She lies crumpled in the ditch, skin blue and cold in the glow that hangs upon the highest eaves. The last moments of her assaulter’s struggle still hum back and forth in her brain, that frantic darting of eyes, the cries of “no” that resonate still in her very own throat.
Her shirt is already beginning to soak in the mucky water, and her phone is vibrating in her pocket.
Both phones are. Both phones, in both pockets.
Standing amidst the flicker of waking streetlights and the hum of car engines, the girl finds all the stories turning on their heads.
She shrinks away, trying not to scream. Screaming will only bring the police, and the police, she realizes, are the last thing she wants to attract.
She tugs at the hem of her sweater. Her own dead countenance stares back from the ditch, hair soaking up the liquid of the black puddle on the old alley pavement. It is five minutes past sunset, and the clouds are coming—maybe if she leaves her here the rain will wash the body away without a trace and she can go back to being an ordinary schoolgirl—
Pala fishes out her ringing phone, synthesiser notes humming in her teeth. When she taps the green Answer icon, both phones fall silent—hers, and the corpse’s. She brings it up to her ear, averting the eyes of her doppelganger.
“Pala, are you on your way?” Panic reignites in her chest. Ms. Mahi’ai doesn’t know what she’s done. Of course she doesn’t know. “The light-up’s starting soon.”
“Yes ma’am, I’ll be there,” she says, and as soon as the receiver clicks her jittery hand slots the device back into her pocket, mind whirring.
Think like a murderer. You’re a murderer now.
:::
Havaiki is a small island, so far out in the Pacific it sometimes forgets there is a world beyond it. The only reminders arrive in the form of small cargo ships, arriving in the port once a day. There are orchards and chicken farms here, and there are fishers whose daily catch is more than enough to feed every citizen. There is a central market where these fish trade hands, so self-sufficient it almost never sees foreign currency.
But not everyone lives by the port, and a working internet connection is not something everyone has, so it becomes difficult to remember that beyond the vast expanse of water surrounding the island, there is an entire world of people, living lives that do not intersect with theirs.
:::
Within minutes, Pala has managed to empty the contents of a trash bag. With every muscle clenched and her breath held so tight it hurts the inside of her head, she slides her cold body inside it. The corpse is pallid and she does her best not to notice the faint warmth, still perceptible, in her other-self’s arms, as she slips each limb into the rustling plastic and lifts it so she slides in deeper. Her other-self’s uniform is rumpled, and she stinks of urine, and she would feel ashamed on her behalf if terror were not constantly screaming for her attention.
She kicks clinking cans, fruit rinds and empty milk cartons over the bag, until it is buried in a heap that looks almost innocuous. Without another glance, she dashes out of the alley clutching at her mouth, heartbeat roaring inside her ears.
Pala feels nausea press on her skull as she sprints through circles of dim streetlight, away from the dark alley, sling-bag bumping on her waist. She can barely hear the cars for all the blood rushing in her ears and the noise of her footsteps, suddenly the only sounds in the world. Every few seconds, the image of her own face in the gutter, bluer than death, crashes in on her thoughts uninvited, and she gulps, pressing forward.
Flesh is a lot stiffer and less yielding than one would assume—especially when that flesh encompasses the windpipe, and is held sturdy by a column of bone. The ghost of that sensation—of the windpipe resisting the pressure of her grip—sends another gush of nausea over her, and she falters to a stop, the circular blue signboard marking the bus stand going out of focus ahead of her.
With a shiver, she swings to a side and vomits on the grass beside the pavement, knees buckling.
For a minute Pala stands and coughs, waiting for the world to settle, like sediments at the bottom of a cup of tea. She spits the taste of lunch and acid into the grass and wipes her mouth with her wrist, fighting to find her footing.
Her phone beeps to signal a message. She shakes her head, and resumes her slow trudge.
Not a car passes, as Pala walks the remaining distance to the bus stand, passing before a row of small houses, each painted a different colour, their windows glowing gold.
Once she has arrived beside the round blue signboard, she closes her eyes and listens to sounds in the warm evening. The chirp of crickets stirs from the grass, the treble to the deep bass of the cars in the southern town centre. A plate clinks inside one of the houses.
