makes sense…even if there's still parts I that I can't place in the picture. But it's alright. I don't mind not understanding some things.” With a simple smile, her eyes drifted towards the sea yet again.

Liss sighed. You have a shortcut to my heart, she thought, with a chill that—like the evening breeze—bore joy and fear in equal measure.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Atlantic Archives - I

Content warnings (may contain spoilers)

This chapter depicts harrassment, racist microaggressions, and alcohol consumption.

All considered, Felix finds ghosting with Honourless not much different from taking the Tunnel Machine or the wormhole portal. The only thing exceptional about it is that this world-shattering jump is powered by a person.

It seems to take a toll of equal measure, as if Honourless were hauling them bodily across an endless chasm with her bare hands. For more than a minute, he can see nothing but the spinning of colours, but he hears her agony somewhere, and that of his companions, their grips tight as talons around his wrists.

Then the pictures freeze, and they plummet through a blinding terrace of glass storefronts, groaning as they hit the rough pavement. Felix crawls to his feet and dusts out his shirt while his head spins. He fishes about in his pocket for his new watch, inspecting the glass for scratches.

In the middle of polishing its face with his handkerchief, he hears Honourless grumble and Marcia reply, “Thank you, we should be all right from here.”

He hears a deep inhale behind him, and turns just in time to see Honourless’ form twist into the fabric of space and vanish, like a needle pulled through cloth.

“Well, let us find ourselves the ‘Simmons Archives,” Vesper declares, hands on her hips as she peers up at an endless facade of stone and glass. “Where to start?”

Felix lifts a finger. “Now, before any looking,” he says, “how about somewhere to leave our luggage and get cleaned up?”

*

Vesper leads the search through the brilliant, faceted streets of New York City for the hotel where they will put up for the next ten days. Of course, as the source of their funds, it is Felix who makes the eventual choice—and that turns out to be the Ansonia, whose white walls and carved windows form the singular most opulent building that Vesper has seen since they began looking.

“Three single suites,” he states at the counter, “for ten nights starting tonight.”

Vesper watches with a gradually furrowing brow as Felix writes a cheque—six hundred and sixty dollars, all in block letters, signed with a flourish that seals in her mind her impression of his entire person.

She hasn’t any clue how much six hundred and sixty dollars amount to here—but she would baulk at the idea of paying six hundred and sixty of any currency for anything she won’t get to keep for years.

It is when the bellboys pick up their luggage on trolleys and they are ushed towards the lifts that Vesper starts to sense the obscenity of the price Felix has so casually slid over the counter. After taking their keys, all they have to do is move with their feet: the lift is presided over by a red-capped operator with a cheery smile, and at the top there are more staff waiting, who guide them down a hallway dressed in gold, flowers and filigree.

They have consecutive reservations on the ninth floor. Vesper isn’t quite sure what she will see on the other side of the door, but when she does open it, what she finds is more like a movie set than a place of repose. The suite is furnished with a king bed, a sitting room, a balcony overlooking the Manhattan streets, a kitchen, and two bathrooms—one with a bathtub and one without. There are velvet curtains that she draws to let in the sun, and a desk carved of old mahogany with a matching armchair, all watched over by a crystal chandelier brighter than the sun. Atop the desk lies a card presenting the hotel’s humble thanks and a list of meal hours.

She kicks her bag under the desk and tumbles backwards into the bed—soft as a cloud, but of course. She groans, staring up at the blinding chandelier overhead. Of all the things she assumed of Felix the day they met, she has been right on precisely every count.

Indeed, if she were asked to picture the heir of a business magnate who hails from the borough of Kensington—no, Kensington and Chelsea, for some God-forsaken reason—she would picture Felix. It is almost comical.

But if it gets us places, she thinks, flipping over, who am I to complain?

---

The Ansonia’s buffet lunch is as close to the comforts of home as Felix has had since returning to his own world. Roast, mash, salads, toast, washed down with a cup of tea. He is the last to finish his meal, on account of trying not to spill gravy anywhere he wouldn’t like it to be, and Marcia and Vesper are awaiting him at the door when they reenter the city to resume their questing.

The mission of the day is simple: to locate the Simons Archive. This is, of course, far easier said than done. The hotel receptionist hasn’t heard of it, nor has the newsboy at the train station on the corner of 74th and Broadway.

It is during this time that Felix begins to examine the city in proper—the hallowed land of which he has heard a thousand tales. The farthest he ever voyaged was Paris. His father sees the hundred-floor behemoth of the Empire State Building every year. And here they stand, peering up at the tower for the first time, and in its swooping facade he sees the distant future he so recently left behind.

His two companions are too busy to marvel at the scenery. He likes to size up his colleagues; it is often a matter of survival. But in this case, it is also a fascinating exercise by itself.

Now that he understands Marcia’s speech, he hears for himself her penchant for forceful persuasion, pressing for knowledge in words sweet enough to sidestep hostility. She seems like one who, if sparring with words, might strike with a rapier’s poise.

Vesper, however, is blunt as a sledgehammer and just wry enough not to abrade. He is sure that it is Gloucestershire that he hears in her voice, recalling to him a riverine countryside like the ones where he spent some summers, by churches watching the hills.

It takes five more strangers for them to realise the whereabouts of Simmons Archives is scarcely common knowledge. The closest they get is when one businessman claims, “It rings a bell, but I cannot say where I’ve heard it.”

“If I may,” Felix declares as they regather, quite disgruntled, “I know of a respected scholar of metaphysics who resides with the King’s College. He would surely know where so important a cache of knowledge might be held.”

“Lead the way, then,” Vesper answers.

“Well, I have never met the man myself,” Felix replies, “but my father has. And I shall need directions, too.”

“My mistake! Give your Daddy a ring, won’t you?”

He laughs. “He has more important business than giving us directions. Like,” he plucks his watch from his pocket to glance at the time, “sitting down for a nice supper, I reckon.”

“I’m sure a few strangers won’t mind being inconvenienced,” Marcia replies, already walking towards the newsboy who is coming this way again.

The location of King's College is much easier found in this way. “Easy! It's a five-storey building on the corner of Church Street and Park Place,” the boy exclaims. Marcia turns to her two companions with a raise of her eyebrows.

All afternoon, taxicabs have been passing their street corner to and fro, shiny and black with leaf-like glass panels rising on stems from their chassis. Felix flags one down, and it trundles to a polite halt by the pavement. The trio climb aboard one after another, crammed hip to hip in a seat made for two.

“Corner of Church Street and Park Place?” he asks.

“Ah, King's College,” The driver flashes a grin, pulling a lever with his left hand.

“What is it with all this glass?” Marcia asks as they roll along down Broadway, pointing out the tree of glass leaves rising from the portal of a mall arcade.

Felix glances over. “Solar power,” he says. “The glass panels turn sunlight into energy that powers our machines—our cars, our telephones. This is the way plants have always made energy, and we have learned to do the same.”

“Reckon you could make this car move faster, then?” Vesper says with an unmistakeable grin to her voice.

“Reckon you could make this car move faster?” he replies. “It's electric, you know.”

“Electric cars? Now I've heard everything.”

“Is a telephone like what Hong Yi has?” Marcia puts in.

“His phone is like no phone I’d ever seen up till then,” Vesper answers. “No, clunky metal things attached to walls by wires, that’s what a telephone looks like.”

It is a pleasantly conversational journey, the wind breezing between the buildings carrying the estuarine river air. The trio keep rambling on long after they have alighted—there is simply so much to knowledge to align between their worlds.

They chalk up a fare of five dollars—surprising for the distance but nothing unheard of. Then the trio lift their gazes to peer up at the university’s brick facade. It is not much different from those of monasteries, owing perhaps to its adjoinment to the holy edifice that gives Church Street its name.

Inside, the receptionist, a Mister Pritchard, asks for their business. Felix has heard the name before. Sure enough, when he asks after Professor William Murrell and cites his connection with his father—Pritchard replies, “You're Felix! Mister Mercer has told us all about you. He was last here, what, a year ago? Blew in here and paid two students’ scholarships. Tell him we can’t wait for his next visit!”

“That does sound like him,” Felix answers with a laugh. While Mr Pritchard picks up the phone to make a call, his mind works away. A year ago—that was before he disappeared. Did the news ever reach the Professor?

“There we go,” Vesper says meanwhile, pointing out the brass object the receptionist is holding to his ear. “That’s a proper telephone. Like the ones my mother works with.”

“And it sends his voice to every room in this building?” asks Marcia. Vesper nods, and Felix notices how Marcia leans in with a sigh, too eager and pleased for him to mistake the feeling that accompanies her reply: “How magical.”

The two are in the midst of meeting eyes when Mr Pritchard puts down the phone and declares, “Take the elevator up to the second floor and look for Room 2-19.” He motions out the general location of the lift lobby, and with thanks from all three, the entourage is off to see the professor.

*

“Back from the dead!” is how Professor Murrell greets the group, extending his hand for a shake before they have even entered.

That is certainly one way for the meeting to begin. Marcia and Vesper both exchange a worried look with Felix, and he communicates as much as he can with his face—that’s not ideal, but do not worry.

“Well met, Professor,” he answers, shaking his hand.

“Oh, dispense with the formalities. Just William is fine. Please, please. Come inside. With your company, too. I never heard that you had returned!”

“Ah, had my father failed to mention it?” Felix answers, sitting down at the same time. “He must have wanted privacy, after the…press debacle.”

“Indeed, indeed! Can’t blame him. The coverage in London was scathing, by the sounds of it. Such is a world strung together by electric cables. A town may collapse across the sea, and you’d be none the wiser till someone called in with the news.” Murrell motions to Marcia and Vesper, who have yet to decide who will take the one remaining seat. “And how about you two? Pleasure to meet you…”

“Captain Lovelace, at your service,” Vesper answers.

“Captain! Of the navy?”

“The Royal Army,” she replies with a nod, to which he looks only impressed.

“And you?” he asks, turning to Marcia as she takes a seat.

“You can call me Marcia…or, Miss Junia.”

“Captain Lovelace, Miss Junia, a pleasure. How did you come to know Lord Mercer the Second here?”

“Oh, Professor, none of that, my father is hardly a lord—”

“I’m his, er, bodyguard,” Vesper says, and he can tell she is trying not to laugh.

Marcia makes a curtsey. “And I was his travel guide in my city for a while, but now I have joined them in their journeying.” Unlike Vesper, she sounds so convinced of her own statement that Felix begins to imagine it were true.

Murrell looks up. “Ah, a guide to which city?”

“Constantinople.”

“The Ottoman Empire,” Murrell gasps. Perhaps because of its outlandishness, the story they are spinning is drawing less suspicion than Felix expects. “How was it?”

“Exhilarating at times and trying at others,” Felix replies. “In fact, I have brought back with me a souvenir of sorts, if you’ll indulge me…”

Turning, he motions for Vesper’s bag, which she confusedly hands over. He makes a show of rummaging about in its largest pocket, before drawing a deep breath and producing, from its depths, a glittering dagger half wrapped in paper. The intricate metalwork on the hilt is inlaid with sparkling rubies—and it doesn't exist, of course, but it has all the presence of a real object.

“Absolutely remarkable!” declares Murrell, leaning in to squint.

“I cannot let you touch it,” he says before his nose can collide with the illusion. “It’s a very rare specimen, you see.”

“Of course, of course, I do not doubt that. But what an adventure, by the sounds of it!” He beams as Felix conscientiously puts the illusion away. “Why, I could sit here talking all day with the three of you about your travels—but I’m sure you have a reason for visiting.”

“Yes, and in fact, it has to do with my travels.” While the two have been talking, he has been concocting a singularly elaborate lie. “It is a bit of a story, if you’ll bear with me. And it concerns your research into metaphysics.”

“Well, then.” He hears the rustle of Murrell’s notebook as he pulls it from under his table. “Please carry on.”

The rest of Felix’s talking is punctuated by the scratching of the professor’s pen nib on paper. “You see, my life has quite changed in the past month. When I boarded the Tunnel Machine, I was expecting it to send me to San Francisco, but when I exited at the other end, the Tunnel Machine had deposited me in a place quite unlike America. There were ancient houses, and mosques, and all the signs of a brewing revolt. The machine had set me down in Constantinople!

“I’ve heard of the Orient Express, of course. But I had entered the machine without so much as a cent, and my bank has no branches inside the Ottoman Empire. So, for weeks I travelled, with Marcia’s kind aid. It was only by luck that I ran into Vesper, who had been waylaid returning home from service, and I hired her to protect us. She knew of a ship that crosses the Mediterranean every fortnight, and true enough, it took us right home.

“When I arrived back in London, my father was elated to have me back. But when I told him of my curious findings, he was adamant about pursuing no further research into the Tunnel Machine. It was too dangerous, you see! It had stolen me away from him. I, however, see that as a missed opportunity. And I have since taken it upon myself to progress his work where he will not.

“Through my own research, I have learned that there is a document here in New York that may hold some answers, under the custody of the Simmons Archive, which I would very much like to get a hold of. A document by an author who calls himself Victor Riparius. And so, I come before you here today to ask if you know where I may find it.”

Murrell puts down his pen and leans back in his seat, drawing in a deep breath. “Well, what an adventure! Much as I'd love to learn every detail you can spare, I see you are here on business.” He parts his hands. “You have come to the right man. I know exactly the records you seek, for I once had an interest in reading them, too.” Felix’s breath catches at these words. “Victor Riparius. A Theory on the Medium Beyond Space and Time. But I am afraid that that document…was recently stolen.”

Felix glances over his shoulder at his two companions, who stare back, both mirroring his quiet concern back at him.

Murrell's brow furrows. “But then…there may be a copy of it that survives yet.” The words bring all three attentions back. “There is something the late Mark Simmons—Junior, mind you—told me just before his death. The Archive is not quite the bastion it used to be, but back in the day…like all archives of the day, they made copies of everything. And supposedly, half a century ago, in a big old feud over the family legacy…the Simmons family split the collection down the middle. The firstborn, Mark Simmons Junior, kept all the originals. His brother, Michael, who made and preserved the copies, kept the copies.”

At this point, Felix has started jotting notes in his pocketbook. “An archive without control of its spares—quite an unenviable position. Do you reckon the theft was orchestrated by Michael?”

“I respected Mark deeply, but he flirted with scandal more than would be wise. I am not in correspondence with the brother, but his copies may help you now. Michael Simmons…I hear he went on to start his own treasury—the Simmons Treasury…”

For the next hour or so, Felix continues to lie like his life depends on it, and his companions helpfully play along. At the end of the meeting, after perhaps too many tangents, they deliver their pleasantries and part at the Professor’s door.

They stroll out onto Church Street to the sound of the clock chiming five o’clock across the rooftops. The sun still hangs low in the sky, skimming the hard edges of skyscrapers. ”Too late for the Treasury, I think,” Vesper says. “Lord Mercer, why don’t you summon us another cab?”

Felix chuckles, shaking his head. “You’ll offend some lords, calling me that.”

“Seven hundred dollars for a ten-night stay,” she scoffs, albeit without venom.

“Seven hundred dollars is but a hundred and forty pounds.” He walks up to the pavement at the sight of a cab and waves a hand to hail it.

“What’s that? A hundred and forty pounds? That’ll fetch you a car.”

The cab’s electric wheels roll to a stop. “Two cars,” Felix replies over his shoulder, then turns to the driver. “The Astonia, please?”

*

Marcia has never been quite so startled by a city as this. Even San Francisco, despite its crowds, was easier to know, with its shorter, squatter houses, and streets that leaned towards the sea. The streets of Manhattan, however, feel as tall as they are long, edifices stacked into the sky, throwing shadows farther than she can see. It is like walking through canyon after canyon, all jagged angles and glass, and gazing up at the top of the Empire State Building makes her head spin.

She follows Felix and Vesper, both only slightly less disoriented than she, and when she is asked to talk, she does, still weighing in her mind the new rhythm and diction she hears in their mouths. Nevertheless, she cannot understand a single word painted or carved in any structure—with the exception of a few Latin mottos rendered in majuscule, always mounted on the facades of halls. These brief patches of familiarity beckon like hearths amid a maze of illegible print—some of them dressed in lights, flashing everywhere she looks.

The streets keep blazing into the depths of night, turning night to day below. Wearing a fresh dress, Marcia leans against the wooden frame of her suite window and gazes down on the streets. The wood is cool to her touch, through her hair, under her palm. But below her, everything is abuzz—a pulse of machinery beneath the veneer of the stones. Carriages roll back and forth, lighting the grey roads with nose lamps, horns blaring like strange marshland birds. Cables swing in the breeze.

She relaxes her shoulders and exhales, and only now begins to sort through her thoughts. This is Felix’s world, in more ways than one. He bought them these rooms. He has paid their way to the corners of the city. She isn’t sure what sort of birthright he comes from; perhaps he is more like Lady Diana than herself. And this place is revealing hidden faces of Vesper’s that Marcia did not see before. She’s from the future; she knows all about the telephones and cars.

And electricity. That is the part Marcia still doesn’t quite understand. Is there a circulatory system through the city, like plumbing, that feeds light to every house? She has seen the cables strung along walls and over streets, from the telephone receiver to its cradle.

She thinks of Vesper again, throwing lighting from her hands. Is that what does it all? The magic that brings the city to life? How can such thin vessels transmit such ferocious power, ignite the towers and halls for miles?

As Marcia notices her hunger setting in for the first time, she makes a quiet exit from her room. But even as she is stepping onto the carpet outside, the clicking of the next door makes her turn.

“Ah, Marcia! Good evening,” Felix calls as his head pokes out. He closes his door behind him. He is without coat and vest, wearing only a white shirt and trousers. “How went your rest?”

“Felix,” she answers. His name is also like a Latin word. She doesn’t quite know him, except through others: how Adelaide adores him, and how Vesper likes to make jabs that he returns gladly. “The rest was much needed, thank you. Being in this city has been…overwhelming.”

“It certainly has that effect.”

“Are you headed for dinner too?”

“Yes, but shall we wait for Vesper?”

Marcia glances past him at Vesper’s door. “Assuming she hasn’t already gone by herself.”

He leans and knocks on the door, once, then twice, calling her name. No reply.

“You know her well,” he says with a hint of a smile as they carry on towards the lift—or elevator—she has heard it called different things.

“Only as well as I could after two weeks,” Marcia murmurs.

She can still hear the smile in Felix’s voice as he replies, “You can learn a lot about someone in two days, let alone two weeks.”

“That you can. If you know what you’re looking for.”

“Unless they're like you. You strike me as the sort who only shows people what you want them to see. Subtle. But subtlety will only get you so far.”

“So says the master of pretences himself. What was all that about a trip to Constantinople and a debacle with your father? It was one lie after another.”

“What can I say,” he sighs, “if there were any trait worth inheriting from the man himself…”

Internally, she mulls over the meaning behind these words. “You know,” she ventures then, “it’s rare for one of your background to be so kind.”

He seems briefly surprised, then he laughs. “It’s rare for one like you to give someone like me the benefit of the doubt.”

The elevator rings up to their floor. A mutual understanding has settled between them, as the bell fills the silence. Marcia cannot know what he has surmised about her—but just like that, she is fairly certain of several things he did not say, too, and she knows her trust can be placed here.

---

Felix purchases a copy of the New York business directory and deposits it at the breakfast table. While he dines, he refuses to touch the book, but Vesper has no such reservations. She idly flips through it with her left hand while stabbing bacon with a fork.

It is fairly simple finding where the S’s begins, less so locating “Simmons Treasury” from the cascade of businesses starting with “S”: even the “Si”’s seem to go on forever, until she finds her quarry and jabs her finger at the line to keep her place. She swallows her mouthful and then reads it out: “Simmons Treasury. 216 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn.”

Felix puts down a slice of toast in his plate. “Brooklyn? That is across the bridge from here.”

Vesper inhales a bacon strip. “What do you know about Brooklyn?”

“Next to nothing. So…this will be an adventure for all of us. Unless Marcia has secretly visited Brooklyn before.”

“I do not know what Brooklyn is,” Marcia puts in. “Into uncharted territory we go?”

---

Brooklyn is many things: a city on slopes, a city on a creek, a city across a bridge. The metal cable stays strobe past as they ride, the blue-green waters gleaming through.

It doesn’t soar quite as high as the spires of Manhattan, but it makes up for that in density, wires criss-crossing the streets on telegraph poles, brickwork and stonemasonry and wood crammed side by side sheltering storefronts, apartments, factories. Their taxi trundles under elevated rails, through markets and past parklands where picnickers feed swans.

This time, it is a ten-dollar fare, which Vesper supposes makes good sense for the scenic route, but she at least is glad she isn't the one paying. They hop off with thanks in front of a three-storey brick terrace and peer up at the entrance, above which is mounted the name of their destination: Simmons Treasury.

Beneath the sign, a man leans smoking against the archway in a suit too small for his builder’s physique. Through a door propped open with a wedge, stairs descend into a basement, out of which wafts the scent of old tobacco and spilt wine. The treasury’s only visible windows are set at knee height, blacked out by wooden boards. Telltale shards of beer bottles and smoking pipes are trapped behind their bars.

The three look at each other. “Not the treasury I was expecting,” Vesper mutters.

“It must be the place, it was the only Simmons Treasury,” Felix replies, then steps backward from the doorway, clearing his throat. “Er, after you.”

Vesper fires him a look. “Your Daddy never taught you how to hold your own in a pub?”

“Well…erm, no.”

Laughing, she turns to Marcia and waves her to her side. “You can handle a few drunkards, I take it?”

“Over the table, yes,” she answers. “But failing that, I can throw that table, too.”

As they arrive at the entrance, the man whom Vesper now understands to be a bouncer lowers his pipe. “Good morrow,” he says with a nod of his shaved head. “Any weapons to show?” Each one lifts their hands in turn, Vesper opening her coat to reveal nothing hidden there. Felix hesitates, but eventually does the same with his coat.

“Take care of your things, eh,” says the bouncer with a meaningful nod, then waves them inside. “And mind your step.”

Vesper quietly shakes her head as they enter the cool shade of the entryway. “You should’ve dressed less flashy,” she mutters.

“How was I to know this ‘treasury’ was not actually a treasury?” he whispers pointedly back.

“We’ll defend you,” Marcia replies, bringing up the rear as they begin downstairs.

The stairs first descend half a floor, growing more uneven as they go. The brass railing is all that stands between them and a fall. A chandelier hangs from the centre of the ceiling, dressed in gauzy cobwebs, but it only lights the scene as much as a pub asks for. It hangs only a few feet above the heads of the clientele, and one could climb atop a table to pluck out one of the glass crystals if they so wished.

Their flight of stairs ends at a mezzanine overlooking the dining area proper. Much larger than the entrance betrayed, it is a maze of round tables with the bar up against the facing wall. This balcony runs halfway around the edge of the hall on either side, a few couples kissing and swaying in the shadows. Then where the balcony ends, two flights of steps descend to the tables, hugging the walls.

“No convenient escape paths,” Vesper says, considering the structure.

“Well, that’s not an optimistic appraisal,” Felix answers in an undertone. “Clearly the ‘treasury’ wasn't very successful.” Then he points at the bartender, wiping a few glasses despite a pair of men jostling each other and making jabs from the other side of the counter. “If anyone knows anything about the owner, it’ll be she.”

They pick their way around the left side of the hall, down the stairs. They turn many heads as they arrive below. The trio pull together into a tighter knot, Marcia and Vesper only just a step in front of Felix.

“Never thought I’d become your actual bodyguard,” Vesper mutters. “And I’m not even getting paid. Lousy assignment, this.”

“I may as well at this point,” Felix sighs.

By now, the bartender has nonchalantly sidled over to the left end of the bar, but the two leery men have followed her. They come to a stop beside the men, catching one’s last sentence— “Come out from behind that counter.”

“Excuse me,” Vesper says, positioning herself with an arm on the bartop such that the men have to make her room. The bartender, polishing a wineglass until now, looks up.

“Oi, who do you think you are?” one man spits, beer on his breath. He wears a gold ring on one hand, tarnished with age.

“I’m here to talk to the bartender,” she replies coolly.

“What can I get you?” asks the bartender, putting on her customer smile. Her hair is in a long braid, a red bowtie and black suspenders over her spotless white shirt.

Vesper trawls through her memories to call up her father’s favourite. “Wouldn’t happen to have a malt whiskey, would you?”

“MacAllan?”

“I’ll have a shot of that.” She looks over her shoulder at her companions. “You?”

“Happy with a glass of chardonnay,” Felix says.

“I have a Buena Vista, it’s a lovely local offering…”

“That sounds agreeable.”

“None for me,” Marcia replies. “I don’t drink.”

These words immediately draw the attention of both men, and the one wearing a ring cuts in, “They don’t let you drink in your culture? Let me get you a glass, dove…I’ll show you the American way…”

“Shut your gob,” Vesper snaps, and the man reels back. Marcia, playing the part without a thought, retreats to Vesper’s side. “We don’t want trouble, so don’t come looking for it.”

“Oh, she’s getting fresh with me. Jealous, are you? Jealous you’re not as lovely as your friend.”

Vesper forces herself to look away, but she continues to seethe until the bartender, meeting her eye, gives her a subtle shake of her head. She says, “There is one more thing. Can we talk to you somewhere less…open?”

The bartender makes a show of looking left and right, nodding as she does. “Less open? After we close, then.”

“What time would that be?”

“Eleven o’clock.”

Vesper blinks. “Eleven…all right.”

The ring man slaps his forehead. “Oh, I get it! They’re trib—” He does not get to finish the word, for his friend clamps his hand over his mouth, and then they descend into a spat while the bartender calmly pours the whiskey.

Vesper doesn't drink often, but when she does, she cannot tell the difference between a good spirit and a middling one. They pick a table, but only for Felix’s benefit, because he seems to genuinely like his wine. Vesper downs her whiskey in two mouthfuls and turns to Marcia. “Sorry about those twats back there.”

Marcia shakes her head. “I'm used to it.”

“Well, that's even worse. Maybe you're pretty, but that doesn't give anyone the right to be—”

“I’m pretty?” Marcia asks with a raising of her eyebrows.

“Well, yes, anyone with eyes can see that.”

“Is that so?” She accompanies this with a laugh both shaky and coy.

“Oh please, Marcie. Now you're just making me say it again on purpose. Fool me twice…” Across the table, Felix laughs. Vesper frowns at him. “What’s so funny now?”

He covers his smile with the back of his palm. “Sorry, hearing you two talk is…it's quite delightful. Marcia, like I said, subtlety…”

“Don't start now,” Marcia gasps.

Vesper holds up both palms. “All right, now I feel like you're joking about me. But it's flying over my head.”

“Oh, it's nothing, nothing important,” Felix murmurs, again hiding his smile behind a hand, then he distracts himself with his half-drained glass. With a shrug, Vesper glances over at Marcia again, but the latter's eyes never stay in one spot for long.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Atlantic Archives - II

Content warnings (may contain spoilers)

This chapter depicts racist microaggressions, implications of racial segregation, assault, and graphic injury.

On their next taxi, the driver assures Felix that there will still be vehicles roaming Brooklyn at ten on the clock.

Marcia cannot help but notice it is always Felix they address, as if seeing her and Vesper merely as his accessories. But the man himself never goes along with it, maintaining conversation with a quiet insistence.

As the noon sun vaults over Brooklyn, they wander to the neighbouring park to await the close of day, listening to the strains of buskers drift over the streets. Picking up a local delicacy—meats, sauces and vegetables squashed between two slices of bread—they find a bench under a lakeside tree.

“What an odd way to dine,” Felix remarks between mouthfuls.

Vesper laughs. “Don’t like touching your food with your hands?”

“It’s a tad unsanitary, don’t you think? Oh, I’m making myself sound like such a snob.”

“As is your God-given right.”

This is a wild park, just the right amount of unkempt, the lake running clear beside them. Marcia watches the parkgoers drift by: a family playing under the trees, a couple strolling by the waters. In the heart of Manhattan, the she felt a quiet disgust that not even Constantinople ever showed her. Most everyone she saw there was pale as the winter moon—and they kept only with alike companions—busy with their books, glaring down their noses at her.

Here, there is less of an imperious air. There may as well be several kingdoms here: she sees faces that she could have glimpsed across Carthage and Constantinople, not so pale or ruddy like Valerius and his children.

Here, soaking in the sunlight and the quiet drone of her companions’ voices, her body eases out of a clenching anxiety she did not notice till now.

She briefly thinks of the other trio. What are Hong Yi, Adelaide and Artur up to now? Poor Hong Yi must be shouldering all the burden of conversation.

She sighs and hugs her legs, resting her chin on her knees. Just beyond her attention, the conversation between Vesper and Felix rambles on, and she lets her mind float upon the names she doesn't know.

“...learned the stories were true. The Thames does smell like a loo.”

Felix sighs. “I have seen things floating in the water that I cannot mention in polite company.”

“Well, one thing they did do right was put up the old smoke downstream of everyone else,” Vesper answers.

Marcia wonders if they have both known the same river, in the same place—whichever place it is that the English language comes from, perhaps.

“For shame,” Felix mutters. “For shame.”

---

By ten o’clock, the clientele of the Simmons Treasury is thin, and the bartender is finally off her shift. The loiterers, though fewer, are not completely dispersed. Nevertheless the two rowdy men are nowhere to be found.

The first thing the bartender says is her name: Margaret. Then, “We get all kinds here. Sorry you were privy to the worst of it today. Now, how may I help you?”

“We came here expecting a treasury,” Vesper says. “This place looks like no treasury I've ever seen. Is there an owner we can speak to? A Michael Simmons…”

“That would be my father,” Margaret says then, face impassive. “But he is too dead to be running a treasury. I am the owner.”

“Ah, our information must have been out of date, then. On that matter…we’re here to find out about the document copies that your late father held under the name of the treasury. It’s quite important to our ongoing research.”

Margaret hums in thought. “All our copies,” she says, “are upstairs. My father did mean to start that treasury, but I'm afraid it simply never made financial sense.”

“So, the copies are here.”

“Some of them are. Some of them were lost in the fire of Sixty-Four.”

Vesper sighs. “Do you have the one titled…A Theory…on the…”

“The Medium Beyond Space and Time,” Felix reads off his pocketbook.

“Ah, that one.” Margaret’s gaze lifts, then her eyes narrow. “Awfully convenient that you should be asking for the copy so soon after the original disappeared.”

The three look at each other. “We are happy to prove our honest intentions,” Felix answers.

She yawns. “Come again tomorrow, then,” she replies. “The earlier the better. We open at noon.”

*

“It doesn’t sound like she’ll let us take the document with us,” Vesper says as they exit.

“Not at all,” Felix answers. “But perhaps we needn’t take it—a transcription is in the realm of possibility, depending on how long it is. Otherwise, we may simply have to memorise its contents.”

It is only after ten minutes’ walking in the golden lamplit streets that a taxi rolls into their avenue to take them back to their lodgings. Almost no one is around by the time they arrive, save for the counter receptionist, looking halfway to dreamland when they board the elevator and call their floor themselves.

---

It is a quiet night all round. Rain falls, muffled on stone, and continues gently into the grey morning. When they decide to leave, it is with umbrellas provided by the hotel, and a stash of writing utensils in their pockets.

Today, they are dressed for the windchill, so Vesper has her coat on, a much nicer one than she would normally buy on her own dime, with brass buttons and a tight weave.

They see from up on the mezzanine that the Treasury has two bartenders today, one of whom is Margaret, they can tell from the loosely braided hair draped over one shoulder.

When they descend the stairs into the pub, there are more eyes following them this time. Drinkers, gamblers at a card game on the floor, a smaller number of daters—many kinds of eyes follow them as they press towards the counter. They wave for Margaret before they have reached her, and at this moment she excuses herself and strides calmly from behind the counter.

“Good morrow,” Felix says as they come to meet her. “I hope you rested well?”

“Quite well, despite the anticipation,” she replies, then her voice drops, and her eyes dart across the hall. “I see you are determined to view the article. Well, before I unlock the second floor for you…I will have you understand how important it is that this document, being the sole remaining copy of a century-old text, be returned in the condition you found it in.” There are nods around. Margaret waves them towards the counter door. “For that reason, I shall be asking you for a security deposit.”

Vesper turns to Felix and raises an eyebrow. He meets her eye and frowns, then inhales and reaches into his pocket. From inside he produces his new toy—the pocket watch he bought in San Francisco. As he does, Vesper notices a few glances from the clients in barstools and readies to intercept a robbery, but none make to take it.

“I hope this suffices,” he says. “It’s genuine gold and worth fifteen dollars.”

Margaret recoils. She gestures for their silence, waving them hastily towards the door behind the counter which she kicks ajar. “Don’t be waving that about in the open!” she mutters as the trio funnel through the door into the musty passageway behind, followed by a dozen gazes.

In the shadow of the door, Felix finally hands the watch over. Margaret pops it open to reveal its intricate lattice of cogs and wheels. She holds it up to her eye and gives it a full round of inspection.

“It’s heavy, and I see the maker’s mark. But I’m not convinced.”

“You could take this to the closest watchmaker and they would assure you of its authenticity.”

“I haven’t the time—and nor have you.” With barely a second’s warning, she holds it out in front of her and drops it.

“What are you—” Felix barely completes his sentence, lunging for the watch as it plummets from her hand. His shoulder collides with the wall as he snatches it. The woman meets his panicked stare with a shrug.

“Seems genuine to me,” she says with a satisfied nod, then extends a hand to take it again. “Here with it. You want to see the copies, don’t you?”

This time around, Felix stares at her until she has fully pocketed the timepiece.

*

Beyond that short passageway is a white tiled kitchen with industrial stoves, and beyond that kitchen is a staircase behind a second too-narrow door. The door is propped open with a water-damaged wooden block. They ascend the stairs, which change from stone to wood, and find another door into the floor above, of a finer make than the ones below. Reaching into her vest, Margaret pulls out her keyring.

The lock does not click, but clatters, so large are its internal mechanisms. The latch gives with a groan, and she pushes the door open to reveal a dim hall, two stories tall and clouded with the perfume of old paper. On the wall just overhead glow two rows of narrow windows, one for each floor, barely illuminating half the room. Pigeonhole shelves are stacked up to the ceiling along the walls and stand in rows on the floor, like those of old university libraries Vesper has only seen once or twice. Most are filled with books or paper files.

Margaret grasps a lever beside the door. “If I may ask, why do you want this document so sorely?” She throws the lever, and Vesper feels the shiver of a moving current as a dozen globes mounted between shelves flicker on in a wave of gold.

“We are studying the nature of reality, so as to map its shape and structure,” Marcia answers almost at once. “And the document will be key knowledge towards the completion of our work.”

“A peculiar pursuit, to be sure,” she answers. “But you must have heard about the travelling machine in London, then. Misfired horribly, I read. The passenger vanished into the ether.” 

There is a flicker of glances between the three. “A terrible tragedy,” Felix answers carefully. “All the more because we were so excited to see it succeed.”

Seemingly oblivious to their caution, Margaret takes them across the hallway, around two huddles of shelves, to the abandoned reception counter. A pair of glass doors stands shut beside it, peering into an unlit corridor.

“You are lucky that we won't have to hunt down the volume,” she says, approaching a stack of folios on the counter beside a gas lamp, “for the first thing I did when the Archive's news reached me was to check that our copy survives. Now, remember. If you take it beyond the walls of this room, through any of its entries or exits, your watch is forfeit.”

She begins to sift through the stack, before extracting a grey folio, dusting off its cover to peer over the writing. “Here it is—our copy of the missing document. De Doctrina in Medium Inter Spatium et Tempus. I hope you can read Latin.”

*

Margaret is right: from the very first page of the eighty-page folio, every single word is rendered in a language that Felix has only brushed with for an hour a week in school. He makes it two paragraphs before sighing in defeat and turning to hand it to Marcia.

“How much of this can you make out?”

Marcia takes the open file and peers in. “About three quarters of it,” she answers. “This Victor Riparius uses words in odd ways, but that may be because he speaks of something I do not understand.”

“Ah! Well, my good lady, you are a godsend in this time.” He begins to pull from his coat pockets a ruled book and writing utensils. “I doubt we could transcribe the full length of the text in what little time we have today, but if you would read it aloud…”

“That sounds like the best way,” she replies with a nod. “Alright—‘A Theory of the Medium Beyond Time and Space…’”

Marcia reads diligently for the better part of three hours. Across its pages, she unfolds an odd tale from the point of view of the author, Victor, in an older Cambridge, seeing the sky on a rare cloudless night.

“‘Here, one begins to imagine one could see the very farthest edges of space. It was while watching these stars, which formed the same constellations in almost every world, albeit altered, that I began to ponder what lies beyond them…beyond the worlds entirely…’”

The text grows denser as it proceeds, relying on metaphors to describe a vision of something so thoroughly strange that Marcia begins to voice her doubts about her reading. Even then, Felix makes notes of her words.

At four thirty, Marcia finally puts down the folder. “I am going cross-eyed,” she says. “We are almost halfway through.”

“You have done remarkably,” says Felix. 

“We’ll return tomorrow,” Vesper answers, “If Maggie lets us. We’ve only been three days—we’re well ahead of schedule.”

By the time they return the folder to its place, Margaret is wrapping up her afternoon shift.

She follows them up to the treasury room, inspects the folder, counts the pages, and gives a satisfied nod. Once they are back in the kitchen, she pulls Felix’s golden watch from her pocket, which he receives with both hands and a proper look at its face and mechanisms.

“Could we return tomorrow to continue our transcription?” asks Vesper.

“You need more time? My shift is at six o’clock tomorrow,” Margaret says. “I’ll see you then.”

---

Felix, Marcia and Vesper arrive back at the pub slightly later than six the following day, after a supper of pizza. It is rather less greasy than the offerings of future San Francisco and, all considered, Felix doesn’t half mind it, although Marcia—picking hers up with her hands—laughs that he insists on having it with a fork and knife.

When they descend the steps of the Treasury and peer out over the mezzanine, Felix senses some change in the ambience of the venue. It isn’t just that there are more people—and he sees faces he remembers from yesterday—it is a kind of restless bristling, the noise seeming to gutter at the half-full tables when they begin down the stairs. Only a single clink of a glass disrupts the otherwise expectant buzz.

“Lots of people, and lots of looks,” Marcia murmurs.

“Is it a Friday?” Vesper asks.

“It’s Thursday,” Felix replies solemnly. A knot forms in his stomach as they begin across the pub floor, Marcia and Vesper flanking him as before. It takes them until reaching the counter to ease into talking again, until Margaret finishes filling a pint and waves for their attention.

“Welcome back,” she calls, plopping the pint on the counter. From Marcia’s right, a man sidles over, giving the three of them a good eyeful.

“So…do you reckon now’s a good time?” Felix asks. “We seem to be drawing attention.”

Margaret’s face pales.

Felix has only just had a second to notice Marcia leaping at him, when his breath is knocked from his lungs and a lady much taller than himself crashes into the counter beside him with metal flashing.

He hears the air whiz past as the blade sinks into the lacquered countertop with a crunch.

Shouts rise. Chairs and tables scrape the floor. Marcia turns to him and shouts, “Take shelter!” In the same moment, he feels rough hands yank him sideways by the arm, and he begins to protest before seeing that it is only Margaret. He stumbles after, diving behind the fortress of the counter.

The floor is wet, but he keeps his footing. There are woven mats underfoot, some of them soaked. Margaret slams the counter door shut, flips her mop sideways, and wedges it in the gap to bar the exit—then the broom, then a barstool, for good measure. “Whew, I’ve been rehearsing that. Whoa!” She rams Felix with her shoulder, and he tumbles. A pint mug comes flying, shattering against the wall where his head was. She pops up from behind the counter. “Tyrell! That’s going to cost you! I know where you live!”

Felix reels for seconds, both hands planted on the sticky kitchen floor. In any other circumstance, he would be fretting over the state of the floor. This time, he only rises to his knees and wipes his hands on the tea towel hanging near his head.

Peeking over the cover, he is treated to a sight and a half. Bargoers crawl on the floor with bruised eyes and cuts on their cheeks. A growing knot of brawlers orbits the centre, before one is thrown bodily out of the circle and crumples to the floor. Through the gap, he glimpses Vesper, and then the gap is no more.

Amid a crashing of glass shards against the outside of the counter, Margaret crouches down beside him.

“Good heavens,” he breathes, lifting a hand to pull a shroud of light over them.

*

Marcia has not recognised, up till now, how easily she reads a crowd. She not only knows at once that there are fifteen people bearing down on them, but that most of them are drunk. There is almost no doubt that some of them saw the trio as easy pickings.

And perhaps they would be. It’s fifteen on four, or—she casts a glance at the counter, where Felix and Margaret have vanished into thin air—fifteen on two. Fifteen beasts might be fair, but fifteen humans, no matter how inebriated, would be a death match in any other case. 

She sees a knife flash—and at the sight of sharpened metal, her muscle memory possesses her. She dives under the stroke and kicks the assailant’s feet out from under them. Nearby she hears a cry and a snap, like a jolt between a hand and a door handle in a thunderstorm. Someone thuds onto the tabletop.

Marcia draws back to her ally’s side. “Stairs,” says Vesper. There is a rote thoughtlessness to her motions. “The railing. Herd them up.” She gasps as a pair of muscled arms lock around her neck from behind, but before the man can take her in a chokehold, she jabs his arm with a spark that stuns him long enough for her to tip him over her shoulders and throw him at the woman running at her with a stool. Both tumble across the floor in a crash of wood.

Long before then, Marcia has already begun to plot her path of egress. “Pathetic throw!” she shouts as a flying table misses Vesper. As soon as the throwers’ attentions swing to her, she begins to shoulder her way up to the staircase, pointing and taunting. Someone flies at her, kneeing her in the back, which throws sparks through her vision. An attempted grapple ends in her flinging them, briefly paralysed by a cocktail of pain chemicals, across the undressed floor.

Herding drunk people is easy, because they will follow the most outstanding sight in their vicinity. What is harder is keeping track of everything that’s happening at the same time. They’ve whittled the crowd down to nine. Vesper has already taken to the other staircase, splitting the throng in two between them. Marcia shouts and cajoles, dragging five up after her. Up the rickety stairs, hands on the brass baluster.

By now, her ally has already reached the mezzanine, both hands gripping the rail. Across the room their eyes meet. “Marcia, let go!” she shouts.

“Hold on tight,” Marcia answers, lifting her own hand away. 

Marcia is expecting to hear something, but there is no sound—only a brief silence, like a breath held—before the bargoers touching the rail seize and crumple and sputter, like marionettes briefly unable to control their limbs, hands tightening like vices on the brass.

It is only half a second, but to Marcia, it feels like a minute. When their fingers release the rails, they tumble to their knees, draped over the steps like a carpet of bodies.

Before she can begin to cheer, her eyes fly to a movement in her peripheral vision.

On the floor, someone is creeping over the bar counter, a dagger clutched in one hand. Marcia gasps, points, and begins to kick the half-conscious bodies off the stairs.

But Vesper is faster, and less considered. With a cry, she pommels herself over the mezzanine railing, leaps, and flies, hands seizing the rings of the chandelier.

Marcia’s breath catches. Vesper oscillates once, crystals clinking against each other, chain creaking. It does not give out to her weight.

On the second forward swing, she launches herself across the tables, over the heads of the unmoving crowd, and lands with a practised roll, just feet away from the counter.

The knife flies. Felix cries out and flinches away, but Margaret launches past him, shoving the assailant by the shoulders.

The struggle only lasts two seconds. Then Vesper springs across and yanks the assailant from behind—a clean, strong tug—and throws them, paralysed, to the floor.

Marcia begins to kick bodies off the stairs, which doubles as insurance that none of them are about to make a last-ditch effort to trip her. By now, she can feel a stabbing pain where she took a knee to her back, but it is nothing she hasn’t healed from.

“Is everyone all right?” she shouts as she races to meet them.

Margaret is clearing the blockade over the counter door. Turning as she arrives, Vesper parts her coat and shows a tear in the fabric just above her hip, the blood blooming on the fabric. “Oh, Vesper—”

“I’ve had worse,” Vesper answers in a ragged groan, already leaning against the counter. “Go see to the other two.”

“No, you’re—”

“I didn’t get to him in time, Felix is injured.”

Just past the counter, Felix’s eyes are unfocused, as if he were halfway to fainting. She hears a creak as Margaret finally clears the defences and opens the door, and Marcia slips through.

“Show me the wound,” she mutters, patting his shoulders.

Wordlessly he peels back his collar, where a splotch of blood has stained the white fabric. There is a bloodied cut—she lifts a corner of her sleeve and wipes it away to inspect the wound. His breath hitches in pain.

It is much deeper than a cut, but nothing life-threatening, unless the blade was somehow poison-laced—but certainly the worst he has ever been injured, if his pallour is to go by.

“How bad is it?” he asks.

“You’ll be all right,” she says. “Could you take care of him, Margaret? Do you have bandages?”

“You’ll be surprised how often they come in handy,” she answers, plucking open a counter drawer. “Here, have one for your other friend.” She dumps a handful of woven towels onto the countertop then tosses one white roll of gauze over. Marcia snatches it out of the air. The woman descends to Felix’s side with a sigh. “Oh, you poor thing. Don’t you fret, sir. I’ve been stabbed that deep before. By a glass shard, but you know…”

“Was it so—terribly—painful? Ouch! Is that whiskey?”

Once she is satisfied that Felix is in capable hands, Marcia flies out the door to Vesper. By now, she has dragged herself onto a barstool, and her coat is abandoned haphazardly on the next seat. From where her hand is pressed to her waist, blood is trickling darkly into her belt loops.

“Ah, Marcia…it hurts just a smidge,” she murmurs.

“Vesper! Let me take a look,” she gasps, unrolling the bandage. “You are a fool, pulling that stunt with blood gushing out your side.”

“Saved Felix from a deadly stab wound, didn’t I?”

Marcia frowns, rotating Vesper to face her and lifting her hand off the fabric. “Yes, you did…” She unbuckles her belt, reining back a shudder and pushing a different interpretation of the scene out of her mind. She prises the blood-stiffened cotton from her skin and uncovers the stab wound, the fresh scent of iron hitting her. It is far deeper than Felix’s wound, that is for certain, and she is lucky it was not an inch deeper.

Marcia’s fingers read the inflamed skin. Vesper is doing a good job of not panicking, but the anxiety is there, dulled by a stupour of mild shock. Her body’s natural defences have sprung into action around the injury.

“Water and a spirit?” she calls over the counter.

“Moment.” A clink of two glasses and the gush of a tap. It is quiet in the hall. Margaret pushes the glass of water over the counter then uncaps a bottle, but Marcia wastes no time in dousing the wound.

Vesper winces. “Are you going to…heal me?” she asks, her voice now coming in a mumble as her attention wanes.

“I hope this doesn’t become a habit,” Marcia answers, dampening one of Margaret’s rags with the glass of spirit to wipe the wound. She mops up the remaining blood. One touch speeds the clotting of the wound. The blood is no longer beading. Another brush brings a sigh of relief. There is no serious infection that she can sense, but that may need a minute to develop.

Once she is certain that the wound has stabilised, Marcia pulls the rest of Vesper’s shirt from the band of her trousers and begins to wrap the bandage around her waist. “Really, such a reckless fool. I know you’re a capable warrior, some may say too capable…but you can’t halt a flying knife.” She turns to look over her shoulder.

“They were civilians,” Vesper says, voice starting to regain vigour. “I swore I’d never kill anyone again. It’s harder like that, not getting to use all my power. And…I might’ve hurt you, too.”

Marcia clicks her tongue as she completes a final loop around Vesper’s waist. She picks up the hook at the end of the bandage and latches it into the fabric. “Refusing to kill while risking being killed can only end one way.”

“And yet I am still here, and no one has died,” Vesper answers, with a glance back at the dining hall.

“I know. But I’ll also have you know,” she says with a prod at the bandage, making Vesper flinch away, “you’re lucky that you’re alive.”

“What else could I have done? It’s never just the one person,” she answers simply. “The current decides who it kills.”

For a moment, Marcia feels that those words come from somewhere, some core of terror that she is almost afraid to pry into. But she saves her questions and gives Vesper’s hand a squeeze. “That I understand. It’s a mighty weapon you have there, and it’ll come in useful again.”

“Thank you for the help,” she says, rather than answering. “And the healing. It’s quite something, you know.” Marcia’s fingers linger on Vesper’s hand just long enough that she notices, glancing pointedly at it. “Are you still delivering some sort of treatment?”

“Oh! No.” Marcia withdraws her hand.

“Remarkable work,” Felix says over their shoulders. Both their heads turn. “What a show! You’re both very impressive.”

Vesper sighs. “Keep your flashy watch in your pocket till we’re behind a closed door next time.”

“Point taken. Well, I wouldn’t blame either of you if you decided we should return to complete the task tomorrow…”

“No, no, I am happy to continue,” Marcia replies. “Vesper, however…”

“I’ll watch. Like yesterday. Suits me.”

---

Despite the carnage in the hall, which Margaret insists on taking care of—without involving the “good-for-nothing” police—the trio return to their work in the library upstairs.

By the time they reach the library counter, the bloodstains on their shirts have dried; Marcia reckons the sight will keep any would-be assaulters at bay. She gives her hands a good wipe before touching the fragile pages, and Felix nods at her with his stationery in hand.

With a deep breath, she resumes at page twenty-eight of sixty.

Victor Riparius carries on in his same rambling, poetic manner. He describes a notion of a medium beyond worlds entirely, not affiliated with any “space-time” and not constituting a “space-time” in itself, but an infinite number of such “space-times.”

A basic comprehension of his theory relies on a knowledge of what a “space-time” is, which Marcia decidedly doesn't have. And so she keeps reading, not understanding her own words, for a transcriber who seems a touch less confused than she.

Now and then, as she reads, Felix stops writing to complain about his wound—typically when he turns his head too fast. In contrast, Vesper seems resolutely unwilling to mention any discomfort at all, even when Marcia accidentally bats the wound site with her elbow and notices her wincing.

It is amid these complaints and pointed looks that she eventually reads up to the fifty-second page—and finds that the text ends there, becoming a list of titles of other works and their authors and years, without any further substance. 

“Well, then,” Marcia declares, patting the first page of that section. “I do believe that is all of it. The rest merely lists other texts.”