A second phone beep startles Pala out of her reverie. Fishing her phone from her pocket, she opens the inbox and finds the last two messages, both from her boss:
15 minutes
someone here wants to see you
The five-to-nine shift is only the second-most-eventful. No one has ever come seeking Pala specifically before. At once she thinks of the body, and a new surge of frigid fear squeezes her stomach—but the pink line bus rumbles in right then, doors gleaming her reflection back at her, and the thought is crushed by the noise.
She swallows again as the doors hiss open. “Good to see you,” says the conductor with but a glance, the golden sun gleaming on his sweat-slick brown skin.
The lone two passengers on the bus are both staring off through their respective windows at the roadsides. Shoulders sagging, Pala begins to make her swaying way across the deck as the bus engine grumbles back to life.
The pink bus line is the newest of the seven on the island: it opened earlier this year in answer to popular demand, running in a loop between the southwestern coast and the southern town centre.
She would have far preferred the colour orange for the line, but citizen preferences don’t matter terribly much to the town council when they’re labelling their bus routes. She supposes it’s no big deal. Perhaps the eighth line will be orange.
:::
Every now and then, news comes of strange happenings in the area. Apparitions, vanishing monuments, places where time loops inexplicably. The papers are full of these stories, and they are just uncommon enough that the citizens do not think anything of them.
Mystery and intrigue are but daily inconveniences, and situated this far from the rest of the world, there is no one there who can tell them otherwise.
:::
Pala tries not to scuff her palms on the wooden seats of the bus as it bumps along towards the southern town centre. Putting one leg up on the facing seat, she unbuckles her bag flap and fishes around for her notepad and pencil.
The first ten pages are single-ruled and filled top to bottom in scribbles that almost resemble maps. On the third page, she purses her lips and flips her pencil, scratching out the squiggles that demarcate the pink bus route so she can redraw it, carefully, as the bus proceeds.
For months, she has been trying to draw the town the way she sees it—trying to capture something she cannot really picture in physical dimensions. They all think she’s making it all up, the wrinkling of the streets, the hairline cracks in the garden earth. They all do, except for—
Her phone beeps again, and this time she feels calm enough to answer.
where are you?
Fen. She smiles and types her reply:
on my way to work
And then he answers:
there’s a pink haired girl asking for you
she says she’ll kill me if you don’t come
Dread seizes her heart so hard that she chokes.
The riverside hotel grows into view from around the last rippling bend of the road. The riverfront façade is already lit for the evening–with what manner of image or message, she can’t see—but the hotel on the facing side of the river is also lit, and it bears a lotus in red, green and yellow, glittering on the water, pockmarked by boats.
Pala springs from her seat before the bus has come to a stop. Dashing to the door as it swishes open, she leaps from the top step and lands with a thud that jars her ankles, stuffing her notebook in her pocket. She sprints up the pavement to the red side entrance and down the dim carpeted hallway, which still smells of old roses, to the servicer room in the back.
She grins briefly when Fale’s stocky blue-uniformed figure appears in the doorway, but when the woman turns, her face is taut, and she gasps out, “Miss Mahi’ai wants you in her office!” and Pala feels the smile melt from her face, dread mounting, as she thanks her and turns for the corridor again, breath burning in her throat.
At once it is apparent that something isn’t right: almost as soon as she enters the office corridor does she notice an acrid stench in the air. She clamps a hand over her mouth and starts to gasp like a fish.
“Ma’am? I’m here!” she calls out. “Ma’am?”
Then Pala notices that the office door is wide open and through the doorway, she sees Miss Mahi’ai look up when she shouts. Her gaze is not bright behind her glasses. She stands like a statue beside her desk, both hands tucked behind her back, and gauzy smoke swirls from one visible corner of the desk, the papers around it charred.
“Pala, perfect,” she says without feeling.
As Pala thunders into the room, her eyes grow wide. The manager’s seat is occupied by a person she has not seen before: a tall girl of ashy-brown skin and a warrior’s build, hair pulled back in a ponytail that is both too pink and not pink enough. Her clothes are foreign, and a tattoo trails a dark line from her right eye to a dot in the middle of her right cheek, distorted by her grin—like a teardrop.
“Who, why--”
“You’re here!” the strange girl exclaims with a thrust of her chin. She reaches under the table to lift something heavy that yelps—something that turns out to be someone—someone she knows too well.
He dangles by his black locks from the pink girl’s grip, eyes squeezed shut and wet with tears. “No,” he mouths. “No, no.”