“Ah, yes, a reference list.” Felix nods, then winces. “Ouch! You’d think I would remember by now that I have an injury. Does that mean we are done here, then? And that I may collect my watch?”

“I think so,” Marcia replies, with a glance at Vesper.

“Go collect your trinket,” Vesper replies. “Great lot of trouble we’ve gone to, on its account.”

*

By the time they return, the downed brawlers have started crawling home, and the smashed glass has all but vanished. The chandelier hangs innocuously from the ceiling with some bulbs askew, their cobwebs tattered.

Felix interrupts Margaret’s assiduous floor-sweeping to retrieve his pocket watch, which she has kept inside her vest this entire time.

He wipes its face and peers at it through his right eye. “It's spotless. Thank you, my good madam.”

“Thank you for doing your part in keeping the rent low,” she answers.

On the way out, the man whom Vesper threw at someone else lifts his mug at the trio, dark eyes crinkling with a smile. She grins back as if they weren’t just in a deathly wrestling match.

Plucking his pocketbook from his inner coat pocket to glance through its pages, Felix says, “Well, then, I hope this is the document Orobelle was after.”

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Liaoning Libraries - I

The sudden hard reality of concrete against their shoes gives way to a tide of voices. All four tumble off the slanting parapet of a skyscraper, catching their breaths as they land.

The chill is the first thing to hit Hong Yi—colder than San Francisco, whatever season it may be. Then comes his awareness of the stream of pedestrians parting around them, like water around a delta.

While Artur and Adelaide sit on the edge of the parapet nursing their ghosting sickness, Hong Yi crawls to his feet and peers about. Here, the buildings cast long, scintillating shadows. Beneath them, walkers flow in and out of gleaming automatic doors while across the road, a skyscraper clock flashes three P.M.

For a minute, he dazedly watches the LED storefronts glimmer and ripple with names: Baiwei Hotpot. Lele Travel Agents.

Then he hears a shuffle of feet, and Honourless claps him on the back, pushing her notepad and glass into his hands. “Oh!” He fumbles with the translation glass, sliding it across the words with his thumb.

Do you need currency?

Hong Yi returns the stationery assemblage. Sure, he writes back on his phone.

Honourless gives the words a cursory glance, and then winks out into oblivion. Blinking just once in surprise, Hong Yi turns around. Adelaide is crawling onto her feet with one hand gripping Artur’s forearm. The latter points at a nearby bench, then waves them both towards it.

It is a simple bench—white, plastic, sinuous—the kind that may have been molded without the touch of a single human hand. All three fit comfortably in the curve of the seat, and they watch from that vantage as traffic comes and goes. Among them, a scattering of drones the height of children roll quietly along in predictable lines while human pedestrians dodge around them. Some have LED faces on a front display, emoting when people halt them to ask questions.

“Which way to the high speed rail station?” asks a teen rolling her luggage along.

“Let me show you the way!” the drone chirps, and onward they ramble, into the crowd.

“Oh, that is kinda cool,” Hong Yi pipes up.

“This is…different from my Dalian,” Artur murmurs.

Adelaide stares resolutely at her lap. “I need to hide my face.”

Hong Yi leaps from his seat. “Oh—right! Maybe we can get you a mask when Honourless brings the cash?”

As if hearing her name, the woman herself pops in from the ether and lands before them in a crouch. In her hand is a stack of plastic hundred-yuan bills which she immediately starts handing to him like candy. “Whoa, slow down!” Hong Yi shoves bills away into his pockets even as the woman stuffs another wad into his hand. “How much did you even—even withdraw? Are you sure you don’t have bills to pay?”

Honourless chuckles as she begins dispensing bills to the other two. Only when she is done, and winks away with a lazy wave, does Hong Yi wave them out of the benches and point up the road. “Come on, let’s go find Adelaide a disguise.”

A five-minute stroll down the road makes it clear that they are in the very heart of the city, the streets full of shoppers and rolling drones. Though the language is the same, the simplified Chinese characters enduring as ever, none of the shops match the ones he remembers from home—countless strange names and unfamiliar logos, chain stores he has never seen in his life dominating street corners.

They stroll under construction scaffolding and past a handful of roving drones before stopping in front of a dollar store. Already, they have seen a few pedestrians wearing masks of various descriptions, from surgical masks to full-faced opera masks, so it is likely not a stretch for Adelaide to also be seeking one. Artur shields her from view as they slip through the sliding doors, and Hong Yi casts his eye about for security cameras, before waving the other two in through the shelves, shoulder rattling a rack of facial serum packets. “There’s a camera front and to the right,” he says. Adelaide nods and looks away.

The tiny entrance belies the bright mazelike depths of the shop’s interior. They forge in deeper like intrepid spelunkers. No one seems to think anything of the trio, nor their inordinate interest in the festive supplies section. Rifling through endless curtains of party masks—monsters and operatic faces and creatures of every stripe—Adelaide picks out the face of a mouse. It is matte molded plastic, pink streaks on white swirling around its eyes, petal-shaped strokes adorning its forehead.

Hong Yi leads her to the counter and Artur brings up the rear.

“Hello,” says the cashier in Mandarin, without any effort at emoting.

“Just this one please,” he says, pushing the mask across the counter. “I’d like to ask, do you know where there might be a cheap hotel?”

“Not sure, go ask the drones,” answers the cashier. “Eight yuan. Bag?”

He holds up a hand. “No need, thank you.”

*

While Adelaide is looping the mask strings over her ears, Hong Yi says, “I asked the cashier about hotels and got told to ask the drones. But I’m vetoing that. We don’t know who has access to their visual and voice data. Let’s go look around.” Then he smiles. “The mask is completely adorable, by the way.”

Adelaide clasps her hands together. “Thank you.”

The thought of being tracked by unseen eyes brings a shudder to Adelaide as they return to the chilly summer air and proceed down the avenue.

They scour the downtown with Adelaide between the other two, passing pedestrians, taxis and hordes of drones on wheels. At least one of these white boxes roams every block; once or twice a fellow walker starts to ask one questions only to storm off in frustration, pursued by the robot as far as the next errant bump in the pavement.

They walk past that drone struggling to surmount a sharp hump with its woefully tiny wheels, its LED face vacantly blinking. Hong Yi sighs and gives it a push; and then it carries on as if it was never waylaid.

“Damn faces, they get me every time,” he mutters.

It is not much longer before an inner city hostel declares itself with signage in English, Chinese and Korean, the warm lightning as effective of an invitation as any. Through a blur of unfamiliar characters, the ones Adelaide knows stick out like a billboard: Happy Dreams Backpacker House.

It is a modest hostel, furnished with white counters, chairs and shelves, aglow with lights imitating the sun. While Hong Yi asks for a room for three, Adelaide sits in the waiting bench and considers the brochures on display. There are only a few she understands—Historic Buildings of Dalian and Must See in Dalian. 

Hong Yi only spends a third of his allowance on a stay of ten days. “Room 501. This’ll last us a while,” he says, counting off the remaining bills as they walk down the hallway to a spotless concrete lobby and its singular lift door. He searches for a button. “Where in the world…”

“Level five?” Adelaide says, bowing towards the receiver by the door.

The indicator above the lift lights up and the doors hiss open.

“Oh! Okay.”

The lift is plastered with ads for attractions and Korean barbecue, all things they won’t have the time to see. They exit at level five and traverse the windowless extent of corridor to find their room awaiting them. Hong Yi peers down at the brochure. Adelaide watches him enter the PIN, committing it to memory—56825821.

The room, to Adelaide’s eye, is not particularly roomy for three. It is much wider than it is deep, with three beds in a row, standing parallel with their feet pointing towards the outer wall. At the far end of the room, a desk is slotted under the only window.

“This’ll do nicely,” Hong Yi says, “but now we need a way to access the internet, or whatever the equivalent here is.”

“Internet is the word.” She slips the mask off her head and holds it between her thumb and index.

“Huh, let me try...” He pulls from his pocket a device—a smaller tablet phone with a thicker make than she often sees—and turns it on.

While he waits, Adelaide walks to the windowed end of the room and drops her luggage bag next to the last bed. She turns back to find Hong Yi seated on the bed beside hers, glaring down at his screen. “No luck, my phone’s certificates don’t pass muster. Anyway, reckon it’s time to get a device with internet?”

“Oh, I brought Felix’s phone.”

His head whips around. “Wait, really?”

She is already fishing around for the device. “He resets it all the time; I guess it might throw off the tracking.” She holds it out towards him. “Still, I think you should hold onto it. I don’t know how they found me. If it’s transmitting my voice then a reset won’t help.”

He takes it. “That helps a lot. We can start doing our research this evening.”

“How about lunch?” groans Artur. “I cannot think with an empty stomach.”

“Oh! I knew I was forgetting something. Addie, don't forget the mask.”

*

In this Dalian—or as his family called it, Dalniy, as it had once been called—Artur finds the streets riddled with unexpected pockets of nonstalgia. He cannot tell if it is the tang of salt on everything, or the brief patches where he sees words he can read, but it is a sense of homeliness that sits awkward, like a new beam in an old roof, shiny and alien. This friction settles into him as a permanent irritability: he both wants more time to appraise this place and doesn't want to be here at all.

Perhaps this is something he will come to find familiar. This is, at the core of it all, not the same city he once visited as a child. It is alive, the walls whole, the facade screens beaming like suns. And there are more of his compatriots here, more architecture that gestures at the kinds he knew—a Russian town threaded along a street in the city centre, yet to be cannibalized by the smooth sameness of the skyscrapers around it.

It is here that they break for lunch, noodles, rice and pierogi side by side on the menu. It has been so long since he could eat without dread that he feels some absence without it. None of these sumptuously laden dishes are borrowed, or stolen, or ten years old. Fresh meats, freshly seared, and real milk in real tea—creamy and even fetid to his nose.

Hong Yi talks to locals with such aplomb that Artur cannot help being a little impressed, even if he is still warming up to the chatterbox of a man. Adelaide’s eyes are always wide with dizzy confusion, and it is for her sake that he starts to ask strangers questions, saying what little he can in Mandarin and then venturing in Russian with the shops whose signage has the language on it. Once or twice, it pays off. Most know at least a word or two, da or nyet or spasibo. He reciprocates with what he knows of their language. But there are some who are fluent, like the waiter, who happily offers his menu recommendations.

“So, I’ve been reviewing the brief,” Hong Yi says over his plate of fried noodles, balancing his chair on its front legs. “We've got a few things to figure out, like who Chen Shanying is, and where the, uh, organisation's headquarters are. I guess that means we're in for a whole day of research.”

“I am not a researcher,” Artur says halfway through inhaling a scallion pancake. “I pilot boats, fix boats…lighthouses, sometimes.”

“And whip up some killer blizzards,” he puts in with a grin, and Artur makes a gesture of concession. “And Adelaide, what do you think?”

“I can help with research,” she says. “Will it work if I only know English?”

Hong Yi is typing something into his phone. “‘Who is Chen Shanying?’ Yeah, we got bunch of conspiracy theory articles in English.”

“I am starting to wonder why there's such an air of secrecy around the book we’re seeking.”

“I mean, if I were an organisation holding onto the secrets of the multiverse, I would guard them like a hundred tons of gold.”

The chatter loses Artur’s attention at some point, but he assumes they will tell him anything that he must know. Instead he focuses on the flavours of the meal, richer even than the hotel fare in San Francisco, and dwells on the perpetual motion of everything around him.

:::

Back in the hostel within the hour, Hong Yi boots up Felix’s phone to be greeted by a cloying voice tutorial. Once he has gone through the motions—exasperatedly—and taken a good number of minutes to run a search of their key terms, he drops onto Adelaide's bedside and shows her the screen. “I have a few leads,” he says. “The Sect of Multiversal Truth has a homepage that's super vague about where it’s headquartered. Apparently they'll meet prospective new members in the city and take you there once they're sure you're a genuine entrant.”

Onscreen is the overly blue homepage of that very website, all its elements housed in three-dimensional panels that seem to move in parallax as he rotates the device. Adelaide takes the phone and swipes the panels around, squinting at the text. Then she swipes the search bar down to type something.

The interface that pops onto the screen is flat, more like the ones he knows. He cannot see the text she is entering, but the results have more videos than text, and he reckons it must be a social application of some kind. She navigates it with such precision it is hard to follow what she is doing until she turns to him and says, “I’m seeing some results that look like they might be accounts of the initiation rites.”

“Oh, let me see!” He lunges over to look over her arm at the screen.

As he reads, Hong Yi can sense that Adelaide is withdrawing from his presence somehow. But as they begin delving into the research, she begins to ease up in favour of helping to trawl through the data.

Owing to the quality of the automatic machine translation tools, Adelaide’s lack of knowledge of Chinese proves no obstacle to her aid, as they chase a trail of ex-pages struck down for undisclosed legal reasons. Then, fifty pages deep into the results, in a blog post dated barely a week ago, they find a description of the journey to the sect headquarters that includes a portion where they meet an initiate at a port warehouse, board a small, clandestine vessel in the depths of night—blindfolded—and make a trip that lasts for about half an hour.

And when I was inside the building, I saw through a narrow window the cliff below, and an endless blackness that was probably the ocean. There were no lights, except for the lights on the island. I had never seen such darkness, but it was the perfect place to hide the secrets of the universe.

On the matter of their mystery publication and its author, the pair uncover a scattering of conspiracy theories housed on old, poorly styled websites. Some of it speculates on the identity of Chen Shanying. Some say he is Malaysian, others say a Chinese national, and yet others claim he is an individual who has never called any land home.

On one hobby historian website, in a slide deck that only works half the time, they find a pair of scanned yellowed pages of what are purportedly his writings. Those writings are in simplified Chinese, but that doesn’t eliminate one national origin or the other. It is an extract from a passage that appears to describe a fifth fundamental force—an anti-entropic force, a super-field that encompasses the entire universe, whose behaviour does not appear to be related to that of any other force already known.

With what little they know about the sect’s location, they move on to scouring maps. The Tesri Map app renders the entirety of China in a low resolution blur, so they switch to the noxiously self-promoting Chinese map service, GongDi.

“Artur,” Hong Yi calls towards the first bed.

Artur, who is in the middle of pulling on his boots, glances over his shoulder. “What?”

“How far can a typical power boat travel in half an hour? At top speed?”

“Top speed? Depends on size.”

“Er, a small one? For five passengers?”

“Mm…sixteen knots…eight miles.”

“Nautical miles?”

“Obviously.”

“Perfect, thanks!” GongDi provides a ruler feature, which Hong Yi happily uses to feel out a radius from the Dalian Port’s yacht harbour. A quick scan of the islands in the radius shows there are only five possible candidates for the site of the headquarters.

One by one, they pan over the five islands in satellite mode. The first three are connected by road bridges—Dashan, Ershan, Sanshan—part-forested islands, some patches stripped bare, clusters of lumber yards strewn about in the bald spots.

The fourth has a name—Bangchui Island. Hanging off the southeastern tip of the city, it lies too close to the land to be hidden to the eyes of a mainland parkgoer.

And the last, lying a few miles southeast of Dashan Island, is blurred to unintelligibility. Smaller than its neighbours, the ocean is crystal-clear up to its shallows, where everything disappears behind a fog of pixelated green and grey.

Hong Yi’s eyes narrow. “Okay, weird, but pretty damning.”

Adelaide leans over to look. “I guess sometimes secrecy gives the truth away.”

“These two…botan,” Artur mutters, pulling the door open with a creak. The hall outside is quiet. “I will buy dinner. What do you want?”

“Anything noodly or fried.”

Adelaide taps her chin, eyes still stuck on the blurry satellite photo. “I’ll have the same as you,” she finally says.

Artur nods wordlessly. The door bangs shut behind him.

*

He brings three packs of the same meal back. By then, Hong Yi and Adelaide have taken to writing their findings in their respective note-taking devices—Adelaide in her notebook and Hong Yi in a Word document on his phone.

“Still researching?” asks their roommate, and at the lack of an immediate answer, he simply trudges over, drops their dinners on the desk, and departs.

“Yeah, we’re really getting somewhere,” Hong Yi finally pipes up. “We’re pretty sure the Sect of Multiversal Truth is based on an island about fifteen miles southeast, in the open sea. Fun fact, the island doesn’t exist on my world.”

“Ah…you already know the place.”

“Yes. And now, we need to plan.”

Artur nods thoughtlessly, opening his box of noodles in a rustle of paper. He sits down heavily in the desk chair.  “I told you. Botan. Both of you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You read too much.”

Hong Yi sighs. “We can continue planning at bedtime. I’m still jetlagged. Or, lagged in some way. No jets needed.”

“But dinner first,” Artur replies. “Let me tell you…in my town, we only dream of food like this. Don't waste this.”

Hong Yi is already crawling out of bed by then. “Wise words, my friend,” he answers, plucking his dinner from the desk. “Oh, fried shrimp!”

The aroma quickly brings Adelaide as well, and they both sit on the edge of his bed, wolfing down the rice and stir fried toppings in stops and starts. Midway, Adelaide puts her food down and says, “I’m really glad we're doing this mission together.”

“Aw, well, I wouldn't have it any other way,” Hong Yi replies. “You're both wonderful roommates.”

“Talk less and you will be even better company,” Artur chuckles.

“Did you just laugh? Was that a laugh I just heard?”

Artur folds his arms. “What laugh? I was clearing my throat.”

“You’re smiling! Where'd the real Artur go?”

“Ey, you want me to be sad? You want that?”

“Nah, I'm just used to you being so grumpy and dour.”

Artur mock frowns. “I am not grumpy.”

“Could've fooled me,” he chuckles, then shovels shrimp rice into his mouth. “Anyway, yeah, we need to get there under cover. They…” He swallows his mouthful. “They only let you in if you commit to becoming a member. And then they escort you the whole way. So that won’t work. We’ll need to sneak in.”

Artur nods slowly. “It is an island.”

“Yes.” Hong Yi eyes him meaningfully. “Yes?”

Artur frowns, for real this time. “No…you can't make me.”

“Oh no! Guess we'll just have to steal our own boat and steer it ourselves. And park it dangerously in a secret part of the coast. Without Artur. This will go so well and not result in any accidents at all!”

Artur groans, lifting both hands in surrender. “Fine. Fine. I cannot let you die crashing into a cliff.”

“That’s the spirit!” Hong Yi grins, patting his arm. “Maybe we’ll survive to see the island after all. Okay, I have an idea…”

*

Night has pulled itself over the land without their notice. The trio part at midnight and go to bed.

When Hong Yi’s eyes open, it is the unholy hour of three in the morning, his circadian rhythm refusing to abide by this new day cycle.

The lone window glows dimly through the blinds with the light of the facing building.

A sound catches his attention then: an intake of breath.

He goes still. From the other end of the room, he hears sobbing. He lets it continue for a minute, just to be sure he isn’t hallucinating.

“Hey?” he whispers. “What’s the matter?”

The sobbing stops. “None of your business,” Artur replies.

But Hong Yi is already creeping towards him, past a soundly-sleeping Adelaide’s bed. Artur is sitting up in his covers, back propped up by pillows. When he arrives, the other man folds his arms and looks away.

“Come on, this is a safe space,” Hong Yi murmurs. “If there’s a problem, especially if we're causing the problem, we can talk about it.”

“No, nothing wrong.” Artur sighs. “Nothing wrong. The opposite of wrong.”

Now intrigued, Hong Yi sits down on the edge of the bed, pulling one foot up onto the edge of the frame. “What do you mean?”

“It is nice to have people,” Artur finally carries on, head sinking. “To laugh together. To have dinner, smile, feel warm. To not be afraid—” His voice is eaten away by sobs before he can continue, and tears drip down his nose, “—afraid you will wait for me to fall asleep and tear my arms from my body and rob my corpse…I thought I will never see it again…”

“Oh, Artur…” Hong Yi feels his throat aching as he inches towards him. “Can I hug you?”

Artur does not answer verbally, but he gives a gentle nod, so Hong Yi scoots over, and throws one arm around his shoulders. “My family is gone,” the other man mumbles. “My parents. Zhenya. But still, sometimes, my dreams forget. When we eat together, and share jokes, it is like my family again. I had a dream tonight: we were eating dinner, but it was not you and Adelaide. It was them…”

“Oh, I'm so sorry.” Hong Yi lets go. “When was the last time you saw them?”

“Six years…six years.”

He closes his eyes, trying to imagine it. Two years is hard enough. Six years is unbearable—six years of knowing they are gone for good.

“I know we can't be your family,” he says. “But we're here for you. And I care about you a lot—even though we've only known each other for a few days.”

Artur nods morosely. His eyes glitter. “We will work together for a while. And it is better to be friends than strangers.”

Hong Yi smiles back. “Promise we won't ever tear your arms from your body. Or take your things.”

“Good. Good to hear.”

“Hope you sleep well.”

“I will try.”

:::

It turns out that boatjacking is far easier when one has no fear of arrest. Not because arrest isn’t likely but because, whatever should happen, they know Honourless will be here to bail them out within ten days.

So, given free rein to be the world’s most obnoxious tourists in this mirror copy of Hong Yi’s own country, they holiday for a good four days. Then, on the evening of the fifth, he and Artur blow a boat chauffeur off a pontoon while he is twirling a key on his finger.

Here follows the staged rescue, in which Hong Yi and Adelaide race up the boards—the latter in her mouse mask, no less—and lean over the edge to fish the sputtering man out of the waves.

Adelaide offers her arm to the sighing, grumbling man. “My mobile must be ruined,” he moans, amid Hong Yi’s comforting utterances. They manage to keep up the charade long enough that the man only notes the missing key—with a cry of dismay—at least five minutes later. “Oh, what a bother! I was supposed to repark the boat. I must go get the spare.”

By then, Artur—hidden till then on the ladder on the other side of the deck—has dived into the water to begin his search.

Once Hong Yi and Adelaide have seen the man off to the bathrooms, they split off in the other direction and wait on a shady bench at the other end of the seaside park.

Artur returns, dripping wet in his shirt and shorts, a smile tweaking at the corners of his lips. He shows off the glinting piece of metal, held between index and thumb.

The next part must happen in the wee hours of the morning, well after Artur has washed up and changed. As it is, the chauffeur does not return to repark the boat before nightfall. All the same, they will not need him to identify the boat for them, leaving them room to enjoy a Korean barbecue dinner in the embrace of dry land.

Then, off to work. They have a fairly good sense of where the boat must be, given the deck where they found him. They rock up to the pontoon with all their luggage at the hour of four in the morning. Of the six boats moored in those berths, all have traces of their drivers, skin and hair left behind on the surfaces of upholstery.

“This is absolutely the one,” says Adelaide from the driver's seat of a shallow powerboat. Its cabin is furnished with polished tables and cushy leather couches more at home in a casino than a vehicle.

“What gives it away?”

“Hair,” she replies, plucking a strand from the gap in the seat.

Artur, waiting in the cabin on the pontoon till then, swaps places with Adelaide. He takes a seat and with a click, the engine rumbles. He kills the engine and flashes a thumbs-up over his shoulder.

“Tonight, we travel in style,” Hong Yi declares, kicking back into his cabin seat.

“Somebody unmoor. There are some…how do you say, the metal knobs. Take the rope off.”

The other two need no telling to slip out the back door onto the deck, plucking ropes off of cleats. One of the ropes goes slack once detached, so Hong Yi piles that one onto the deck; the other seems firmly tied to a buoy. That one, he tosses onto the pontoon.

By now, most of the marina is soaked in inky darkness, speckled by boat lights. In this sleepless city, the port is alive even now, crane clangs echoing across the rhythmic gush of waves, but it is too far away to touch their plans.

In Adelaide's pocket is a collection of resources: notetaking stationery, a storage drive with a wrist strap, and a pen. While Artur prepares for the piloting, Adelaide and Hong Yi settle into the cabin.

The lights flicker on. Artur mutters to himself in Russian as he pushes levers around and then, with a crack, snaps a plastic box off the dashboard and rolls down a window to flick it into the sea.

“We need your map,” he says then.

Hong Yi fumbles the device out of his pocket and flicks open the GD map again. “Er, okay, how do you want me to give directions?”

“Tell me which way to turn—degrees, port or starboard.” Then he says in an undertone, “Ready?”

“Aye aye, captain!”

Then the motor rumbles to life under the cover of the night, and they jet off into the inky darkness.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Liaoning Libraries - II

“Okay, let’s go over it again,” Hong Yi says as the yacht skims over the waves, eyes glimmering with the last port lights through the window. “We want as little time on the island as possible. Every hour we’re there, the risk of getting caught compounds. Plus, we need to mind our supplies.”

“Do I look like an office worker?” Adelaide murmurs, tugging on her blouse.

Reclining in the seat beside her, Hong Yi beams. “I assure you, you look quite professional.” He is himself wearing business casual, complete with a stripy tie.

“Are you sure it wouldn’t make more sense to leave me on the boat…or downstairs…”

Hong Yi shakes his head. “We shouldn’t split up for too long. We might need all hands on deck.”

Inhaling deeply, Adelaide peers out the window. Through the windshield, she sees that the eternal twilight of the port illuminates the waves only so far. Once they fly out of the orange fog of industrial sodium floodlights, the expanse ahead clears to pitch black, pierced now and then by the strobing of a lighthouse on what must be Dashan Island. Container ships are strung along the horizon, like fraying trails of the city’s glow.

“Keep that lighthouse on your left, I mean, port side,” Hong Yi says. “Turn about forty-five degrees to starboard.”

Artur uncomplainingly spins the helm. Now they are plowing bow-first into the abyssal part of the night. Adelaide watches over Hong Yi’s shoulder as the pointed dot on the map surges across satellite seas towards the pixelated island. “Alright, straight on,” Hong Yi says as they ease out of the turn.

Whenever Adelaide read about boats, she always pictured lazy meanders down waterways, perhaps prodding at her own distant memory of going with her parents on their little vacations. What she sees now can barely be described as leisurely, as Artur stamps on the pedal and they hurtle across the frothing waves.

She clings queasily to the armrests while Hong Yi’s eyes lift from his phone. “Everything okay?” he says. “Do you get seasick?”

“I don't know.”

“Is this your first time on a boat?”

“My first time on one that went this fast.”

“Come over to the centre, it's not as bad here. Actually, let me try something.” As she slips across the armrests, dragging their bag after her, Hong Yi loops an arm around her back. At once the g-force is dampened and her stomach settles. “That help?”

She nods profusely. “That’s amazing.”

“I’ll have to pay attention, though.”

“Should have brought ginger,” Artur mutters from the cockpit. “Helps with boat sickness, you know. My father taught me…”

---

Adelaide does not know much about Artur other than that he is a menace with boats. Even with their lights off and only Hong Yi’s verbal instructions in lieu of GPS, he maneuvers the pleasure yacht precisely around the incoming rocks, watching the silhouettes sail past their windows.

He sighs as they coast around a colonnade of dark outcrops. “I have broken every marine rule.”

“And saved us breaking our skulls,” Hong Yi replies.

They dodge around the back of the island and chug into the arc of a rocky beach, where branches overhang the sands. Killing the motor, Artur sits catching his breath for several seconds, before popping open his outer door. Barreling out onto the deck, he gathers up rope in his hand to tie a large noose.

He tosses it at the nearest branch, misses, the cord splashing in the waves. Yanking it back aboard, he tosses again, and this time it catches. He tightens the noose and loops the slack around the cleats till there are only two metres of give. It's as if he has done this a hundred times before.

“Quickly,” Artur calls, waving them towards himself, and they shove the passenger door open and scramble out to the deck, where the hull is closest to shore.

“I can give us a boost,” Hong Yi whispers. “Any chance you could make a gale?”

Adelaide nervously glances across the inky gap between them and the shore. “I don't know that I can make the jump…”

“Yes you can!” Hong Yi declares under his breath, taking her wrist. Artur glances back and snatches her other wrist, somehow gentle despite the fear in his eyes. Then, Hong Yi’s weighs the boat down, as the hull begins to push deeper beneath the waterline, water sloshing aside, Artur counts them off from three—

Adelaide feels her body lighten. The boat beneath them rockets upward like a rebounding trampoline. They leap, much higher and farther than humanly possible. A gale catches them midair, propelling them towards the shore.

They land lightly, as if on the moon—and the three allow themselves mutual grins before resuming their sprint—straight into a perimeter fence.

The wire fence girds the entire island boundary, taller than any of them. Hong Yi and Artur meet eyes, and with a nod, begin to count off another leap.

With the lightness of the upward gale, Adelaide finds no trouble scrambling up the fence after the other two. They await her expectantly as she lands gently on the other side, and once her feet meet land, they break into a crouching sprint.

Despite the half-moon, it is a dark night on account of all the ocean clouds. The wind is whipping, its cutting gusts softening when they dive behind a line of trees. The only light at this hour is from the building corridors, glowing mutedly down through rows of windows. The air thickens with vapour as they skirt the perimeter, searching for a way inside.

This facility spreads its limbs over every foot of the island, its spidering blocks and wings five stories tall in some places and three in others. It is like a research campus with its many buildings joined to each other at odd angles. Through a crenelation in the wall, they see an open-air bridge on the fourth story, but there is no visible path there.

“Some weird sect,” Hong Yi murmurs as they dash past block after block. “I hope it’s the right place.” As they sprint along, feet buoyant, they see that there are no openings into the depths of the structure but the windows, all of which stand shut.

Except, in an obtuse angled corner formed by two white walls, they glimpse a third-floor window that has been left ajar, just wide enough for a person to clamber through.

Adelaide sees, from the darting of Hong Yi’s eyes, that he is starting to construct a way up. A gutter pipe ascends to the window, ensconced in chunky brackets that form precarious rungs. It passes a parapet running between the second and third floors, and then it is no less than a leap from that ledge to the windowsill.

Adelaide’s knees start quaking.

“Follow me,” he whispers. “We’re going up.”

“What if I fall?” she breathes.

“I will go below you,” Artur replies, and by then, Hong Yi is already scampering up the pipe rungs.

The trio ascend in a chain, Hong Yi charting the path. Adelaide watches the steps diligently, the way he springs from one bracket to another while gripping the next handhold above. This cannot be the first time he has done this, though perhaps that comes with the territory.

When it comes her turn to make those moves, she lifts one foot onto the first bracket, propels herself upward—and feels her pulse accelerate as a creak of metal reverberates through her body.

Where Hong Yi was able to leap fearlessly, she freezes and crawls in stops and starts, even with his gravitational boost.

“You okay?” asks Artur a foot beneath her.

She glances down. She is half a story up. Her arms start trembling. “Y-yes. I think.” Then she resumes watching Hong Yi from beneath his shoes as he swings off the pipe and onto the parapet.

The rest of the pipe climb is easier now that she has performed the motions a few times. Her hands find purchase on the rough steel and haul her up with startling ease. Once or twice, her shoe misses a bracket and scrabbles against the pipe, but eventually—without looking down—she reaches the parapet.

From here, Adelaide can see that the flat span of the parapet is about a foot wide, not quite enough to walk on. But the windowsill is just close enough to swing to straight from the pipe—if she doesn't miss. Ahead, Hong Yi is already readying for the leap to the open window, silhouetted in the predawn sky beyond.

Here, nine feet from the ground may as well be fifty. She resolutely keeps her gaze level. Behind her, she sees that Artur is still picking his way up the pipe; there are a few things standing between her and a perilous fall.

With that in mind, she puts her left foot on the thin sliver of wall, which Hong Yi has only just deserted, crouched on the windowsill. Heart thundering, she swings. Pivoting on her feet, Adelaide does as Hong Yi did, leaning to snatch the rough corner of the windowsill with her left hand. She puts her left foot on the parapet, then, with a deep breath, takes her right foot off the bracket, planting it on the painted concrete.

Her torso is pressed to the wall and her arms are spread, one hand hooked on the sill and the other fighting for grip on the rough paint. Her fingers are sweaty, sliding against the dust. Her feet inch sideways along the ledge. There is a fog tiding in.

Inch by inch she sidles towards the overhanging sill—feet, then hands, until both hands can reach the window frame.

And then she has to leap. But now she can see that the windowsill is a little higher than her shoulder. She will have to haul herself almost her entire height upward.

“Addie!” breathes Hong Yi, torso halfway through the window. He extends a hand.

She stares at the hands hanging down into her vision. The ground spins. Her fingers are slick. “I—I can't,” she stammers.

“I think you can,” Hong Yi whispers, reaching out to grip her wrist with a nod. “And I can give you a boost. Don’t worry, okay? You won’t fall as long as I’m here.”

Adelaide swallows and nods back, hinging everything on the bright confidence in his eyes. Both her hands tighten their grip on the windowsill. Shifting her right foot as close to her left as she can without losing balance, she counts under her breath, “Three, two, one—” Then with only the slightest bending of her knees, she leaps as high as she can.

Suddenly she is hanging by her hands, swallowing the scream that would burst from her throat if terror didn’t hold it down. Every muscle from her elbows to her neck clenches painfully. Her arms are not strong enough to lift her. But she feels Hong Yi hauling her upward, both of them huffing and puffing even as her joints cease to strain and she launches her torso onto the sill with one last kick, landing belly down.

She lays there for half a minute, gasping for breath, before crawling the remaining distance across the sill.

When at last she rolls off and lands on the carpet on bent knees, her legs refuse to hold up her weight. She hugs her knees on the floor, panting. Hong Yi pats her shoulder with one hand, the other gripping the window frame.

Only then, when Adelaide has cleared the sill, do Artur’s fingers peek over the edge, a gale swelling up behind him and whistling through the window. He, too, lunges onto the windowsill and lies draped there, panting with terror before sliding onto the carpet. “Never doing that again,” he groans, dusting off his hands on his shirt.

At last, the trio look up in concert, and they see that have entered an office corridor.

The grey carpeted corridor goes on for tens of metres before reaching a junction at what appears to be a courtyard of some kind. They are alone for now, save for the soft, static hum of air conditioning and the camera swivelling just above their heads.

“Alright, act casual,” says Hong Yi. “We probably can't avoid being seen on camera now. But with luck, no one's actually watching right now.”

Adelaide taps Hong Yi’s arm for the backpack, and he slips it off to pass to her. Quietly, she plucks her mask from their half-empty bag and slips it over her head. “We should find a computer terminal,” she whispers. “They either have the document in a physical library or they would have digitised it. We'd need to check the catalogue either way.”

“Alright, let's scout out the place.”

The doors are glass, showing them the state of the tables inside—four cubicles to a room, each one decorated in its occupant’s vision. Each door has a scanning camera and up to four occupants’ names on cards, each rendered in Chinese characters and Latin ones. Huang Yiming, Yao Xing Summer, Natasya Tochilin. None of the lights are on. They try two empty office doors, but those do not budge.

At the other end, the corridor meets one of the five corners of a pentagonal walkway, running along the perimeter of a courtyard. Two floors down, a small garden glows in day-coloured spotlights. The scent of leaves drifts into awareness along with a gentle sway of music—a tinny piano ballad with no lyrics, overlaid on a loop of birdsong.

More office doors stand along all five segments of this walkway. They walk past a digital notice board glowing with holographic digital posters of scientific machines Adelaide has never seen in her life. Opening hours: 6am – 6pm daily.

As the reach the next corridor radiating out of the courtyard, the scale of the facility suddenly becomes visible. On and on through the gaps, they see an endless layered maze of blocks and walkways, painted white and striped with filtered blue windows. Every gap is filled with more windows and walls, not an inch of the cloudy sky visible except through the top of the courtyard’s airwell.

Hong Yi waves them into an alcove beside a metal flap labelled cleaning closet, where their only company is a chrome drinking fountain with blue LED indicators. “Alright, I have an idea,” he whispers. “To gain access to a computer, we're gonna need an employee’s login. So what do you say, one of us pretends to be a new employee and distracts someone away from their office?”

“Alright…but how do we get their credentials by sneaking in?” Adelaide answers.

“We won't have to. Consider…”

*

The trio push open the flap of the cleaning closet and creep inside. Hong Yi crouches as they enter, peering about in the dimness.

It is a small dim chamber whose ceiling is lower than their heads, lit solely by the blue LEDs of six cleaning drones. They are asleep at the charging docks, the gradual dimming and brightening of the edge lights timed like breathing. On each dock flashes a timer that reads 00:31:45, counting down by the second. The drones’ make is similar to the ones they saw on the streets, white with rounded corners, tall as children, their blue pixel eyes closed in slumber. 

“Oh, huh, cleaning time soon, I guess.” Yawning, Hong Yi, plucks the phone from his pocket. “Okay, we're almost on six A.M.” It is decidedly strange sitting here in a cleaning closet bathed in blue. The lights gleam off Adelaide’s mouse mask. Artur has already dozed off.

But before the hour is ended, they hear the first clatter of footsteps up the hall—just two employees first, speaking Chinese with great familiarity, then not long later, a pair chattering in Russian.

“That sounds like our ticket, Artur!” Hong Yi shakes his shoulder till he roses with a sputter.

Two minutes before the cleaner drones are due for their rounds, they spring out of hiding and dash in the direction that the voices went, back up the walkway and into the corridor they came from. Down below, office workers are shambling down the garden paths, oblivious to the hubbub above.

In the hallway, one of the office lights has turned on. Right on cue, a whir of wheels from behind announces the arrival of the six o’clock cleaning squad. The drones zip by, their eyes open now, scrubbing the floor with spinning vacuum brushes. Masked by the sound of machinery, Hong Yi and Adelaide duck off into the shelter of an adjacent unlit doorway, the former digging for a pen in their supplies bag.

Meanwhile, Artur takes in a deep breath and strides up to the lit office.

He knocks on the glass, calling out Ms Tochilin’s name.

The door clicks open, the glass rattling. Out pokes a face. “Hello?” says the respondent in Mandarin.

Artur begins replying, in Russian. “Good morning! I'm a new initiate here,” is what he is meant to say. “I seem to have gotten lost, and I cannot make heads or tails of the signage. Which way to the eatery?”

Hong Yi hasn't the least clue if he is sticking to the script, but whatever it is he says, it seems to have done the trick, for the door swings open and out steps a person he assumes to be Natasya, short and slender with her black hair tied at her nape.

Artur leads her away down the hall with more questions, away from where Adelaide and Hong Yi are hiding. Meanwhile, the door swings shut behind her—but before it can lock, Hong Yi hurls the pen through the door and, as it enters the gap, multiplies its weight tenfold.

It thuds to the ground as if turning to stone. The door crunches against the plastic. That obstruction is enough to wedge the door infinitesimally open. And then they dive inside, Adelaide plucking the pen from the floor.

Natasya's terminal sits unguarded with two glowing screens. One of them is a touchscreen keyboard with shortcut buttons for various system functions. The other is a display monitor, a research paper sitting open in a many-panelled window.

While Adelaide takes sentry position at the door, Hong Yi jumps into the swivel chair and minimises the document. He finds the interface not all too different of that of any Apple device: the finger gestures for navigating the screen are intuitive enough to learn and the library catalogue browser is conveniently housed in an application of its own.

A search for the name Chen Shanying pulls up only one text, which he clicks into. Physical copy unavailable. Loan digital—

“She's coming back!” Adelaide hisses.

“Shit!” He closes the catalogue window and slaps the Sleep button. The screen winks black.

Rather than dash out of the room, Adelaide dives into the next cubicle. Hong Yi takes the cue and flies in after her, both pulling up against the rough felt of the separator.

Five seconds later, the door clicks open, and in steps Natasya.

In the shadow of the unlit cubicle, they peer through the gaps in the divider panels, Adelaide lifting her mask. Natasya looks absent enough that he doesn't think she has realised they are there. She sighs, wakes her machine, and begins to enter her login credentials.

Heart booming, Hong Yi squints. Her username is simple enough: tochilin.n. Her password is 2y*:n— no, N—it is a string of random characters, which the woman types with puzzling effortlessness. By the time he catches on that some of the letters are capitals, he has lost track of the rest of the string.

Instead, his thoughts shift to the more pressing question of how they will escape. Perhaps, if he takes a precise angle, he could throw something at the door and hope she goes out to investigate…

Amid this furious mulling, a knock resounds on the glass.

Natasya straightens, spinning in her chair. “Oh!” She says something to herself that he cannot understand, then rises to open the door.

From outside, they hear Artur's voice pipe up with an inquiring tone. Hong Yi lets out a long sigh. The woman replies, seemingly bemused but not upset, and steps outside again.

The pair nod to each other. Hong Yi stops the door with his foot and sticks his head out to look. Artur and Natasya are conversing as they stroll up the hallway. In the five seconds they are looking the other way, Hong Yi and Adelaide break of in the other direction, towards the window they entered.

They tumble to their knees in a corner and crouch, panting. Hong Yi tug on his tie. Adelaide pulls her mask back over her face, her gasps fluttering against its plastic.

With shaky hands, she plucks her notebook from her pocket. She begins to jot something down with the half-crushed pen and hands it to Hong Yi. 

2y*:NaL1+}, says the note. Forgot to check for username.

Below it, in the margin, he writes: tochilin.n, also how did you remember that?

It has an obvious pattern to it, doesn't it? 

No?

The sound of footsteps awakens them to their surroundings. The click of Natasya’s shoes on the floor is followed by the creak and clatter of her glass office door, leaving behind a perfect quiet.

“Let’s give it three minutes,” Adelaide whispers, and Hong Yi nods back.

“I sure hope Artur isn't panicking yet.”

---

Artur is on the edge of panicking. Not that he would ever show it, but he is not cut out for lying. He is capable of saying untrue things, but Dr Tochilin has been nothing but patient each time, even waxing lyrical about the cafe’s blini and sharing the names of baristas who speak their language. His conscience will not withstand much more.

When he turns the corner after Natasya answers his second inquiry—this time about the route to the dormitories—he does not think to pretend to keep walking. Instead he halts in his tracks, and then realises he should have kept going, because she may have noticed.

Even then, she does not reappear around the corner, and only after half a minute does he finally breathe again.

But then comes the next problem. After three minutes of waiting, Hong Yi and Adelaide have yet to reappear. Have they made another attempt at sneaking into her office?

Artur’s thoughts grow unrulier by the second. He is all out of convincing lies with which to convince Natasya to leave her room, and even if he had any, his guilt is starting to gnaw. If he must attempt another rescue, then he isn't sure where he will unearth the wherewithal to bail them out again—

He gasps when a hand claps down on his shoulder. “Saved our lives back there, thank you.” It is Hong Yi’s voice.

Artur sighs. “Did you find the book?”

“We found it,” he replies. “But the contents, well, let's say, that is why we stole her login credentials.”

His heart aches with shame. What a way to repay a lady who has done nothing but help. “I saw a computer lab one floor down,” he replies, pointing in the direction of the stairs.

*

The stairs are around the corner, undressed and grey and steep. The bare concrete shows the scuffing of thousands of heels, and they have already seen other sounds of life stirring in the criss-crossing halls. They see labs, offices, doors, room numbers declared by placards. The floor beneath follows the pentagonal layout of the one above, and it is along the perimeter that they reach the computer lab with its indigo tinted windows, its walls lined with terminals.

Hong Yi tries his luck with the door handle—it swings open with a shove. He pumps his fist as Adelaide and Artur pile in after him.

The carpeted floor is dim, dusky purple, the fluorescent white tubes reflecting off the corners of screens and processing units. The screens themselves are unlit, and their keyboards are mechanical unlike Natasya’s, although the shortcut keys are alike and there is a trackpad for finger gestures.

By virtue of the screens facing the windows, Hong Yi has realised there will be no hiding their doings from anyone who passes. “It’ll be fine,” he breathes as he drops into the closest chair. “Just doing some lab work.” He turns on the closest terminal. “Alright, Addie, you'll have to show me how data storage works.”

She nods. “Pass your phone?” While she opens her notebook on the table, he plucks the device from his pocket to trade it over. He takes the book and enters the details—“tochilin.n,” ”2y*:NaL1+}.” The login form accepts them. “Damn, you’re good,” he breathes. He picks out the library application again and reruns the search.

There is only the one book in the system authored by Chen Shanying. This is a treatise, it notes, on xenisma, the force that flows through all things and brings matter to order. With the trackpad, he swipes down to the button for loaning a digitised copy, which takes him to an embedded eReader called Janus.

There is no visible download button on that reader. He fights with the subwindow system for a minute before opening a corner browser to look up how to download files from Janus, but the prospects are grim: the app streams pages one at a time to the viewer.

“Addie, any chance you know how to programme for the browser?” he asks, and she shakes her head.

“Screen snip them, maybe?”

“There’s fifty pages…but worth a try. Okay.”

“Let's pair the phone, stream them over as you grab them.”

The snipping utility has a shortcut key. It takes a bit of easing in, but once Hong Yi has the sequence of keypresses down, he finds snipping, exporting, and streaming the pages only takes a few presses each.

Still, he begins to fear the spectre of carpal tunnel long before he has finished. About forty-two pages in, Artur clears his throat.

“There’s people looking here,” he whispers. “Hurry.”

At once Hong Yi’s hand motions accelerate. 43, 44, and then 45 fly from the computer to the phone. 

“They’re pointing—they’re coming, quick!”

Hong Yi starts to panic in earnest around then, and as soon as his eyes hit the first page of the reference list, he smashes the power button—and that is just as well, because Artur grabs both their arms right then and yanks them away from the terminals and out the door.

A pair of guards is sprinting towards the room even as they burst out the farther door, radio devices to their mouths. He does not like the surly crackle of the voices on the other end. They tear off the other way around the courtyard even while the guards round the other side, soles skidding around the corner. “We need to find that window!” Hong Yi cries. Heels thunder after them. He wheezes and pants, and he can sense Adelaide flagging.

Though they are one floor down, the corridors are a carbon copy, bending at the same jagged angles, enclosing the same courtyard. Retracing their twists and turns, they sprint for their lives while the guards nip at their heels. Past a storeroom then another they fly, by office doors with screens glowing through. “Stop right there!” He shrugs off the yelling, but they are gaining.

Adelaide shrieks and checks her phone, and as they round the last corner and come into view of a familiarly shaped corridor, they can hear the panting of the guards, almost at their necks…

“Past the cleaning door, quick!” she shouts. In a final burst, they lurch past the closet.

A whir of machinery, a click of a flap, and a cascade of six robots rolls out in a train behind them. They intercept the chasing guards, who trip and curse at the “stupid robots.” With only one glance behind, Hong Yi makes the final push for the window, reaching it before either of his companions. He wrenches the rusted handle horizontal and pops it open with his forearm. “Artur, gonna need your help here,” he says as he leaps onto the sill.

*

By now, the daylight is trickling back through the clouds. The wind is whistling from through the window—a buoyant current that gives Adelaide a chill. She turns and says, “Artur, could you—” Artur needs no more telling—he grasps her waist and lifts her onto the sill with shocking ease.

Outside, Hong Yi has already crept aside to make room. His eyes fly to the foggy horizon and back. “It’s just maybe ten feet to the ground,” he calls as she slides both feet onto the parapet, hands slick around the window’s edge.

Ten feet could still land them in hospital. “I—I’ll do my best—”

“Ready.” Artur's voice is steady behind her. The ground spins beneath her, but Artur is now crouching on the sill.

“One—two—” she braces herself as the wind picks up— “three!”

The wind howls in a whirlwind, picking up a tumult of leaves and twigs. Snatching her hand, Hong Yi leaps. She feels Artur knock her from the parapet, and she almost begins to scream—

—but they do not plummet. The wind is blasting them away from the wall, and they are light as leaves, gliding over the gap between the building and the fence.

What should have been a split-second fall takes them ten seconds, as they arc over the wire netting and loft down on the other side, one hop from cliff’s edge.

Their stolen boat is yanking on its mooring. Artur, barely blinking at the descent, snatches the rope and reels it in against the waves.

“Oh my god, did you see that?” Hong Yi gasps. “I've literally never done that with my powers before! We were gliding!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Artur murmurs, waving them down into the deck. “Quick, inside.”

One by one, they jump the gap, the ocean gale buoying them across. Artur goes last, unlooping the rope as he goes, and even as the boat is pummelled away from shore by the waves, he makes that superhuman leap, a gust thrusting him over and away.

He tumbles into the cockpit and kicks the boat into gear. The ocean splits apart at their bow and, hitting planing speed, the craft punches into the ocean fog.

For a while, Artur does not speak, and Adelaide begins to notice that the boat is not rocking the way it did on the journey here.

“We need to read these books,” Adelaide mutters, already reaching for the phone. “If it runs out of battery, we won’t be able to charge…”

“Vesper charges my phone sometimes,” he replied simply.

Adelaide blinks. “I didn’t know she was so…casual with her powers.”

“Oh yeah, and she makes a show of it when she wants to. Like when she rescued Marcia from those rabid wolves, and zapped them all dead in the colosseum…”

“I did not hear about this,” Artur calls out from the front. “Marcia is a gladiator?”

“Yes, but I don’t reckon that’s all she is,” he replies. “Mm, I wonder how they’re doing with their half of the mission.” He chuckles. “Maybe they’re all done already, and are taking time off to do whatever it is you do in 1894 New York. Eating pizza?” Then he folds his arms. “Anyway, you’re right—we should at least take a look at the book, in case something happens to the device or the files. And with a memory like yours, that’s about the same as making a carbon copy of it. Right?”

“I’m not that good,” Adelaide murmurs, but she cannot help a smile.

*

It is only after twenty minutes of jetting off through the murk, towards the open ocean, that Artur slows back down and turns on the lights for the other two. They do not need it, on account of the light emitted by the phone from which they read, but he figures they could use a view of their surroundings. Hong Yi has pulled his hooded jacket back on.

“Where are we headed?” he asks.

“Not back to Dalian,” Artur replies. “They will find us. We go northeast. I threw the tracker in the marina. I go by memory.”

“Northeast?” he answers. “Not into North Korea, I hope?”

Artur shakes his head with a snort. “Not enough fuel. Maybe halfway.”

Dalian is fading from view in the fog behind them. When Artur next turns his head, it is to the sound of snoring in the backseat. Hong Yi has pulled his jacket tighter and lies curled up on the cushions. Adelaide too is dozing with her feet up on the table.

With a small smile, he focuses on the dim night and the gaps between the lights of vessels queueing to enter port, and they thread themselves gently through, into the darkness beyond.

 

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

The Big Bang

Content warnings (may contain spoilers)

This chapter depicts corpses and explosions.

“I couldn't—I couldn't find the third book.” It takes Pala three tries to form the words. Around them, the corridor sinks to a hush. “The whole building where it was meant to be…it was destroyed.”

Liss' eyes narrow. “Did you at least try?”

Pala can feel her will subliming beneath Liss' sweltering stare. Still she cries, “I did! I crawled inside to look. But there were rotting corpses and wreckage everywhere and I couldn't—” She pulls her arms close to her body. “I couldn’t go on.”

Liss sighs. Her voice softens as she grasps Pala's elbow and says, “Then bring me there. I will look. You will stand watch.”

Pala swallows, then nods.

“Pala,” Liss goes on. “I know you are terrified of many things. But if you are to become the person you could be…if you cannot vanquish your fear, then you must do those things while terrified.”

“But the fear makes it hard to even move, sometimes.”

“As long as your body can still move, you can keep going. It isn’t as hard as you might think, I promise. Look, you’ve figured out how to Travel without Fen. That’s a big step forward.”

She wrings her hands together. “Yes…you’re right. That surprised me, too.” She glances at where Liss’ hand tugs on her arm. “Wait, are we going…now?”

Liss nods. “You can do it, can't you? Do you have the strength?”

Pala closes her eyes. “For two leaps? Yes.”

---

The pair land by a sliver-thin crack that opens into a hall of shattered walls, feet skidding on the wreckage. The air is dry, static, yet it is not dead.

Liss' head perks up. She can feel the afterimage of an explosion in the air. All about them, a graveyard of crumbled buildings glows beneath the bloodshot sky, metal frames pricking from the concrete fragments like bones from flesh, all invisibly alight with traces of a fire like her own.

“Quick, inside,” she breathes, waving at the triangular opening formed by two slabs of rubble. Pala scrambles in after Liss; she hears those unsteady footsteps scattering concrete behind her.

Lifting her eyes, she surveys the dim collapsed hall they have entered, before Pala pulls a torch from her backpack and turns it on with a click. The thin stream of light lances through the dust, revealing hundreds of shelves partially crushed beneath the stones. The ceiling slumps to one side, the hall tapering to jagged shadows at the far end. They entered on the side that is still mostly upright.

They begin to forge in deeper among the shelves. Far as they can see, and farther still, are tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of books lying sprawled on the ground, or draped over snapped shelves, bent, faded, broken at the spines, coated in a carpet of stone dust.

As the lonely torch sweeps across these papery carcasses, they glow briefly with ghostly white, before melting once more into the blackness.

From inside her collar, Liss pulls the looking glass that hangs from her neck: an old lens set into a tarnished metal ring. She holds it in front of her eye. “Alright, let us find that book,” she says, peering down at the first pile of books scattered on the floor. “Who was the author again? Sanjaya Hartono. A book about the structure of the many universes…”

*

For about five hours they venture through the frigid air, scouring the titles on the floor. Rank by rank of fallen shelves she plies, Pala trailing timidly behind, hunched and shivering, pointing the white-blue torch at the covers while she peeks at them through the glass.

Every time a tattered corpse rears its head—or its ribcage, if even that—she hears Pala gasp and stumble back, ceasing to walk until Liss has shoved it aside. Bones tumble like stacks of cards, clattering with a sound like rolling dice.

From what is still readable of the titles here, she sees books on myriad topics: kingdoms that surely no longer exist, armies beyond imagination, wars given numbers—one, two, three. Through that film of dust, there are titles that distantly remind her of theoretical concepts she has encountered in the depths of the temple: of invisible emissions from matter, of weapons that split the cores of particles.

They reach the part of this shattered library where the titles begin to speak of space and galaxies and stars born in clouds of dust. Through the window of that moving beam of light, Liss pieces together a story of this world. Once upon a time, humanity saw into the far reaches of space. Centuries later, it launched bullet-shaped ships into its endless hollows, in search of the nearest star. Humanity lost some of its kind to the space between star systems, and never again tried to transport anyone beyond. All of that dreaming came to naught.

The stars, she knows from the temple library, are not specks of light in the sky but spherical bodies thousands of times larger than the world itself, whose hearts churn with elemental gases for aeons until they run out of fuel and either fade or collapse into themselves.

Running out, running out, everything is always running out of fuel. Machines can only run for as long as they have something to burn.

But she—she tears fire out of the matter of existence itself, and she will have fuel as long as there is something she can hold. Not even the Being can claim this much.

Yet there is a limit to the universe, too. All those planets floating like specks of dust in a breeze—there must be a limit to how many there are, no?

Liss peers through more books: ones about galaxies and star clusters, about how to read the signatures in their pulsing light. She scours the row pace by pace, her heart racing like an engine, until she reaches where the fallen books are about numbers, about gods and death and knowing one exists and truth and then…

Nothing. Liss halts, two feet from a slanting wall. She peers up its height, at the sliver of roiling red sky that peers starlessly back down at her.

She grits her teeth. “It must be here. This is the right aisle. Let’s keep looking.”

“Yeah, I think you're right,” Pala offers, eyes also scanning the floor.

On the return, Liss finds her thoughts astir. She kicks aside every book that doesn't match. She crawls at times between rotting limbs, flipping the tomes over. Nothing. Nothing with an author remotely resembling Sanjaya Hartono.

Then, as she is flipping another book over to scan it through her lens, the light winks out.

“Pala, turn it back on,” Liss says, pausing with the last grimy title still grasped between her fingers—Measuring the Universe.

Liss hears a switch click a few times, the sound echoing dimly. “I—can't. It's out of power reserves. Sorry.”

Liss’ mind races and calculates. She doesn't have more days to waste on this search. But she is here without the axis machine. There is no failsafe—if Pala leaves to get a new light, Liss would briefly be stranded without a way back to her universe. If she gives up the search for a lost cause, whatever knowledge it holds remains out of her reach. Her eyes glaze over as they sweep the thousands of books piled on each other, the pages crushed against planks in the dark.

No, she will carry on while she has the time and resources. She could light a torch of her own—but what can she burn here but a book?

Plucking the smallest nail she can find from her pocket, Liss kneels to pick up Measuring the Universe, laying it in a sconce of cracked stone. Then she places her nail atop it.

She steps backwards and lifts her hand in front of her. The world whirls darkly around her like matter around a gravity well. Just a small explosion will do. Not the whole nail. Not even half of it…

She squeezes her hand into a fist, and light tears the scene in two.

Fire rips the volume apart, the flash consuming the entire book at once with an acrid stench. Pala screams and dives away as what remains of the shelf creaks and snaps, books about the stars cascading into a burgeoning nebula of dust. The corpse’s remains are buried beneath an avalanche of wood and paper.

Briefly, as the sparks blow past her, Liss recognises the resemblance of the new destruction to the old: the slabs caving in one direction, the debris crashing inward from above, the toppling force of the shockwave.

In a blinding moment of clarity, she can see it all: the splitting of atoms, the formation of the universe—the cataclysmic explosion that sent this library collapsing inward.

Then from beneath the echoes of the crack rises a much deeper groan—above, beneath, and all around.

The hole in the ceiling overhead is opening like a mouth. A pillar creaks and begins to crumble.

“Pala! Let’s go!” Liss hisses, snatching the Traveller’s arm. Pala’s eyes grow very round. Amid a chorus of crunching shelves and cracking stones, the world warps into rings around them, pulling them into the epicentre of the ripple and through the puncture hole.

---

Pala and Liss land on either side of Fen in his little storeroom. They lie panting there for seconds, Liss still staring on at the ceiling as that cloud of thoughts and revelations tries to settle.

“Um…everything alright?” he murmurs, crawling out of the bedroll to where Pala is dusting herself off.

Wordlessly, Liss rises to her feet. “Yes,” she says, marching towards the door. Fen and Pala are already grasping each other’s hands. “Everything is fantastic.”

*

“We couldn’t find the book,” Pala finally bursts out. “Then the torch battery died, so Liss tried to light a book on fire, but the explosion was too strong and the shelves caved in and then the walls started to collapse, so we leapt back before we could get crushed!”

Fen pulls her abruptly into a hug. “You—you could’ve died there!”

“I know. But I got us out. I did it. Just in time. I…” A smile breaks through her scrunched-up face. “I feel…like I did well.”

He returns her smile. “That’s the best thing that could come out of it.” Then his gaze dips. “You’re learning so fast. It’s kind of amazing to see.”

“Aw…that's only because you're here to support me. Look.” She gestures around them at the little room—the yellow papered walls, the cushions they have gathered in the corners from the common spaces, the slatted window. “I still ended up coming back to you. Almost like I can’t help it.”

“Can you help it?” he asks, leaning in. “I think it would be even better if you weren’t bound to me somehow. Not that that upsets me… It's kind of an honour.” He clasps his hands together on his lap.“ I hope that’s not weird to say.”

Pala beams back. “I'm glad I can always find you.”

As her head drops against his shoulder, he sighs, arm slipping around her back. “At least,” he murmurs, “there’s one thing we can always be sure about.”

---

Noma is waiting for Liss at the doorway to the dining hall. When she shows her face, they fly together into a spinning hug, Liss lifting Noma briefly off her feet, then bowing to kiss her forehead.

“By the way, Pala has come back, right?” Noma says as they let go.

At this, Liss sighs. “I went with her to search for the third book, but we couldn't find it. I accidentally blew up the shelves and maybe caved in the walls on top of it, too.”

Noma shakes her head, rubbing Liss’ back. “You were always much better with power than finesse.”

“I know. In fact…I think I did realise something, while I was there.” They start strolling into the dining hall where the buzz of voices keeps their words out of everyone else’s earshot. “That place, that library, was destroyed many years ago, by something powerful enough to level cities. It dawned on me that this must be that thing we read about…the explosives that split particles to release the power that holds them together. And then I realised…I think that is what my powers do, too. Maybe not in the same way. Maybe not splitting particles. But unlocking—releasing power from inside matter.”

“Oh, whoa—and—“ Noma's brow knits the way it does when her mind is racing, “maybe the reason it works better with metals and rocks is because—it’s more of the same type of matter clumped together?”

Liss grins, clapping Noma on the shoulder. “I think you may be right. You are so much cleverer than even I realise sometimes. And that’s saying a lot.”

Noma clasps her hands over her cheeks. Liss obliges to pull a chair for her, gesturing for her to sit. “I—I feel like I’m never going to get used to this,” Noma murmurs as she drops into the seat. In answer, Liss leans over and pries her hand off her face so she can peck her on the cheek. Noma lets out a high pitched yelp, as if Liss’ mouth were burning her.

“If you never get used to it then I will always have an easy way to please you,” she chuckles, stretching for the nearest pair of tongs. “And if you do get used to it, well, then I get to try something new.”

---

Despite the mixed success of Pala’s retrieval quest, Liss gets what she wants: a series of reference texts filling holes in the knowledge she has been piecing together. Every day, every word is clarifying more of the picture to her.

In a way, the work of Sanchai has burgeoned into a mild obsession. All these volumes and documents are, of course, not authored by several separate scholars. Sanjaya, Victor, Shanying—they are all him: the one known to this world and this temple as Sanchai, the Nomad.

Across the decades of his travels, he chased a singular blazing hunger like a comet in the sky, sowing knowledge across the universes as if laying a trail for someone matching him to find.

That someone, Liss has surmised already, is she. He is speaking directly to her across the winds and tides of space and time, not the voice of a man but of the universe itself, beckoning her towards the one true answer to all the agony and malaise of existence.

All of this pain and struggle and death will be worth it at last, when she has linked all these revelations together…

*

While Liss has toiled at this puzzle of singular import, Noma has slowly carved out her own niche at the temple, to which she finds herself returning. This is especially so when Liss is neck deep in her translations and analyses, when Noma needs something of equal immensity to engross herself in.

Every work day evening, she sits with the priest-scholars in the prayer hall and trades knowledge with them. The knowledge held in the Temple tends to be of the mind: ancient teachings of the world before, of machinery and power, of languages and translation.

Less developed—or perhaps less well-preserved—is their knowledge of the body. She teaches them how to mix herbs to produce healing and salving effects, how to determine health by searching for swollen nodes in the neck, how facial coverings of cloth can limit the transmission of respiratory illness. In turn, they show her how to tie knots she has never seen before, and they teach her what they know of Pala and Fen’s language with the books Liss has borrowed for her.

But more important than the learning is the talking.

“Your knowledge is quite striking,” says Tomay at the end of a demonstration. “And to think you have learned it by piecing it together from both your own people’s teachings and those of your conquerors…such triangulation takes deep meditation and astuteness.” They chuckle. “Are you certain you wouldn’t like to be initiated into the temple? I would commit these learnings to literature if I could.”

Noma shakes her head. “I don’t think I could pass the trial.”

Kori sighs. “You are so very different from your friend. Your partner, rather. Where she is always pushing forth, you are always circling back. Where she is impossible to appease, you barely, if ever, make demands.”

Noma finds herself smiling despite herself. “Liss was always the one who leapt into danger and went places. She's the one who endeavours and achieves. And I am simply…the one who goes along.”

Daranth clicks her tongue. “Don’t you speak of yourself in that way,” she replies, sweeping their scattered leaves into a heap. “I have been on this world for well near seventy years now, and I have never had a youth like you teach me so much I didn’t know. Don’t you ever believe she is overshadowing you.”

“It isn’t really that I’m afraid to be overshadowed,” Noma replies. “I’m simply honoured she would bring me with her… I only worry about the day she’ll no longer need me.”

Daranth frowns. “Well, I will say, she does largely keep people in her vicinity only as long as they are useful to her. But I will also say that I believe you are the exception. That she likes your company simply because you are who you are: the one who kept with her through oceans and wars.”

“I suppose even someone as cruel as she can harbour love,” Kori replies. “Frankly, Noma, you’re the only reason I still believe she has a heart.”

At these words, Noma sighs, fingers curling around the bowl in which her crushed herbs lie. She never quite saw it the way they do before, but in some little way, these words both thrill and terrify her.

---

Everything moves faster around Liss, as if her mere presence stoked the coals beneath everyone’s feet.

Within two weeks, she has gone from tirelessly reading to feverishly setting the pieces of her plan in place—straight from the studies and into the driver’s seat.

It is time, she says, for Pala’s first true test. The world in the other direction is harder to reach than the Traveller’s own, but Liss has perfect faith that she can make the leap.

Once the party is there, there is a plan of many steps to be executed. Before Noma can even ask to have it explained in full, Liss is already busy gathering supplies for the journey from the temple stores.

They meet on the temple steps in the light of that fateful dawn, on the threshold between the first terrace and the ground. The sky is almost the same colour as Liss’ hair. Pala and Fen have yet to arrive; she is sitting alone on the second highest step.

She looks up when Noma appears and descends onto the step beside her. “All the best,” she says as they embrace. “Things really do keep hurtling forward when you’re around.”

“The work doesn’t do itself.” Liss folds her arms on her lap. “It’s the only way. It’s how we turn one day into ten. Ten days into a hundred. If we stop moving, we let that time slip away.”

Noma tilts her head to one side. “But don’t you think the hours feel longer when we’re just…lingering with nothing to do?”

“Like now?” Liss murmurs.

“Like now,” Noma answers, leaning into Liss’ shoulder. “If this could last just a little longer…”

“When we win,” Liss replies, looping an arm around her waist, “we’ll have all the time in the world.”

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Cosmic Jigsaw

Honourless learned the day they crash-landed in San Francisco that, by staring closely at the transient flickers in the translation glass, she can sometimes make out connotations of the word that it doesn’t otherwise signify—fragments of the mind that wrote it.

When she first parsed the tangle of scrawlings in that sketchbook, the halo of text around Moscow revealed cold and riverine written in her own language, from her own memory of Ghosting trips to the Spire.

Surely the place called Moscow is not much like the Spire, but the connection persists as she soars across the gaps between space and time, light as paper in a breeze by her lonesome, saying the name of Sanjaya Hartono as she descends into Artur’s world.

She bursts from the in-between and crashes onto the dust-caked wagon of some vehicle boxed in by cracked wooden walls. Her legs knock empty canisters over with a racket like drums. The air rolls in through the cracks, thick and hot.

Honourless groans as she props herself upright, peering out the cracks to see an expanse of red dust. If she were asked to picture the opposite of the Spire, this is what her mind wold conjure.

“Alright…let’s do this the long way,” she mutters, sweat already beading on the sides of her face. A little rummaging with her hands in the dimness finds her an electric torch sitting atop a can of paint under the fabric cover—similar to the ones she has seen Vesper’s compatriots use. Plucking it from its rusted cranny, she leaps to her feet, and back into Felix’s San Francisco.

Without her entourage, she can chain leaps together without breaking a sweat, though she forgets a few more names on the way. If any world has an Academy of Military Sciences like Artur’s, it would be the one in the other direction from their lodgings—Adelaide’s.

Stumbling to a halt on bare grey paving rock, Honourless finds herself on the threshold of a surly fortress with a plaque on the front wall. When she sweeps her lens over it, her heart leaps: it bears the name of her destination. This text does not flicker in the glass: its meaning is sure as stone.

In this version of Moscow, on the streets outside the Academy, the pavements are dressed in the colours of summer, not quite time for the snow to fall yet, but the chill tells her it may be soon.

The trees are waving gently, and she strings two more leaps together—one backward into Felix’s Moscow, where the sky is as grey and the walls are red brick, and then another forward—back into Adelaide’s world, landing in the vaults of a library where the shelves tower higher than her head.

The air is thin and cold here. The only sound is of feet shuffling through the aisles and pages turning, sometimes indistinguishable. Honourless picks up a book and makes a show of reading as she wanders through the maze, peeking over the page’s edges, until she finds herself facing a thick wooden door with a plaque that reads Limited Access.

Her eyebrows rise. Stepping backward to the closest shelf to put her book down, she inhales—and makes another zigzag jump, again via Felix’s Moscow, centring all her thoughts on the Moscow Academy’s Limited Access section.

She is in the Limited Access collection in Adelaide’s Moscow. It is like an archival box in here, so dry that breathing starts to hurt. Only one light is turned on. Here, the books are sparser, but a large, forbidding door, featureless and black, stares at her from beside the counter. She waves the glass over it. A “secure dry room”…

A hop forward, a skip back. She is in the Academy’s dry room, and the interior is even darker than the door. She turns on the torch and picks up her scrying glass, stooping to scan the multitude of books housed inside a variety of glass cabinets. The selection here is narrow, and some of these tomes look older than herself. She sees ones about cities and countries with alien names. There are documents of military strategy and weapons research well beyond her comprehension. Records of secret operations in wars bloodier than she can imagine.

“Moscow Academy of Military Science, dry room,” she says. “A book by ‘Sanjaya Hartono’…” Even as she speaks those words, she squeezes her eyes shut and focuses on the concept of something she will soon forget, making the leap two worlds down.

*

When Honourless lands in that darkened place, the stench tackles her like a beast. The rankness of death and dust pervades everything—even for one who has no fear of corpses, it is enough to make her gag. Then the cold pierces into her awareness, so frigid it burns when she touches the fallen metal shelves.

She flicks her stolen torch on, the beam blazing through the cobwebs and wreckage. An eyeless skull stares at her from atop its spine, propped against a collapsed bookshelf like a coatrack for cobwebs.

She points the torch overhead and sees that the ceiling has caved into a triangle, an avalanche of books lost under a pile of stones. There are only thin cracks of light from the outside, but whatever pierces through is dim and red.

Briefly, Honourless feels a cold sweat break out. She cannot feel what Vesper does, but she remembers Hong Yi’s warnings all too clearly. There is a wrongness to the colour of the light.

She sweeps her torch once over the wreckage of pages and spines, the tattered white sheaves scattered like snow all over the shattered ground.

Here a crumbling wall separates the hall from what was once a smaller adjoining room, now no longer solid, easily crossed.

She can tell it is the same dry room because of the rows of defunct cabinets, their glass doors smashed and caved under the rubble.

As Honourless creeps over the piles of rubble, her foot kicks a book. She glances down, sweeping her translation glass over their covers. Dark matter. Coups in the Kremlin. None by Sanjaya Hartono.

She kneels on the ground and routs through the dust and rubble, tucking the torch between her head and her shoulder. She nudges a bony leg aside, some of the rank flesh still decaying in the dusty cold.

For lonely hours, she picks through the debris on her knees. It almost feels as if she were born for this task. She spent two decades marking days on a tree, picking reptile bones bare of flesh. She could keep searching for a year if she so pleased, pushing shards of the wall aside to uncover ever more multitudes of books.

But this task does not take a year. Five hours into her hunt, with knees and palms scuffed, she picks up a metal rod off a book and waves the torch and lens over its cover.

And there is its author: Sanjaya Hartono, every character matching the shapes of the ones on the scrap in her pocket.

“I almost thought you would be harder to find,” she murmurs, dusting the layer of dust from its soft cover. The cold has preserved it, but even the cold could not keep all the mould from the pages. Orobelle will simply have to deal.

---

Orobelle smells Honourless before she sees her. Her stench permeates the air, becoming pudding-thick as she opens the door. Staring up at the gaunt woman clutching a mouldy paperback book in her hands, Orobelle suddenly wishes that she could rip her nose off.

“Where in the Light’s name have you been?” she snaps.

“Searching for your book,” Honourless answers flatly, tossing the book at her. She screeches as it hits her, and her fingers recoil when she snatches the dusty, grimy cover with stains of old blood splashed across the words. “I know you won’t thank me, but at least leave me be.”

Orobelle draws her lips into a line. “Thank you,” she snarls. “Now take a bath, you smell like a graveyard.”

Dorian is beside her by then, almost on cue. The Duchess hands him the book with a two-finger grip. “Hold it for me,” she says, trading it for the translation glass he has brought.

“Of course, my duchess.”

Frowning as he rotates it to face her, Orobelle peers over the cover. A Critique of Theories of the Light. She inspects the half moulded author name to see it is the same as in the sketchbook.

“Dorian, could you clean the cover?”

“Certainly.”

It is short work for him. He rummages for one of her unused silk handkerchiefs and rubs out whatever mould he can find with a drop from her bottle of liquid sanitation. Then, giving a satisfied nod, he brings it back.

“Now, let me read it.”

Page by page, Dorian turns on command.

The cleaning has done little to remove the staining of mould on many pages, but even with the blotches obscuring segments of every leaf, it makes for riveting reading.

It begins with an account of falling down a tunnel, much like the one in World Three. It is, Orobelle realises quickly, not merely a critique of scientific theory. Her heart begins to pound harder with every opening paragraph of every chapter. She recognises every hypothesis it comments on, point for point. It is a critique of the Scripture of the Light—the definitive document of her powers as Knot of Worlds.

The scripture claims that the Knot of Worlds was once unanchored, but now cannot hold unless attached to a human being. I must say that the idea that a single individual can hold the universe’s existence in balance is absurd. That is not to mention the even more absurd notion of the Cores. How should the sum of eight consciousnesses reduce the strain on such a Knot of Worlds? It makes no physical or even metaphysical sense.

I am not suggesting that the Scripture is wrong, and in any case, I would rather no one wagered the existence of the multiverse on the supposition of the Scripture’s unsoundness. It is true that the sentient, self-aware human psyche is a very powerful thing; the existence of Travellers alone proves it. But is their purpose really to preserve existence? Why so convoluted of an arrangement to ascertain so important of a thing?

There must either be an explanation I have yet to remotely comprehend, or it is all a grand fraud, and I cannot say which one frightens me more.

It is like peering at her own heart, watching its veins and chambers distend. She is drowning in a vertigo that does not subside even as her protector closes those moulded covers.

“Dorian…” she mumbles. “See to it that Honourless is ready for the retrievals.”

“Of course. How shall I do so?”

“Ask her.” 

---

It is easy going for Honourless for the next four days: dinners of meat and salad, mornings sleeping well past sunrise, forays out into the city funded by the change she has wrung out of Orobelle with the help of Dorian’s pleading.

For the sake of the tenuous trust between herself and the duchess, she does not Ghost without asking. One more bleeding month and I’m out of here.

All too quickly, it is time for the rescue, or so she refers to it in her mind. There is some satisfaction indeed to knowing that she may hold Orobelle's plan hostage if she so pleases.

But lately, Honourless finds herself with a growing complicity in the project. It is more than just knowing Orobelle is her only pathway to acquittal. It is, she must grudgingly admit, that she cares for these lives that the duchess has gathered under her command. They are a mess. They are lonely. They are trying their best. Herself included.

This is what she thinks as she launches herself across the breach into the world beyond, readying herself to find what she may. 

*

Vesper, Marcia and Felix are seated in the mezzanine gallery of the Astonia’s tea house with a singularly opulent meal laid before them. “High tea” is insufficient to describe it; there are truffles with the cheese and the souffle is dusted in gold flakes. The house itself is all glass and carved hardwood, crystal lights hanging from every corner.

Despite her distaste for the shameless excess, Vesper cannot complain about the tea, which is smooth as silk and fragrant as the leaf with which it was brewed.

“What do you think?” Felix declares, taking a sip of his own cup.

Marcia bites down on a cracker with cheese and a halved olive. “Better than the food in the villa of Gaian.”

“Gaian?”

“The emperor's son in my time.”

Vesper chuckles. “Better food than an emperor's son offers. Are you quite sure you aren't a lord, Mercer?”

Before Felix can answer, there is a crash of wood that tears the quiet in two, a few screams erupting in its wake. From the air, a tangle of limbs and clothing quite ill suited to the setting collapses from the air, bangs an elbow against their table's wooden edge, knocks an empty chair to the ground, and crumples to the chequered tiles beside it.

“Honourless?” gasps Marcia, and she is right: from the pile pokes Honourless’ head, and then she untangles herself from Marcia’s chair leg and groans, rubbing her elbow. She mumbles something, which Marcia interprets for the table: “She says it's time to go.”

“Surely not,” gasps Felix, gesturing at the spread before them. “We have only just started.”

Marcia turns to Honourless. “He wants to finish the meal. You know, very exotic food. He's paying an arm and a leg for it. And I will say…” She picks up a cheese knife and a cracker and slices another piece. “It is quite excellent, try it.” She hands the cheese-laden cracker to a gaping Honourless. “Oh, don't forget.” She picks up a half-olive and places it on top.

Honourless spares a moment for blinking, then takes the cracker and puts it whole into her mouth. She chews and swallows in a matter of seconds and grins, speaking again.

“Does she care to join us?” asks Vesper, and Felix nods his assent, gesturing at the chair facing him.

Honourless does not complain one whit as she seats herself with them and begins partaking of the meal. It is a pleasant half-hour indeed, with all the boons of good company: conversation, humour, and the distinct sense on Vesper’s part that some jokes are flying over her head.

Felix pays at a counter girt by gold-leafed pillars, as he promised to. Then, taking Honourless’ hands in a tight ring, they leave the teahouse and all of New York behind, a little sorry to go. 

---

Screeee! Sirens are  wailing across the water. Specks of red and blue flash in their peripheral vision.

“Left!” Hong Yi yells. “Turn left, they're coming from the right—”

“For the last time, it's port and starboard!” Artur answers, but yanks the helm far to port as the white vessels jet towards them.

“There’s more! Oh my god, oh my god,” Hong Yi gasps as a flock of police jetskis swarm from either side. Adelaide is curled up on the floor, the supplies carrier repurposed as a sick bag. The boat makes another lurch, spinning to face the open horizon once more.

“This will be easier if you don't shout like that!” Artur roars.

“I’ve never been on the run from the law before!”

“Me too!”

Then there is an explosion of fabric—a shirt and cargo pants and long scarred limbs. Like a phantom, Honourless materialises in the cabin. She takes one look about, and her eyes widen when Hong Yi pounces and hugs her arm, saying, “Please, Honourless, get us out of here!”

“She's here? Good!” The jetskis are gliding inward across the waves, their sirens blaring on the wind.

Though Honourless cannot understand a lick of Hong Yi’s words, she seems to get the message once Artur kills the engine and the boat skids to a crawl. Like vultures smelling carrion, the police swerve towards them, their helmeted heads bobbing as they plane over the waves.

Honourless takes a dizzily swaying Adelaide’s shoulder, then extends the arm Hong Yi is already grasping to snatch Artur’s hand.

“Asith,” she declares, and they wink out of Adelaide’s universe, leaving an empty yacht behind. 

---

Artur, Adelaide, Hong Yi, and Honourless land in a pile at the door to the San Francisco City Hotel. All at once, the screams of sirens, the chug of the yacht engine, and the gush of waves are replaced by the click-clack of wheeled carriages and the clanging of machinery on the piers.

They look at each other and grin, and then laugh, Hong Yi dragging the other three into a celebratory hug before Honourless clears her throat and points into the lobby.

There is no time to await the elevator: they dash up the stairs, still hopped up on adrenaline, bursting into Orobelle’s room.

Marcia, Felix, and Vesper are already there, looking almost a world away in disposition—pensive and in easy conversation. “Oh, there you are!” Vesper declares, rising from the couch—only to be tackled with a hug from Hong Yi. “Blimey, what's the matter?”

“I thought for sure we were going to get rounded up by the cops!”

“Cops?” Vesper gasps.

Artur pokes his head over Hong Yi’s shoulder. “We stole a boat.”

As Vesper’s eyes widen, Hong Yi bursts out laughing, clutching his forehead. “Oh, god, it's a long story. How did you go?”

“Other than the stab wound and the overpriced cabs, pretty well.”

He steps back. “Stab wound? Hello?”

She chuckles sheepishly. “It wasn't the worst I've had. And Marcia patched me up in a jiffy. She really is something else.” They both cast a meaningful glance in her direction, but she is still talking to Felix and Adelaide.

“Well, I can't wait to catch up. For now, I think I need to stretch my legs, we've been on a boat for five hours.”

“I’ll join you,” says Artur with a clap on his back. “A walk is good.”

Vesper folds her arms. “And you could explain how you wound up on a boat for five hours.”

As the trio begin to stroll up the hallway, Hong Yi says, “It was a lot more than five hours, actually. So, the whole thing started on the street in the city of Dalian…” 

---

When Adelaide reaches the top of the stairs, she leans against the wall and draws a huge breath. She follows with glazed eyes as the rest gather in Orobelle’s room, their voices rolling over her. All she wants right now is a seat… 

A seat presents itself, in the form of the room couch. She stumbles towards it and drops onto a corner of the upholstery.

“Ah, Adelaide,” says Marcia from her right. “Did I say your name right?”

“You can call me Addie,” she mumbles. 

“Addie. Are you well?”

“No,” she replies, leaning back against the leather cushioning, head sinking in among the tassels of the throw blanket. “We were on a boat, fleeing from the law. It was going really fast.”

“Oh, they never did agree with me either, boats,” Marcia says, laying a hand on Adelaide's forearm. All at once, like a puddle evaporating, her head begins to clear. Only then does she seem that her companion is watching attentively with an emotion she cannot identify. “You could probably do this for yourself, too. Hong Yi told me about your abilities.”

“I guess I could? It would be slower, but…”

“Addie!” She hears Felix before she sees him, and by then he has descended to a crouch beside her. “Are you all right? You look worse for wear.”

“I just got off a horrible boat ride,” she mumbles. “We were fleeing the coast guard…”

“Fleeing the coast guard! And I thought we got up to no good.”

Marcia smiles. “Oh, Felix, don't be so polite, come sit with your darling.”

He rubs his forehead. “Marcia, please—”

But Marcia sidles away to make room, tugging on Adelaide's arm so she does the same. “You could use the rest yourself, no? After the stabbing?”

“Marcia! Don't—”

Adelaide's eyes go very round. “You got stabbed? Where?”

Sighing, he lifts his chin and pulls down his collar to show her where the scab is streaked across his skin. “I ruined a good shirt is what I did.”

She reaches out to steady his shoulder, leaning to look. She sees him swallow. It is worse than any wound she has sustained before, the skin inflamed around the injury. “Oh no, that looks bad,” she murmurs.

Felix shakes his head. “Marcia assures me it is only a scratch.”

“Could I—help you fix it?”

“You could?” he breathes.

Out of the corner of her eye, Adelaide sees Marcia shoot her a grin. “Yes,” she exclaims, then her voice shrinks. “I want to get used to doing it. I know what I’m capable of, I've just been afraid. To use my powers on anyone but myself.”

“Then I would gladly be your subject,” Felix answers with startling steadiness.

Shivers take over her body, and she looks away in case he can read her feelings from her face.

“Well, you are in capable hands,” Marcia says. “Perhaps what you need now is to retire to your room.”

Adelaide and Felix exchange a fleeting glance. “Perhaps Marcia is right,” says the latter. But Adelaide is first to rise.

*

For the entire walk, her thoughts ramble in circles. What possessed her to suggest this? Was it Marcia’s encouragement? Was it the sight of him after ten days apart? Was it the terror at seeing such a wound? He can do without healing—assuming she can even pull it off.

Whatever the case, they make it to the hotel room without Adelaide crumpling into a ball. They slip through the door, then she stops just inside, and Felix carries on inward, turning to look at her. “Where do you need me?’

“Oh—on your bed—should work.”

He uncomplainingly sets himself down on the edge of his bed, watching her as she arrives beside him. “If I may be so rude, could you explain how this will work?”

“Well…” She, too, lowers herself onto the bed as he reclines. “Did you know that all your cells have almost exactly the same genetic content? Your skin, your bones…every tissue has the blueprints to become every other, to make every material in your body. Because of that, I can return the healed skin to its original form.”

A curious smile slips onto his face. “That is slightly beyond my comprehension, but consider me astonished,” he murmurs. She reaches out shakily towards the fading wound, but flinches before her fingers can meet his skin. “What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I just—don't want to hurt you.”

“You need not do anything you fear,” he replies. “But I have seen how you have changed yourself and I have perfect trust in your skills.”

Felix’s gaze burns through her face. Adelaide cannot keep looking. When her fingers finally meet his collarbone, he draws a sharp breath, and so does she. “Sorry, did I touch a sore spot?”

He shakes his head. “Not at all—please carry on.”

Her fingers press on the pinkness around the scab. She finds—and it is easy to tell because she knows her own wounds—that the healing scar has done its job of staunching a breakage in the skin.

Her fingers press and probe, finding different parts of the wound. It is like reading a tale aloud, changing the way the words are said, softer or louder, impassioned or morose, except the words signify the colour of hair, the age of skin, the speed at which it consumes the nutrients in blood.

Again, he is a book wide open for her reading, but this time she is writing her notes in the margins. Touch by touch, she changes the expression of the scar tissue to be more like the neighbouring cells. A lump is forming in her throat, from shame and guilt and rapt exhilaration.

As Adelaide does her work, Felix closes his eyes. Then she starts to notice it is not just the skin around the scar that is reddened now, but the rest of his neck and his face. Her fingers recoil and she cries, “Are you alright? You shouldn’t be having a reaction.”

At once his eyes snap open. “Y-yes. I'm feeling perfectly fine. Don’t you worry.”

There isn't much left of the wound, and nothing has yet to go wrong that she can identify. She presses her finger to the one part where the scab is still clinging, and translates that, too. Blood roars in her ears.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. She isn't supposed to do this. But she is allowed to. No, she can do this. He allowed it.

Retracting her hand at last, Adelaide sits back and lays it on her lap, blowing out a long breath through her lips. Felix brushes the scar, jolting out of his recline. “Oh!” he exclaims. “There's barely anything left.”

“Do you feel okay?”

“I’m delighted! And curious—to see what else you can do. Not that I would inconvenience you to perform further, er, demonstrations.”

He says this with such enthusiasm that her body lights up like a pyre. “T…thank you. I guess we are done here.” She makes to stand, but is halted by his hand tugging on her wrist. Her gaze flies to him. “Was there something else?”

“No,” he answers with a tender smile. “I just wanted to say…Adelaide, you never cease to amaze me.”

“Felix—I—” Longing pierces her heart, a sensation she's growing familiar with. She thinks of Hong Yi’s words. And Marcia’s. “I’m—feeling so many things right now. And I’m not sure what to do about them.”

That is not how she meant for those words to come out. “I’m sorry,” he answers quickly. “I didn't mean to…”

“Don't apologise!” Adelaide bursts out, mind scrambling to piece words together. “The feelings are good! But also confusing. I’m fine! And I'm happy I could help you. And that you were alright with me trying my powers on you.”

To that, he beams again, squeezing her wrist gently. “Addie, you are welcome to heal me whenever you please.”

It takes Adelaide seconds to realise she has stopped breathing. She wants his hand to stay right where it is, clasping hers, but she does not say that. As he lets go, she finally rises to her feet and begins to shuffle away dizzily.

At the door, Adelaide casts a glance over her shoulder. Felix is still sitting on the bed’s edge, watching her go.

She is starting to understand what it means to find someone beautiful. She wishes she could keep looking, because looking makes her feel lighter, as if she could do all the things she never could before.

Perhaps the next time, she can let that feeling buoy her towards honesty.

This time, she simply tears her eyes away and leaves.

*

Felix waits till the door has clicked shut before sinking back into his mattress.

These past few weeks, something has been the matter. Something’s been the matter with him. He has been saying far too many things he should never say, making bold propositions that any self-respecting man of his ilk would sooner die than utter.

There is a proper method to this. There are protocols and scripts and social mores.

But then again, perhaps all normalcy was flung out the window when he met Adelaide in her gilded prison on the top floor of a future laboratory and fled with her under his wing.

Even on the day they met, with her hair all disheveled and her eyes rimmed with tears, he thought her quite beautiful. But he quickly put that thought away. She had lived alone in a room for years. She needed time to reacquaint herself with the world. And he was going to go home to his own universe without her eventually.

But now, none of that is true.

“Well, what's the matter with that?” he mutters, turning onto his side. He sees his coat hanging from the door hook, the butterfly hairclip and cat keychain still looped into the button hole.

For those dreamlike weeks, he began to lose himself in the intoxication of being free and unknown. It ignited in him a startling courage—to do things wrong, to make a laughingstock of himself, to say foolish and brazen things in the slim hopes that…

Already his home world is sinking its hooks into him, and this drowning shame is just about all he can feel in his solitude.

He cannot be letting his whims rule him like this. What would his father think, his mother, the man on the street?

No, he will deny himself. Adelaide deserves no less. He is capable of good manners and self denial…

Felix wraps his arms around himself and closes his eyes in the gauzy afternoon warmth. But he falls asleep picturing Adelaide sitting quietly beside him, and she is there walking in his dreams, too. 

---

All considered, none of the documents returned by Orobelle's colleagues are presented particularly well. The book from Dalian is conveyed to her as a series of images on a singularly irksome device. Despite the comments from the creature behind the glass threatening her patience at every turn, she eventually makes it through all forty pages.

The book from New York has been translated in the pages of Felix’s journal from a reading by Marcia. But it is an incomplete transcript—there are gaps where Marcia seemingly did not understand what she was reading.

Studying the three texts takes the rest of their stay at the City Hotel, and the pursuit begins to resemble the solving of a jigsaw—leaping back and forth from screen to ruled lines, from mildewed paper to glass.

She is starting to recognise something—something that grows increasingly plain as she revisits each text. All three of these works must have been written by the same person, for they all effect the same rambling, narratively didactic tone, and their contents interlock, like a conversation with oneself.

Sanjaya, Victor, Shanying, the author may go by many names, but they are all one and the same—a man who has wandered the worlds across so many years. For all that time the Queendom believed only three worlds existed, this man was seeing multitudes of them, though perhaps his truths fell on unhearing ears.

All three books, though short, are dense like scripture, each detailing sweeping metaphysical concepts that Orobelle can only just grasp by the tips of her fingers. In Moscow, Sanjaya is the youngest. There, he reports on the scripture of her world, her Queendom, in the time of Liminelle—three centuries ago. He talks of finding a Tunnel between Worlds One and Five, and thereafter begins to write of the religion she knows to be her own.

He discusses at length the potential energy stored in memories and sentiments, like the potential for motion kept in wound-up clockwork dolls. The fact that such abstractions of thought can compel human action signifies a kind of force, he claims—working against the universe's natural trend towards chaos and disorder.

“That force must relate to the Knot of Worlds. But what is the connection exactly?”

Orobelle shudders. Does she want to know the answer?

In New York, Victor is older and more world-weary. His musing begins on a clear night, where peering into the depths of space raises the question of what lies beyond the bounds of the multiverse. He theorises that there cannot be nothing, but whatever is there must exist in strange configurations in relation to the universes. For the Knot of Worlds, he says, is an entity that must transcend the universes—yet it is attached to a single physical being, taking a singular corporeal form in one particular spacetime.

In Dalian, Sanjaya is decrepit with age. In the document housed in the Sect’s archive, he develops his thesis on the Force of Will, as he calls it.

It is not merely a figuration: it is “the sustenance for being, the cause that organises matter against entropy, and all things that possess free will must be wellsprings of it. And this ‘will to be’ is perhaps what they call the Being in Suna’s land…”

Suna? This is a strange series of books indeed, for it is her first time reading this name.

“…the very universe’s force of will, flowing through all things, which brings the world to order, which accretes matter and infuses the elements with life…”

Orobelle has never learned of any religion other than the one into which she was born. It is the power of the Light—she has been taught—which her own power relies on. The way Shanying writes of Force of Will conjures in her mind the flash of a cold hall, a blurred aroma of sea salt on incense, the crinkle of book pages beneath her fingers. These words threaten to overwrite that memory…

“…Perhaps this is what they call the Light in the Queendom, and any number of other names in other lands…”

Her pulse accelerates, her eyes widening with every word. It has always felt like her duty—to know why the universe is the way it is. Kneeling with her mother on a marble pew, she peered at the faceless god and the stars carved into Her robes and felt, for once, unafraid. All that terror she had inherited, just to be the future Queen, melted away beneath the attention of that faceless deity.

The Light made the multiverse, then made the Knot to hold it together. Does Sanjaya know her, too?

Orobelle shakes her head vigorously. This isn't why I am reading these books. Clearly, whatever their villain is planning is of a cosmological nature, needing the Knot, and involving the eradication of pain.

Surely this villain, whoever she may be, could not be planning to change the face of the universe herself, and yet it is the only possible conclusion.

How can one person even dream of achieving that?

“It's all a farce,” Orobelle mutters. Still, there is a dreadfulness to it all—that this is the nature of this stranger’s plan, and that her body should be a centrepiece to it.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Florian's Mystery - I

The Diamonds Court members' profiles - you may find this nice to have while you read!

It's all come down to a game of cat and mouse.

The Council of the Diamond Palace, tasked with keeping Orobelle’s absence under wraps, seems to be failing at its job. Already, in the markets, they are whispering about the Duchess’ quiet escape. Once the news reaches the Queen’s palace, it has a high chance of turning into a problem. A problem involving swords and cannons.

In a time when the Queen lays roads near the World Gate and arms her forces in the open, a stitch in time—as they say—saves nine.

Out on the grounds, the General of the Ducal Army drills her lieutenants on their sword-forms. Inside his office, Florian blinks himself awake, picking his head up from his notes.

Until it is solved, all his hours will be spent attending to but a singular mystery.

It's an oft-overlooked detail of the case, amid the clamour about the explosion and the missing child. But the ransom note was clearly a work of considerable artistry.

After all, Orobelle has refused to submit that note to his investigation. That assures him of one thing: it contains secrets he isn't allowed to know.

There are few who could betray information like that—and conveniently, all of them live and work in the Diamond Palace.

Through the gap in his curtains, Florian watches the soldiers form ranks on the quadrangle. This is a peculiar case, even for a sleuth of his calibre. The details are scant. The crime is cryptic. And the Councillors are a shady lot indeed.

In other words, this is his dream assignment.

The role of Councillor of Investigations does not make as much use of Florian's detective’s training as he would like. He has endured the years of dreary paperwork, unsettling dressings-down from the late Duchess, and frankly childish arguments with her daughter, for this day.

On this day, he sits in his office with a stack of identity documents, putting the final touches on his first case file in years.

Summary: There has been a likely case of collusion between a Diamond Palace employee and a foreign criminal. The perpetrator, if any, enjoys access to Duchy secrets too sensitive to be shared with most councillors, the nature of which are not currently known.

Based on the above details, the following suspects have been identified…

---

Hiscera. Councillor of Correspondence. The palace’s oldest employee, a dear friend of both Estiva and the late Adamanta. As the Councillor of Correspondence, it could do me well to seek intelligence through her. I understand her relationship with Orobelle is less pleasant than it was with the Duchess’ mother.

The clock starts ticking the moment Florian begins to move. And if haste is necessary, then he supposes there is no better place to start than with the primary handler of all communications passing in and out of the Diamond Palace.

“Florian, dear,” says the snowy-haired Hiscera as he knocks and enters. Florian has never managed to accustom himself to her office. It is austere and quiet, the shale blue curtains and polished wooden shelves conceding no adornments, her desk making room only for documents and a teaset. The woman's monocle gleams at him as she turns. “What a surprise to see you. I hope you are well.”

Florian glances about for a visitor’s seat and finds a small wooden chair, into which he settles himself. “Good afternoon,” he replies. “Investigative work brings me here, you must understand.”

She nods slowly. “And I can certainly guess what that work concerns,” she answers. “How may I help with it?”

Never disclose more than necessary, that's the first law of detectiving. “Well, I am investigating the attack on the water tower,” Florian answers carefully. “You are the Councillor of Correspondence, and also a suspect. I have a few questions which I hope you will answer honestly.”

“Straight to business, I see. I will do my utmost.” She speaks just as slowly as he does.

“Wonderful.” He picks up his pen and flips his file open. “First things first…please explain in full your responsibilities as Councillor of Correspondence. Spare no detail.”

For the next several minutes, Hiscera does just that. She is the connective tissue of the palace, shuttling sensitive mail from the palace’s inbox to its recipients. No servant or messenger is entrusted with such missives. Before they reach anyone else, they pass through her hands.

At times, she is also the Duchess's spokesperson to dignitaries and citizens alike, and she ghost-writes Orobelle's speeches when the latter is disinterested in the subject matter.

“So, what you are saying is, if any letters of a sensitive nature were addressed to the palace, then you would have seen them.”

“That is correct. I do not open them, of course—my job is not to peep—but I would know they were delivered.”

“I see. Well, let us start there, then. In the weeks prior to the attack on the water tower and the time since, have you noticed any…suspicious correspondence with palace denizens?”

Hiscera adjusts her monocle. “Well…yes, two things of note,” she says. “Arco has been receiving an awful number of missives from anonymous senders, some of them written in Tysian. They did not appear to be letters from official bodies, judging by the state of the envelopes.”

“She works with roads and farmlands; surely that means a great amount of correspondence with people who do not write much.”

“This didn’t start until two weeks before the attack.”

“Ah, now that is interesting.” He flips to Arco’s page and scribbles a note. “What was the other thing?”

“I noticed that Estiva recently received a very nice-looking envelope from the Queendom University, which she later told me was a research grant. Bless her heart that she has finally seen some success in her search for funding, but I think it behooves us to treat all matters relating to the Queendom with caution. Even its university.”

“True enough,” Florian murmurs and makes a note of this as well. “Though, the Queendom University is rather independent of the Queen, isn't it? The wife of the Baroness of Spades is a professor there.”

“Mellistella? Yes. But nothing in the Queen’s City is truly independent of the Queen.”

“True, I suppose. Now, in the days before the water tower incident, and in the weeks hence, did you observe any other unusual behaviour among our colleagues?”

Again she glances aside in thought, then nods. “Now that you mention it, yes. The night before the incident, I happened to encounter Anthera in the hallways. She leapt when she saw me. When I greeted her, the little dear simply walked on, and I saw the terror in her eyes. Our encounter was in the first floor hall—beneath the arch, not far from her office. I do not see why she should have been so frightened, unless she did not wish to be seen.”

“What were you doing out that evening, if I may ask?”

“Meditating, as I sometimes do at that hour.”

“Whereabouts?”

“In the courtyard garden. The only other ones typically about that late are Grus, yourself, and the night librarians. I cannot say what she was doing at that time.”

“Lively company, to be sure.” With an unrevealing nod, Florian makes a note on Anthera’s file. “Well, I thank you very much. Is there anything else you have to say that could help me?”

Hiscera lowers her voice. “If I may offer you a word of caution…be careful, or you may uncover secrets you aren't looking for.”

“That is only an occupational hazard,” he replies, rising. “Well then, time does not wait for me. I thank you for your time, Hiscera.”

She nods as he departs, smiling pleasantly.

---

Ara. General of the Ducal Army. Second newest palace employee. A military woman, through and through, she is known to take great outward pride in her position as general. She associates with Arco and Anthera, and she works closely with Grus.

Ara spends a quarter of her day leading drills outside the armoury and another quarter speaking with her lieutenants. Often enough, he sees her throwing spears and spinning maces on the range; one time, she accidentally decapitated a sculpture in the neighbouring garden, which Adamanta had replaced posthaste.

Florian can only suppose she spends the rest of her hours either asleep or thinking about her job, and when he finds her office empty, he waits by her door.

Sure enough, not minutes after the drills are over, she comes marching up the hallway, only to halt beside him with a raised eyebrow.

“Ara, good day to you,” he declares.

“Odd day for a visit,” she replies as she swipes sweat off her tanned brow, waving him inside. Hers is not an office so much as a nest: for someone so disciplined, her room is copiously cluttered with old weapon parts, chains hanging willy-nilly from half-empty bookshelves, and a plethora of crates, some of them half-open.

The woman herself takes a seat with her dark hair in a tight bun atop her head,  fastened with a metal hairpiece. She does not have a visitor’s chair—there is a clearly designated standing area in front of her desk, just by the door. Florian imagines many a recruit standing straight-backed in his place, ready to receive orders.

“So, Florian,” she replies. “What do you need?”

“Well, I am here on an investigation,” he replies. “And I have a few questions to ask.”

“Sure, what questions?”

In a similar fashion to Hiscera, he asks after her responsibilities, and she describes them—in fewer words. “I train soldiers. I give military orders. I organise the palace guard. Don’t you already know that?”

“Yes, well, I need to be sure I haven’t missed anything.”

“I also answer questions from pesky investigators.”

His cheek twitches. “That is all quite straightforward, then. Now, I understand you’re close to Arco. What do you know of her recent doings?”

“Not much. She’s been on a recruitment drive. Not enough workers on the highways.”

Though Ara speaks with a stone faced stillness, she is different from Hiscera. She is not a stony person, and Florian has an inkling that there is something she isn't saying. “I see,” he presses on cautiously. “What kinds of work do the highways need these days?”

Again, he catches Ara hesitating. “How would I know,” she replies. “She says she gets frequent complaints about the state of the roads near the World Gate. Has to send inspectors and all, to find the bad spots. It's a long stretch of road.”

While they are talking, Florian’s eyes have taken to sweeping the room. Among the knickknacks, there are weapons—ones he is familiar with and ones he doesn't quite know as well, appearing Tysian in make. Arco and Dorian are Tysian, he thinks absently.

Ara clears her throat loudly. “Anything else?” she says.

He snaps to attention. “Yes! You know Anthera well, don't you?”

“I do. Why?”

“Do you know about her preoccupations these days?”

This is Ara’s longest pause yet. “Other than attending to city-building, as her job requires? She has been swamped since the water tower explosion.”

Again, he takes to searching this room of endless detail for other objects of note. On the shelf, there are medals hanging from the coat rack and boxes of cubed vigour. Again Ara interrupts his staring, this time by snapping, “If that is all, I have a lot of work to attend to.”

“Before I go, I do have one more question, and it’s the most important one. In the week before the explosion, and the week since, do you think anyone in the palace has been acting unusually?”

Ara does not cease bristling. “Yes. You are placing yourself above the need for investigation. How do we know you aren't complicit? It would be an easy pass, no?”

“I suppose we shall see what the evidence says, hm?” Florian replies. “No one is being prevented from investigating me.”

“Sure,” Ara says. “But actually, yes, I do remember something. In the early hours of the morning after the explosion, when I was in the courtyard, I saw Orobelle storming through the second floor hall, properly stressed. I don’t know why she was up and about. Did you know this?”

“This is news to me,” he replies, scribbling down a note. “In the second floor hall, you say? At what time?”

Ara is nothing but consistent. She pauses, then says, “The last quarter of the night,” and Florian knows she is fudging the hour.

“Thank you. Now, I shan’t keep you from your precious work any longer.”

From then, she glowers at him, and does not cease doing so until he has turned to depart. In the hallway outside, Florian turns the details about in his head, scribbling in his file as he walks and thinking: she really did not want me looking at her things.

---

Arco. Councillor of Agriculture and Roads. She works closely with clients living on the lands of the Duchy. A Tysian acquisition who has been outspoken about her anti-royalist sentiments, I am aware Orobelle does not like her.

Florian does often see Arco, except when the entire council is gathered in Orobelle's war room. At his knocking, the woman throws her door open with a bottle of mead in one hand. As always, she wears her long brown hair in a utilitarian ponytail atop her head, her collar lifted and her sleeves rolled up.

“Good afternoon,” he says with a nod.

Arco folds her arms, accentuating her work-hardened muscles. “Out with it, what do you want?”

He frowns. “A little hasty, don't you think?”

She flicks hair out of her face. “You only visit when you want something.”

“May I step inside?”

“No. We’re talking here. Don’t like letting nosy investigators in the office.”

“Alright, then,” Florian sighs, opening his folder. When interviewing a witness it is usually in his best interests to comply with their requests. “I doubt it surprises you, but I’m here to investigate the matter of Freesia's kidnapping and the explosion at the water tower.”

She leans on the doorframe. “And I don’t care about the Queendom's political squabbles. Please, an explosion. That’s hardly a good way to bring a Duchy down.”

“To bring the Duchy down,” he says. “Do you often think about it?”

“Less since Duchess Orobelle’s ascent,” she barks. “For all her issues, she at least doesn’t pour her funds into tearing my homeland apart. And frankly, if she let Eirucan define some of the terms of his employment, then there’s only so bad she can be.”

“Did she?”

“You’d know this if you talked to him at all,” Arco says. “It’s the reason his twin got to come along with him. But you’re not here to chatter. What d’you want to know, Glasses?”

“I have a few questions, if you'll answer honestly. This is a matter of internal security.”

“Go on then, shoot.”

“Alright. Well, first, tell me more about yourself and your role as a councillor.”

Arco, at least, seems to take great pleasure in explaining her work. She is a proud Tysian woman who was brought to the Duchy at the request of her compatriots. She coordinates the parcelling of farmland and the laying of highways, orchestrates trade networks between the provinces and the city, and conducts dispute resolution with landowners.

“And I send some of the Duchy’s money to farmers in need, when they write in for it.”

He nods as he makes notes of every pertinent detail. “Now, I’d love some insight into your colleagues,” he carries on. “In the week before the attack, and in the time since, has anything you've observed struck you as unusual?”

“Be more specific. Everyone in this palace is being suspicious all the time.”

“Anything that you think could be relevant to the case of the kidnapping and explosions.”

“Top of that list is Hiscera. I mean, what’s not nasty about that hag? She masterminded the genocide of Acse. She slaughtered the warriors of Leyse.”

“She slaughtered the warriors?”

“Don't play a fool, Glasses. None of that would have happened without her. And I’ll tell you what—she’s been taking bribes, too.”

“Is that so?”

Arco smirks as his eyes widen. “I can put two and two together,” she replies. “You know how Carana’s bid for her role came off the back of her being a section master at the inter-world postal service? Well, I talk to the inter-world postal service all the time. Ride with them, even. And you know what they say about Carana? She’s an elite, never gotten her hands dirty in the mail rooms. She replaced a more qualified candidate one year before she became councillor. One year. And guess who oversees the whole operation? That’s right: our Councillor of Correspondence.”

Florian feels a shudder travelling up his back. “Has she done anything recently to make you think she may be up to something?” he asks.

“I’m the wrong person to ask. I cannot stand the woman and I see her even less than you. But go ask Carana, I reckon. That lady’s in with Hiscera, one way or another.”

“Alright.” He pauses to make a note, then looks her in the eye. “Now, I have a question for you. I hear you have been receiving correspondence from various anonymous senders.”

She groans. “Oh, the little old lady has been routing about in the mail again, has she? Well, obviously, I have contacts from out afield. And not all the farmers on the lands want to be slapping their names on everything they write. ‘Specially not us Tysians.”

“Seems odd, I suppose so,” Florian replies, writing this down. “Now, correct me if you’re wrong, you seem to know Ara well.”

“I’d say so.”

“Do you reckon Ara has been doing anything she shouldn’t?”

At this, Arco barks a laugh. “Ara? The general? When does she ever do anything but what she’s supposed to?”

If there's one thing Florian has surmised about Arco, it is that she is a dab hand with trickery, easily obscured by her outspoken veneer. Even as he bids her farewell and marches away through the vaulted halls, he has the distinct sense that some of her words were barefaced lies.

---

Anthera. Councillor of City-Building. She oversees the planning and building of the Duchy City and negotiates transport connections to the provinces with Arco. Descended from both Queen Drachen and Countess Caligo, she was appointed so Adamanta could keep an eye on her, being Orobelle’s closest competitor for the Queendom’s throne.

Florian knows all of the above because he was there in the room, advising Adamanta when she made the decision to appoint Anthera.

The woman, of course, has no inkling of his role in her receiving her current job. When he knocks on her door, she whirls outside in a blur of blonde hair, chirping, “Hello, hello!” as she waves him into a lavish peach coloured couch matching her fluffy coat.

When Florian sits, the plush upholstery sinks too much for his liking. Before he can right himself, Anthera drops into the seat beside him and adjusts the flower in her hair, crossing one leg over the other. “How nice to see you, Florian! Want some tea?”

“No tea, no thanks.” He won't admit he is a little thirsty from all the talking. No accepting drinks from suspects.

Her hand, already halfway to the teapot on the side table, simply picks it up and pours herself a cup. “Suit yourself! Here on an investigation, aren't you?”

“Right on the money,” he replies. They're talking already, just as he expected. “I have a few questions for you, if you'll humour me.”

Her chipper demeanour deflates just a little. “Oh. Is there a chance my answers might land me in jail?”

“There's a whole judicial process between now and then…but depending on your answers…yes?”

Anthera pauses with her teacup halfway to her mouth. “Oh, so this is serious serious business.”

“Have you ever known me to be about on unserious business?” he asks.

“There was that one time the Duchess made you play croquet with her. Just because she wanted to try it. And when you beat her fair and square, she stamped on your foot and cried.”

“That was the most serious of business!” he huffs. Then he pats the open pages of his case file flat. “If I may?”

Anthera smiles sweetly. “Go for it.”

“First of all, you must be being kept busy since the explosion. How is that going?”

“Oh, it's been so hectic. I've been visiting the library at the Queen's City to refresh myself on those theories about disaster planning and whatnot.” She flicks her hand, laughing. “What were they thinking, appointing a rich good-for-nothing as Councillor of City-Building.”

“Your progress as a councillor has been quite impressive,” he answers impassively. “Do you have any friends or other connections in the Diamond Palace?”

She taps her chin. “Well, I’m close to Ara, I guess,” she says. “She’s way too serious, I’m telling you. Always talking about drills and promotions and domestic threats and whatnot. And I guess you could say I'm friends with Carana, but I never know if she actually likes me or if it's because I'm the only other person in this building with a fashion sense.”

Florian begins to retort before realising she has a point. “Does Carana really pick her company on that basis?”

Anthera shrugs. “Well, she keeps up with Hiscera too, and we both know it's not for her fashion. Maybe it's because she owes her for—stuff.”

The detective's eyes narrow. “‘Stuff’? What kinds of stuff?”

She shakes her head. “Oh, the usual. Gave her a good word, nothing world-shattering.”

“I’m sure it was nothing at all,” he says, even as he notes this down. “How about Ara? Do you reckon she has been doing anything unusual lately?”

Anthera’s smile wavers for a second. “Training the soldiers, readying for a possible incursion, the usual for her.” She shrugs. “She works too much. And she's principled, too, I may add. They didn't put her in charge of defence for nothing.”

Florian nods. “I think we all know that quite well. Now, in the days before the kidnapping and the explosion, and in the time since, did you observe any unusual behaviour among your colleagues?”

“Oh, yes!” Her answer is immediate. “The morning after the explosion. Before Orobelle heard the news. I saw Carana in the halls. She was heading towards the library all sneaky-like. It was the third quarter of the night, I think. I cannot say what she was so cautious for, but I was sure not to be seen.”

Florian knows that Anthera is an early riser, but even for her, the third quarter of night seems unusual. He makes a note of this as he asks, “Is that atypical of her?”

Anthera shrugs. “Before sunrise it is, and in such a hurry, too…I didn’t think anyone other than Grus visited the library while it was dark.”

“Which librarian was on duty that night, do you know?”

“Poppy, I think?”

“And was Carana carrying anything when she visited?”

“A…book, I think?”

He makes a lengthy note under Carana’s file. “One more question, then. Do you have any grievances with the palace?”

She giggles. “Oh, not really. I know Orobelle doesn’t trust me, so I’ve been trying to prove I can be held up as a worthy member of the court. May as well, if I’m stuck doing this city planning work.”

“Well, I think you are doing better than most would in your place.”

Anthera touches her hand to her heart.  “Your kind words are much appreciated.”

“Thank you for your cooperation. Farewell, and hopefully the next time we talk, it will be under less strained circumstances.”

She returns his goodbye with a twinkle of relief in her eye. He leaves her to finish her cup of tea alone.

---

Estiva. Councillor of Academics. The second oldest member of the council, she was a researcher before she became a councillor in the field. She spearheads the advancement of research pursuits and the Duchy Academy. Of the council, she is closest to Hiscera.

The sun is well into the final quarter of its arc when he finally makes his way to Estiva’s office. The Councillor of Academics is busy organising a stack of writings on her desk when he enters her office in the loft. Her windows are open, and there isn't so much as a shred of paper anywhere it shouldn't be. A collection of leggy potted plants sits by each open window, some of them with self-watering tubes poked into the soil.

The woman herself is short and stocky, face framed in loose grey curls. Her glasses reflect the verdure in her room as she arranges the cushions on her couch for Florian. 

“Good afternoon, Estiva. I’m here on investigative work.”

“So Hiscera told me over lunch,” she replies, folding her arms on her desktop. “How may I help you?”

“I have just a few questions, if you will answer them with nothing but the truth.”

She nods. “Seems straightforward enough.”

“First things first, then. You’re the Councillor of Academics. What does that entail exactly?”

“The Duchy Academy is my chief concern,” she says. “I am on its board, as is Orobelle, and I oversee strategic direction and outreach. Anything that concerns how the Duchy spends its resources on research is within my purview.”

“I see,” he says, writing as he speaks. “And, I hear you have recently received a grant from the Queendom University?”

“Ah, so you've heard,” Estiva replies, eyes lighting up. “Indeed, after months of running into dead ends, the Professor Mellistella herself heard caught wind of my work in metaphysics and prompted me to write to her University. The funding application was approved almost right away!”

He smiles. “Well, congratulations, first and foremost. Did the Duchy Academy fail to fulfill your needs?”

She nods. “I cannot direct the Academy’s funds towards my own research simply because I’m a board member, of course. The other members of the board reviewed my applications, and their recommendation was that the funds I needed were outsized compared to the strategic relevance of my work.”

“Ah! What is your research about?”

“My latest work is into the synchronisation of timekeeping devices across world boundaries. If you’ve seen that fancy watch of the Duchess’, even that device wobbles a little with respect to our time. Only by a few seconds per day, at most—but with enough months, that turns into entire hours lost.”

“Interesting…” Well, it is not especially interesting to him, but such cloying small talk is what the job calls for. “Does the grant come with any obligations not related to your research?”

“There was nothing in the contract on that matter when I signed it. It stipulated that I shall not conduct any illegal work under the law, that it may be revoked if I am found to be embezzling the funds, and so on.”

“I see. Is it usual for the University to take in a researcher from the Duchy?”

“I reckon half the people at that university are not from the Queendom’s lands. There may be an enmity between us in political realms, but fields like mine are much bigger than such squabbles—better researched nondenominationally.”

“Understood. Well, let me change directions. In the week before the attack on the water tower and in the time hence, have you noticed anything strange in the behaviour of your colleagues?”

She strokes her chin. “Why, yes…the evening before the attack, I was walking along the courtyard ambulatory when I overheard Grus and Hiscera talking in the garden about some covert business of the Tactician’s. I caught a whisper from Grus that Orobelle should not be made aware of whatever it is they were discussing. But they must have noticed I was there, because they both went silent at once.”

At this, Florian raises an eyebrow. A secret kept from Orobelle could be many things: the fact that one of her gowns was blown onto the lawn and had to be re-washed, the truth that her liquid satiation is sometimes made with substitute herbs, or something more…unsavoury? “Do you know what the subject might have been?”

Estiva frowns. “I think I heard the phrase ‘induction ritual,’” she replies. “But nothing much else to indicate the subject.”

“How odd,” Florian murmurs as he writes this down. “Before I leave, is there anything you’d like to tell me?” 

“Not much—except, thank you for your tireless work.”

---

Carana. Chief political advisor. Orobelle entrusts many critical secrets of political strategy to her, as her work requires, but I understand the Duchess does not fully trust her character. Her skill with her work precedes her, nevertheless, and she often goes above and beyond what her post demands.

Carana is not in her office, but Florian finds her reading a book by the lamplight in the hallway not far from her door. Her dark hair is in a loose bun, and she wears a sharp burgundy dress, glistening like silk.

Peering up from the pages, she murmurs, “I heard you were investigating the kidnapping. Sticking your nose where it shouldn't be.”

He stops beside her. “I reckon ‘in my witnesses’ offices’ is exactly where my nose should be.”

“Witnesses, or suspects? Don’t play coy, Flor.”

He sighs, seating himself beside her. “The people implicated in a crime tend to be both. But I prefer to be charitable.”

Carana nods. “Well, are you about to ask me what I was up to the day before the tower exploded?”

“I would if I lacked tact. But no.”

She does not reply. She has resumed reading.

“So, you are the Duchess' political advisor. What does that entail exactly?”

Carana finally lowers her book to the benchtop. “I construct communication plans. And I advise her on the daily matters of ruling. When she's willing to be advised, that is.”

Florian nods, eyes flicking to the right in thought. “I'm curious. Do you think that, during her life, you were Duchess Adamanta’s most trusted councillor?”

“No.”

“Who do you think that was?”

“Who do you think?” Carana answers. “We both know who the late Duchess told all her secrets to.”

He nods. “Well, then, I would like to know what you think of Hiscera.”

Carana finally lifts her head from her book. “She is a very kind woman, and an intelligent one. It is humbling to be privy to conversations between her and Estiva: they are wiser than I could ever hope to be. And she is ever so ready to aid her colleagues, even then.”

“She is kind and wise, it’s true. But do you think we have any reason to question her morals?”

“No, not at all,” she replies without so much as a pause. “She has all the right principles to be in her position. And this is why she has been there for fifty years—longer than either of us has been alive.”

“And you believe that signifies loyalty,” he replies.

“Oh, very much so. She is a woman of her word, and she has only the Duchy’s best interests at heart.”

He adjusts his glasses. “Enough about her, then. Let’s talk about you.”

“You know I’d love to.”

He squints at his scribbles, just a little hard to parse in the dim light. “You joined this council before I did—you were Duchess Adamanta’s advisor. A lofty position, with intimate access to the Duchess. Before that, you were a section master at the post, which is a respectable role, too, but hardly a strategic one. When you joined the palace, how was your character assessed to be suitable for such a role?”

Carana’s eyebrow twitches. “I fail to see how any of this relates to the kidnapping.”

“And I fail to see how a kidnapping could have been orchestrated so effectively by a criminal from a different world—and yet, here I am, investigating that very circumstance. So, Carana, how did you reach your position so quickly?”

“I did my job at the post office well,” she replies. “I was interviewed by the Duchess herself. And there was no one else remotely positioned to compete with me.”

“Interesting,” he replies, eyes moving to the garden, now fading into the last blue hues of evening. “I would have thought the position of political advisor would fall to the council member most experienced in the Duchy’s internal matters.”

Florian basks, briefly, in the satisfaction that he has managed to make Carana pause to think. “That may be true,” she answers. “But you hardly know what conversations I have had with the late Duchess, either. And I am not about to disrespect her trust beyond the grave.”

“I have no interest in that, either.” He makes a few notes on Carana’s file, and then Hiscera’s. It is a game of cat and mouse, after all. He can’t press her for information she has decided not to give. “Different question, then. In the week before the tower explosion…”

“...and the time hence, I know, I know.”

He bristles briefly—have they all been tattling so eagerly? But he gathers himself and carries on. “In that time, do you reckon any of the councillors have been behaving unusually?”

Carana ponders this for a second. “All of them,” she answers with an unrevealing smile. “If you’re intent on your view of Hiscera, then I can’t see how any of the others pass muster.”

“I’m not intent on anything,” he replies. “Now, I can tell you much rather be reading than talking to me, so I’ll dispense with the parting pleasantries. Thank you for humouring me.”

That is the last thing he says before getting up and taking his leave. She does not stop him. There is one more person to attend to, and, Light help him—he left her for last for a reason.

---

Grus. Chief military strategist. A sensitive role that oversees many of the political movements of the Duchy as a whole. Orobelle is as wary of Grus as she trusts her. She holds access to the Duchy’s military plans, though she tends to project an aloofness about the internal politics of the palace.

An hour before bedtime, the light still glows under Grus’ door. It helps that her bedroom adjoins her office—she had the study converted after too many a late night with her nose in her notes.

The pale-haired woman is still toiling over a stack of maps when he comes knocking, opening her door a crack to poke her head through. “Ah, if it isn’t Florian, up at midnight as always,” she says.

“If it isn’t the only person I ever visit at this hour.” He takes her in as he enters, her hair almost as dishevelled as her coat, halfheartedly draped over her shoulders. “You may have heard a thing or two about the rounds I’ve been doing today.”

She nods. “Hard to keep these things quiet.”

He opens his file as he sits down in the armchair by the door. “Who told you about it?”

“Ara warned me you’re about to be real nosy.”

“It’s my job, no?” He smiles. “I’m Councillor of Judiciary and Investigations. Though you’d think Orobelle has forgotten the second half.”

Grus returns his smile. “Opening with polite disdain for the Duchess, are we?”

“You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”

She quirks an eyebrow, taking a stack of files off her chair. “Where does that come from?”

“Well, I understand you have been discussing matters that the Duchess should not be made privy to.”

If Grus is surprised by the mention, she smooths over it perfectly. “Well, yes. I’d love to deny it, if only for the safety of what it pertains to…but I’d rather not be caught lying to an investigator.”

“Care to explain what that was about?”

She sighs. “Let me tell you something about military strategy. There is a lot that is best not known in advance—not by the ones executing the plan, not even by the Duchess—especially not by a Duchess so liable to speak rashly when angry.”

“I know your work deals almost wholly in secrets,” Florian replies. “But you must understand…if there is some business of yours that could be relevant to my case, then you must do so. And I must treat you with suspicion until I know what you aren’t telling me exactly. You may either choose to explain, or I may have to press an explanation out of others.”

Her shoulders scrunch closer to her head, just perceptibly. “I assure you, I have no business that is relevant to the case. Perhaps you should instead consider scrutinising the doings of Ara and Estiva, then. I have found some of their recent behaviour irregular.”

“In what way?”

“I keep seeing Estiva in the Queen’s City.”

“What are you doing in the Queen’s City?”

“Classified.”

Perhaps the full day of interrogations is wearing on him, but Florian can feel his patience fraying. “Let me be clear. You have a vested interest in clearing your name. You may achieve that by cooperating, or you may remain on my list of suspects.”

“Playing hard ball already? Well, if I were your ‘culprit,’ or whatever you detective types say, I would be lying out every orifice, sparing no expense to help you incriminate someone else. But strategic secrets are strategic secrets.”

No squeezing water from a rock, but rocks can be broken in other ways. “Well, what about Ara?”

Grus folds her arms on her desk. “I had a soldier come to me recently,” she says, “asking me to clarify some orders from Ara. And irregular orders they were. She’d asked them to allow an unauthorised individual inside the armoury. But when I questioned her, she was reluctant to explain what those orders pertained to.”

He turns the page to Ara’s file and jots down a note. “The armoury. What kinds of equipment do you keep in there?”

“Weapons, shields, ammunition for said weapons, instructions on how to use said weapons.”

“And who was this unauthorised individual?”

“The soldier wasn’t told. Only that the person of interest would be carrying a letter with a symbol—a crescent sun—drawn on it.”

Florian knew that the sigil of the crescent sun was associated with the occult. It told him nothing about the person concerned. He jotted this down under his notes about Ara, drawing his own rendition of the symbol. “Do you have more useful information to share?”

“The night before the explosion,” she says at once, as if continuing his sentence, “I was looking out the window near midnight when I saw a head peeking out from the bushes, silhouetted against the facing windows right there.” Turning to the tall arched window behind her, she points at the one facing hers, peering between two pillars. “They had no light of their own. They crossed the courtyard in the direction of the quadrangle.”

“The night before the explosion, you say. Did you observe any identifying details?”

She taps her chin. “Enough to be sure it wasn’t Estiva or Hiscera. Not Dorian either. Could’ve been you for all I know. Short and nervous.”

That is just about all that Florian is willing to tolerate. “Well, thank you for your cooperation, if I could be so generous,” he says, standing up to leave. “Rest well tonight.”

She yawns. “You too. Don’t lose too much sleep over it.”

*

What a bag of contradictions, thinks Florian on his way out.

So many leads to so many plots, so many unexplained details. Some of these must have nothing to do with the kidnapping, and he must resolve to firmly disregard anything that is unrelated to the case at hand.

Easier said than done.

Whatever truth this bag of lies might yield, it will be the work of tomorrow’s Florian to untangle. Still, as he finally settles down for bed in his office cot, he is swallowed by a creeping dread that he is taking on more than he bargained for.

---

The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Florian's Mystery - II

It is the first quarter of the day. The soldiers are shouting their drill manoeuvres on the courtyard. The perfect time, as it were, to search Ara’s office.

Florian would rather sticky-beak around than attempt to strong-arm the general, of all people. Every guard in this building looks to her, rather like ants to a queen, and if push came to shove, he doubts his ability to punch his way out of a chokehold. He knocks before entering, and only nudges the door open when he gets no answer.

Through the bright window, he can see the tail end of a line of soldiers twirling practice staves. In its light, his eyes parse the office's chaos. Most things here are typical of the leader of the Ducal Army—weapons, floor plans, and scraps of half-finished notes—but some stick out, like the gleaming new Tysian spearhead tucked behind a box of metal rings. That head has the decorative lustre of one that has seen no weather nor blood. It is in the characteristic leaf shape, the edges serrated.

Picking it up, his eyes shoot to the characters etched into the stem, written in curls and diamonds. He puts it back down and picks up his pen to transcribe it.

The thought of Dorian as a suspect resurfaces, but again, he shakes his head. It was his niece who was kidnapped, and he was the first one to ask the court to investigate it.

But you truly never know with these coucillors…perhaps he benefited from the debacle in a way I cannot name yet.

There are a number of files here and there, too many for him to search in full before the woman returns.

But looking over to the book-littered couch, he notices a sliver of fabric peeking from the gap between the cushions, peach with a frilled edge. It is a singularly unusual contrast to all the metal and hard edges around the room. When he pulls it out to inspect, he sees enough to surmise what it is, and immediately pokes it back into the gap, heart booming.

His eyes lift to the window. The soldiers have cleared the quadrangle. Oh, Light burn me! With a leap, he lunges out the door in a flutter of fabric and flings the door shut, dampening the impact with his boot. The sound of metal clanging up the hallway puts a spring in his step, and he clears the corridor, panting, well before any sign of the general appears.

Onward he marches, in a furious haste, pen scratching away at his notes, but his thoughts are no less flummoxing. I think, he writes, I have stumbled upon a scandal.

He knows that what he saw hidden in the sofa couch was someone’s underwear, so utterly in contrast with Ara’s taste in everything else that he cannot imagine it belongs to her. No, the floral style far befits someone else in the palace.

Based on Grus’ observation, the person hurrying through the courtyard the night of the attack was moving towards the quadrangle—or perhaps, more accurately, towards Ara’s office. Ara lied about what time she saw Carana so as to appear not to be awake at odd hours, but Anthera took no such caution…

Whatever the contents of their activities that night, he is almost certain they had nothing to do with the kidnapping. And if so, then his singular cause to suspect Anthera of ill-doing—her insistent defensiveness of Ara—is moot.

More importantly now, this revelation places Anthera’s and Ara’s observations of the night close together, perhaps even in the same hour. Orobelle and Carana were out and about in a similar hour of the night, and he is starting to have a hunch that there may be a connection.

---

Through the glass doors of the palace library, in front of a wooden screen wall, Vane the librarian dawdles on duty. The curly-haired librarian appears to be in a state of advanced boredom when Florian shows his face, their head propped on a fist while they scribble on the sheets.

Approaching their desk, he quickly sees that they are drawing meaningless shapes in the margins of the work roster.

“Good morning,” he calls. “Slow day?”

Vane’s head perks up. “Oh, hello, Florian. Tell me you have a fun task for me.”

“I have an investigation on my hands that you could help me with,” he says.

“Just what I needed! Carry on, please.”

He is already flipping open his case file to the page where he has noted the order of business with the library. “There's more than a little to get through here, so do bear with me. First of all…are you any good with translating Tysian characters transcribed without intent?”

Vane hums in thought, putting down their quill. “We can always do it the old-fashioned way. Just a minute.”

They whirl around and disappear among the shelves, robes swishing. Not a minute later, they return, staring at the back cover of a mouldy tome in their hand. They flip it over and slap it onto the countertop, smiling fondly. “Ah, the only good dictionary of Tysian linguistics…co-authored by the Duchy Academy and the Queendom University’s linguistics branch—truly an artefact of the times. Alright, now, let's see, then…”

Tysian is written vertically in chains, recognisable by its abundance of diamonds, rectangles, and curlicues. Vane translates the phrases word by word, riffling back and forth between the pages of the dictionary and sounding the characters out.

“Hmm,” they say at last.

“Hmm?” Florian replies.

“‘A common freedom,’” they declare, pointing out the words in turn. “Where did you find this message? The context can reveal much.”

“Attached to a part of a weapon,” he replies.

Vane strokes their chin. “Intriguing…my understanding of Tysian culture is that gifts of weapons are exchanged between clans and even with neighbouring nations as declarations of alliance. This custom became increasingly common following the Queendom’s arrival in the Cracked Land.”

Florian nods along as he jots these thoughts down beside the transcription. “Then…‘freedom’ here could well refer to resistance.”

Vane's head bobs noncommittally side to side. “Make of it what you will. What was the next thing on your list?”

Florian glances at his notes. “Are you willing to disclose clients’ activities in the name of investigating threats to Duchy security?”

“That depends. Do you have a warrant from the Duchess?”

“Unfortunately, no. She is quite reluctant to participate in the investigation.”

“Hm. We are not in the business of disclosing loan and consultation information, except at the behest of the Duchess. But I’ll be honest—warrant or not, this business sounds quite serious indeed, and I would very much like to assist. In the name of the safety of everyone involved, and all that.”

“That’s very noble of you. But you may refuse if doing so would jeopardise your position. I have no leverage over you.”

“I know, I know. But, warrant or no, I think mitigating a threat to the Duchy’s existence is worth a minor protocol infraction.”

Florian smiles. “Alright, then, if you are sure.”

“As sure as I am a Duchy citizen!”

“Well, firstly…” he lifts the page to read, “I hear Estiva frequents the library. What can you tell me about what she borrows? Anything untoward?”

Vane does not have to consult their records to answer this question. “Yes, one of our favourite regulars! Whenever she comes here, she’s borrowing books in the same theme. Timekeeping technologies, inter-universal physics, the world gates.”

“That does all align with the subject of her research.” But then again…the attacker seems to have come from beyond our three worlds. “Does she read anything else?”

“It is not for herself, but on a few occasions, she has come in here asking after books for Hiscera—I suppose the latter has less time to spare for browsing the shelves. The Councillor of Correspondence takes an interest in the Queen of Hearts’ gift. The control of wills.”

His heart thuds harder. He, like most of the Queendom, knows well how the Queen of Hearts’ reign has, for centuries, been propped up by a phalanx of servants gathered into service by her Gift of control.

“Induction ritual.” The thought nags. Her Gift is shared by blood, isn't it? “That sounds useful—thank you. Now, I do have one last question. When may I next speak to Poppy?”

Vane’s eyes dart to the scribble-covered roster. “This evening, at the turn of night,” they reply. “I never understood his love for servicing the counter after dark. The Duchess could not pay me enough to make me work those hours.”

“Well, then, thank you for your very kind assistance. I believe the rest of my questions are for Poppy.”

Vane breaks into a grin. “That was easy. And…” they glance at the clock on a side table beside the reception entrance, its chains ever clattering, “less than an hour left on my shift. Thank you, Detective.”

---

While he awaits the hour of the changeover, Florian pays the armoury a visit. There is a guard at the door, as there always is, the shifts rotating every quarter.

“Erm, good afternoon, officer,” he calls out at the man standing guard. “I’m here on investigative business and I’m wondering if you would be willing to aid me.”

He tilts his head to a side. “What sort of business can I help with?”

“I have questions about one of your superiors. There's no need to say anything you are uncomfortable saying. Just a few simple questions, and I will not make a note of your identity.”

“Sure, what's the questions?”

“I hear that guards—perhaps not yourself—have received unusual orders to clear unauthorised guests for entry into the armoury without due process. Is this true?”

“Mm…yes.”

Well, that was simple enough. “Has this occurred yet?”

He shuffles his feet. “Y...yes, Investigator. It was my mate, Agate…he let her in.”

“Her? Whom, may I ask?”

“Um.”

“Is that secret?”

“Well, I don't want anyone getting in trouble.”

Florian nods patiently. “If I must,” he says, “this case concerns the very Duchy’s internal security, and that of the Duchess. And your assistance could help us avoid a repeat of the water tower incident.”

These words seem to almost instantaneously catapult him out of his hesitance. “It was Arco.”

“Oh?” Oh. Weapons. A gift of alliance. “A common freedom.”

“That's all I know. I promise.”

Florian inhales deeply. “It’s more than enough. Thank you very much for your cooperation.”

---

Most palace staff do not operate past midnight. For those who do, it is because it is necessary—and as such, the immediate availability of reference material and expertise at that hour is also paramount. This is the reason that the role of night librarian exists.

Poppy is a petite man with a round face who wears his brown hair tied at his nape. When Florian shows his face at the start of the second quarter of night, he perks up with a smile too bright for the hour. “Ah, Florian! Vane told me to expect you,” he says as he straightens. “I hear you need help with an investigation of sorts.” The scent of bean tea wafts over from a mug on the desktop.

“You heard right. If we can skip the pleasantries—I have a number of questions to ask, and I hope you will answer as honestly as you can, as this concerns matters relating to the security of the Duchy.”

Poppy’s eyes briefly widen, but he nods. “That I understand. Ask away.”

“Firstly, I understand that the morning after the attack on the water tower, perhaps shortly after the attack occurred, Carana paid the library a visit.”

“That is correct, she did.”

“Before that, did the Duchess also visit the library?”

“That she did.”

“At what time?”

“Start of the third quarter.”

“Fantastic. And may I ask, what business was the Duchess on?”

He thinks for a moment. “Translating a paper note.”

At this, Florian’s heart pounds. “Are you able to disclose the contents of the note?”

“I did not read it,” he replies.

“I thought as much. She did not disclose the contents to me either. But what interests me more is that visit by Carana thereafter. What time did she enter?”

“End of the third quarter thereabouts.”

“And did she in any way show awareness of the Duchess' note?”

Poppy pauses, as if to contemplate what he is allowed to say, but to Florian that is answer enough. Nevertheless, the librarian finally murmurs, “Yes,” and Florian marks a note under Carana’s file. “She asked to visit the translation room, and because she is a council member with every right to the facilities, I allowed her.”

“And how long did she spend inside?”

Poppy shakes his head. “Half a quarter. She entered, spent a while in there, and then left without a word.”

Florian has, in the course of his training, learned that there are ways to unearth the viewing history of a translation glass. Such instruments are rare and costly, often owned by laboratories and studios, but such costs would be far from prohibitive for the likes of Carana.

Half a quarter sounds like plenty of time for someone to take a comprehensive reading.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about the manner in which Carana conducted herself?”

Poppy closes his eyes. “She was holding a leather-bound notebook and some sort of metal torchlight, I think. And when she left, she was reading the book.”

“Ah! Well, that’s all I needed to know. Thank you,” Florian answers feverishly. “Have a good evening.”

“And to you—don’t work yourself to death!” Poppy answers with a wave. 

*

Of two things, Florian is now reasonably sure. If Carana was transcribing the ransom note from the traces of the scrying glasses, then she knows its contents. And, if she was transcribing the ransom note, then she had to know that there was a note in the first place.

Either way, that woman has more questions to answer.

The front page of the case file is filling up by the day. This is the last thing he makes a note of before he falls asleep, dreaming of different versions of the events of the night—Anthera sneaking to Ara’s office, Orobelle marching through the halls, Carana ducking in after her, Grus and Hiscera whispering about the Queen’s rituals of control.

Then, he marches into the office of the political advisor the next morning and enters without knocking.

“Florian. I swear I have seen your face more times this week than I ever do in a month,” Carana mutters as he thunders in. “What’s the matter this time?”

“Carana. Good morning. Unfortunately, work brings me back,” he says, effecting a tone of perfect solemnity. “By which I mean, you are now a prime suspect.”

Carana looks scandalised. And then, she laughs. “How could I be?”

“I spoke to Poppy.”

She sighs. “What would you like to know?”

“You knew there was a ransom note before the news was made known to the palace. How, may I ask, did you know that?”

“Why, the Duchess was making such a racket when she passed my quarters. I couldn’t stay asleep! I was worried, so I caught up to her to ask what the matter was, but she refused to let me in on it. Can you imagine? I, her political advisor! I did see, however, that she was carrying a note in a foreign language, and I surmised she was on her way to the library. So I thought it my duty to investigate the matter.”

His eyes narrow. “Do you often go snooping on matters that you aren’t meant to be privy to?”

Again she sighs. “Don’t you think that it is my right, as political advisor, to know about matters concerning the Duchy’s safety? As much as it is yours to be investigating them?”

His brow furrows. “Let me be clear—I currently have no interest in acting against any such hypothetical infractions. But I need confidence that you are telling the truth—that this is what happened the night of the explosion, and that this is not simply a fabrication. Is there anyone who can corroborate your version of events?”

“Orobelle could, but who knows how long she'll be gone!” Carana hisses.

This is it, then. Time to bargain for his life. “Then show me your notebook and let me read the translation,” he replies.

“Why?”

“If you weren’t the one who betrayed the Duchess’ secrets to the attacker, then the note’s contents will exonerate you, and I will take it as an indication of good faith.”

“This seems unprofessional.”

“Do you know what else seems unprofessional? The manner in which you attained your position as advisor. I have more than one reason to question your character.” He feels just a little disgusting speaking these words. But such is the way of the Duchy. “So show me now, before I leave the room, or you will remain a prime suspect.”

Carana stares at him, speechless for seconds. Then, wordlessly, she turns to her study desk and opens her drawer, pulling her leather-bound diary from within it.

“I have one condition of my own,” she says as she turns back. “You will not transcribe any of it. The fewer people can get a hold of this text, the better.”

He swallows. “Agreed,” he says, capping his pen and tucking it into his pocket.

She turns the pages till she finds the one she is looking for, then rotates the book for him to take.

He peers closely at the pages. The page is filled not with writing but with the printed representation of the view through a translation glass. Burned across six pages is a startling crush of text. It does not obey the ruled lines nor the edges of the book, some words truncated by the edges of pages.

Amid this chaos of letters, he finally locates the note of relevance on the fourth page—and as he reads, he stops breathing.

“Oh.”

“Oh? That’s all you have to say about it?” Carana scoffs. “I assure you, I knew nothing about what was written in that note before I traced the translation glass. And part of me wishes I had remained in ignorance.”

“Well…your co-operation has been much appreciated,” he says. “And no, I do trust you would not share such secrets so freely, either.”

”Then goodbye,” she says, “and let us keep our secrets to ourselves, lest they endanger more people than we mean to, yes?”

There is weight to these words that Florian recognises well. “Of course,” he answers. “What was discussed here need never leave this room.”

---

Among the four matriarchs of the Queendom, succession is typically determined by primogeniture. After the splitting of the Queen’s lineage, the throne passed from mother to daughter, or mother to niece failing that, outward from the immediate family.

However, there is an exception enshrined in Queendom law for when there is no clear eligible descendant: to prevent crises of succession in those cases, the current matriarch may name an heir who succeeds her in the situation of her death or abdication.

To protect the selected heir, the choice of heir is sometimes not made public until it is relevant. However, to ensure the naming of the heir holds weight in the royal court, the document must be signed by at least one witness.

Such heirs are often less popular than their counterparts, and to mitigate this they are typically chosen from among those with noble blood. An heir from outside the family is unheard of.

Orobelle has, it appears, dispensed with all of these conventions and cautions. The ransom note names her heir, a fact heretofore unknown to any but the witness, whoever that may be.

That witness must now be found, for only they could have disclosed the truth. And he has an inkling of who that might be.

Before then, there will come a gruelling process of elimination.

---

“Estiva,” says Florian the second time he appears at her office. “If you’ll spare me a few minutes, I have some further questions to ask.”

“Ask as you please,” she replies, turning to face him.

“I understand that your research concerns the structure of reality, including movement between worlds.”

“Yes, that is correct,” she replies.

“Now, I am asking you to be very honest,” he goes on. “Our recent attacker came from a world beyond our known three. Can you assure me that you did not collude with them to help them gain entry into our world?”

She frowns for a moment. “Well, if the attacker needed our help to enter our world,” she says, “then wouldn’t they have had to enter our world in the first place to establish contact?”

“Aren’t there ways of communicating between universes?”

“If you asked again in a few years’ time, then maybe,” Estiva replies. “There are instruments that could transmit across world boundaries. But once again, such an instrument would have to be given to the correspondent in the first place.”

He nods. “That is true…it is all a little convoluted. But there is one more thing that I must ask, then. Do you know the identity of the Duchess’ heir?”

“Is that related to the case?”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, I'm afraid I haven't a clue…I am certainly not close enough to Orobelle to be privy to information like that.”

He draws his lips into a line. “Thank you, then. That is all.” Then he rises from her couch and leaves.

---

Arco’s door stands ajar, so Florian does not knock. “Well, behold, a second visit in three days,” he declares himself at the door.

She smirks from her armchair. “How goes the investigating?”

“Quite well,” he says. “In fact, I have learned you have been making unauthorised visits to the armoury—that Ara has been clearing you for entry despite your lack of standing to be there.”

Arco stares at him. “So I have. What do you make of it?”

“You have been receiving letters with their senders unmarked. You have been cooperating with Ara to gain entry into the armoury. This is all beyond a doubt. So I am giving you a chance to explain yourself. To tell me why you have done all of these things, if not to destabilise the Duchy.”

Arco draws a deep breath, then sighs. “Florian. Do you know how I came to work for the Duchy? I was asked to. Hiscera rode into my village and said that my compatriots had asked for me. They often make us Tysians farmers—we know more about the art than the Queendom does, whatever it may claim. And I accepted, because I wanted to make this place more bearable for them. It would have been wonderful if they had never been coerced to leave home in the first place! But destroying the Duchy will not release them to go back home. The Queendom will seize the Duchy. The Queendom will take its servants. And that is the same, if not worse.”

Florian does not interrupt her. And she carries on.

“So as I have told you, I have no interest in assisting in the kind of damage that this attack has done. I am particularly not interested in the harm of Uri Licur-ca, a child from my own nation. All of these details you’re learning about me, they have nothing to do with your case. Yes, I have secrets, because secrets keep this palace running. Who in this damned palace doesn’t have them? So that is all you need to know from me.”

All considered, Florian is willing to believe her: if she knew Freesia would be targeted, she would never have stood for it. And he is tired of unearthing secrets he never meant to know.

“Fine,” he replies. “But I have one more question, if you’ll help me. Do you know who the Duchess’ heir is?”

“No,” Arco says at once. “Why would I? She knows my allegiances do not truly lie with the Duchy. She would trust me with no such thing.”

“Then that is all,” he replies. And with that, he bids her goodbye.

---

“Grus, I have some important questions for you. And I must have you know that I am no longer merely playing at a conclusion. Your answers will help me make a judgment on whether you are guilty or innocent.”

Florian was not looking forward to pressing Grus to explain herself, and when she smiles oddly at him, his misgivings compound. “Well, I hope this is not you telling me you have already come to your conclusion and are simply here to press for ‘evidence’ to affirm your stance.”

“I am not certain of anything yet, and I will press no charges without reasonable certainty. So if you’ll cooperate…”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Good. Then, please, explain to me in full why you were discussing matters that Orobelle should not be made aware of, and what they had to do with the Queen’s control rituals.”

“I cannot do that,” she replies.

“Why not?”

“Because I cannot compromise the project to which they pertain.”

He folds his arms. “Are you trying to incriminate yourself?”

She sighs. “I said, this has nothing to do with the kidnapping.”

“And yet you cannot clear your name? I am investigating a crime against the Duchy, Grus. And to show your innocence, all you have to do is tell me, even vaguely, even in abstract, what you were talking about with Hiscera.”

Grus pauses for a very long time.

“Alright then,” she mutters. “If that is what you will have me do…then you, too, must make me a pact. Once you hear this, you are inducted into the plot, and you are sworn to secrecy until it is brought to its conclusion.”

Whether behind his desk or outside his office, this job certainly comes with a lot of binding oaths. “I agree to those terms,” he says.

She steps forth and shuts her door, locking it. “Then, how do I begin…”

*

By the end of that conversation, Florian is convinced that Grus is not his culprit. But in its place is an equally terrible revelation, one whose weight makes him feel off-centre as he walks away.

When he embarked on this mystery, he knew he would learn secrets he didn't mean to. He didn't think he would be sworn into a secret that could decide the fate of the Duchy.

But that is where he is now.

Grus does not speak at length, but she says enough to explain everything—her interests, her causes for secrecy, the reason Orobelle cannot know about this.

“But you entrusted Hiscera with this knowledge,” is all he says in reply.

“Of course I did,” Grus answers. “She is the only one I knew without a doubt would betray it to no one else.”

---

Long before Hiscera became Orobelle’s counsellor and friend, she was Adamanta’s. She has fingers in the palace’s every corner. She was there, on the sand, when the Duchy put Tyse and Leyse under its yoke. And if Carana caved to his threats…

He feels his belly roiling with nerves as he enters Hiscera’s office at her quiet bidding, that severe office of clean edges and empty tabletops. “It is good to see you again,” says the woman.

“Likewise. You must know why I am here.”

“You’re doing your job, as always. How goes the investigation?”

“Frankly, this is quite the muddy case. There is no murder weapon, no accessible victim, no hidden stash of contraband. And so my conclusion can only come from elimination at best.”

“That sounds like quite a bind,” she replies calmly.

Only say as much as necessary to gain a useful answer, he thinks again. “So, answer me this,” he replies, then inhales. “Do you know the identity of Orobelle’s heir?”

Hiscera pauses. They are both sizing each other up—the Councillor of Correspondence, the Councillor of Investigations. Her eyes flick to her hands, then back to his face.

“Yes,” she finally says. “I do. What will you have me do?”

Florian’s head spins. Of all the councillors, Hiscera has the most to lose. She was Adamanta’s lapdog and secret-keeper. At her word, the venture in Leyse turned violent. She is Orobelle’s shadow advisor, the one to whom Carana owes her place, and perhaps everything else.

Here it is—her indirect confession. And yet…

…this is not what a guilty Hiscera would say.

“It—it isn't you,” he murmurs, thoughts coalescing, feet moving faster than his mind. “It isn't you.”

Even as she stares, he turns to the door. “Thank you for your help, and I'm sorry. I must—” Before she has replied, he has dashed away through the halls.

*

There is no reason Florian needs to hurry. The palace is in lockdown, and the missives aren't flowing. But the sooner this resolves, the sooner life can return to normal for everyone else.

He trips up the stairs to the loft and knocks, for the third time, on Estiva’s door. She is at the windowsill, filling her waterers.

“Estiva,” he declares. “Stay right where you are. I will not leave until you tell me the truth.”

“Well, this is quite the turn,” she replies, lowering her watering can. “Please, explain.”

He catches his breath, folding his hands together as he steps inside, forgoing the armchair. “I’ll tell you what. First things first. You have received a grant from the Queendom University. Yes?”

“Yes, I have.”

“You are researching metaphysics with the university, and some of your work concerns the World Gate and communication across world boundaries.”

“Also yes.”

“The Queendom has also recently shown intent to seize our World Gate, laying roads near our borders. To take control of the passage would mean direct access to resources that we have historically brokered to them.”

“It is a little early to conclude, but that is a possibility, yes.”

“And the Duchy did not have any use of your research, but the Queendom University does? That's interesting, isn't it? That the Queendom is taking such an interest in interuniversal travel?”

She frowns. “What does my working with the Queendom University have to do with the kidnapping?”

His thoughts are rambling, and he is piecing together a reply like a trolley laying tracks before itself. “We both know the Queendom would benefit from the destabilisation of the Duchy. By now, the Queen knows our Duchess’ intent to seize her throne. We are moving towards war, and I reckon a researcher with fingers in the Duchy’s council would be very convenient for them, no? Enough that they spare no expense in reeling her in? You said you were approved almost right away.”

By now, Estiva is staring bewildered at him, and she says, “I cannot see your argument, Florian.”

“I do not yet know the connection between the Queen and the attack. But I do not need to. When I asked you if you knew the identity of Orobelle’s heir, you said, ‘No.’ Whoever disclosed that information to the attacker must have known that admitting to the knowledge would incriminate them. So if you knew you had betrayed your Duchess, you would know to lie that you hadn't that information in the first place.”

“Have you considered that someone who doesn't know that information might also say they don't know it?”

“Yes. But Hiscera told me she knew it. Yes, she—our clever, ruthless Councillor of Correspondences—chose to incriminate herself! But we both know there’s a good reason she was selected as Orobelle’s witness for her declaration of heir. If she were a culprit trying to escape incrimination, all she had to do to muddy the case was to say she did not know who the heir was. I would have my hands tied by a lack of evidence, and I would close the case defeated, with no conclusive evidence against anyone.

“But no, I reckon this is what actually happened: she heard my words, realised what must have been written inside the ransom note, and realised that someone else must have disclosed the secret to the attacker. Someone whose identity she knew, because she was the one who told them!

“And Hiscera, who has ordered the slaughter of villages, chose in that moment to take the fall for the true culprit. Who else could that be—who else would she share such a secret with, who else would she defend with her own life, but her dearest friend?”

Estiva’s brow furrows. “That is a massive extrapolation from Hiscera confessing to the crime, Florian.”

“She did not confess to the crime. She confessed to knowing who Orobelle’s heir is.”

“And I would have accepted the verdict,” says Hiscera's voice from the door then. Both heads turn to find her peeking inside, face lined with sorrow. “Even though I knew it was you…you do not deserve imprisonment more than I do. But it seems my lapse in judgment has cost us fifty lives.” She shakes her head. “I merely believed you were above all this politicking.”

Estiva sighs, putting down her watering can. “And you are correct, my friend,” she says. “I do not care which side I end up on—as long as these squabbles eventually cease.”

“And your pledge of loyalty to the Duchess means nothing.”

She shakes her head. “You, of all people, know that we pledged our service to a murderer.”

Hiscera does not answer.

With a final sigh, she turns to Florian. “So, what will you do about this?”

---

Recognising that it is her word against Hiscera's, Estiva finally admits to the truth. She was brought into the Queendom University's fold without apparent ulterior motives. But it did not take long for the Queen to start making demands, insinuating threats of defunding and worse. Between certain jeopardy from the Queen and the mere risk of sanctions from the Duchess, she chose the latter.

A comprehensible act of treason, but treason nonetheless. Her reserved demeanour tells him she needs no informing of this fact.

But before the matter can go to trial, Florian makes a deal with Estiva. He will spare her of judicial action if she will help gather information—for a certain plan he does not mention. And after an evening’s deliberation, she agrees.

The secrets remain firmly in place, and the Duchy continues to tick, for now.

---