“Fen,” Pala squeaks in reply.
“Shush, it’ll be over soon!” The pink-haired girl jabs a metallic rod at Fen’s cheek, still grinning. “You care about this boy, don’t you?”
“Who are you? What do you want from me? I don’t understand--” She digs her fingers into the fabric of her sling-bag and her eyes dart to Miss Mahi’ai for instruction, but the woman has retreated from the desk, and she only shakes her head.
“Well, Pala Winstead, you have a certain skill that I would very much like to use,” says the girl. “In exchange for this boy’s safety, I would like to you to come with me on a long journey. It would please me very much for you to comply. Otherwise—” She twists the rod against his cheek, fingers tightening in the loops at the other end— “boom.”
In the silence that follows the single syllable, the thin smoke wafts from the table, and Pala notices, for the first time, that Miss Mahi’ai’s red ceramic mug lies in fragments among her papers.
Everything is making itself known all at once. All the things she was afraid of. All the things she knew deep in her core. And the universe is suddenly more than even she, with her wild imagination, can fathom.
“Yes, okay, I’ll go!” It barely takes her three seconds to come up with her answer. She has begun to sob. “How did you find Fen? Why are you doing this? Who are you?”
“Well, Pala, I am a very thorough researcher. And you, you are a Traveller.”
“I don’t travel,” says Pala in a trembling voice.
The girl throws her head up in a laugh. “Not in the regular sense of the word, you don’t!” she exclaims. She has stood, and her gleaming rod-tool—suddenly more sinister than before—is still pointed at Fen’s head. She shoves him from behind the desk, towards Miss Mahi’ai. Her gaze pins Pala in place. “I’ll make sure you are treated well, as my premier servant. Kalani Mahi’ai over here has already agreed to the transfer.”
“Let me follow her,” gasps Fen as soon as the girl releases her grip. “I…I know what this is about. The…strange things. The holes and pits and folds. I feel them too. I’ll go with you!”
The pink girl’s eyebrows rise, but she does not seem particularly impressed. “Is that so? Well, I have no need for two of you. A Traveller’s what I need, and that’s what your friend is.” She slides the strange metal tool into her belt. “But this does mean one less witness to worry about.”
After a moment’s pause, she stretches an open hand in Pala’s direction, and snatches Fen’s shoulder in the other, scaring a gasp out of him.
“Hold my hand tight. We leave in a minute.”
“How?”
“By Travelling.”
“Travelling?” Quaking with every step, Pala reaches out to grip the girl’s calloused palm. The smoke threatens to choke her. The pink girl’s fearsome red gaze makes her head pound. Miss Mahi’ai and the office seems farther than ever, and her other hand instinctively slips into her skirt pocket, to check that her notebook is still there.
“Think of something specific but unimportant,” says the girl. “Maybe not so unimportant, because the more important it is, the quicker you’ll be done. An object, a feature of a place.” She pauses, gaze bur”’ning into Pala’s. “Well? Anything—a painting, a flower, a piece of furniture in your home. Quickly now.”
“I’m thinking—I’m thinking—“ My double. My corpse. The person I killed. “I’m thinking of something.”
“Good, now think about all the ways it’s important. Think of all the things that give it meaning. And then think about the universe next door, the deeper one, the downstream universe.”
“Downstream?” Pala echoes, going breathless.
All at once, the clues connect in her mind, and suddenly she understand. The topology. The sinkholes and infoldings and tears that have haunted her, taunted her, all her life.
It’s all real. She is right. They are not alone.
This universe is pressing against another.
“I killed myself!” she shouts, thinking of the agony of looking in her own dying eyes, her hands wringing a windpipe, and the fetid taste of vomit, and she wills herself against the straining fabric of the universe—
—and then the space around them buckles and warps inward—like when a needle punches through cloth—and then they’re not there anymore.
:::
“Exceptional!”
The thundering of the sea suddenly sounds much closer than it should be, the wind more . And when Pala opens her eyes, they are assaulted by daylight, her nose by the clawing smell of brine.
Her captor’s fingernails are digging deep into her palm, and she feels tears spring to her eyes.
They stand on the booming coast of somewhere new and warm. The sky is dim overhead, and the clouds dance in a way she has never seen before—almost ghostly, like smoke stirred by wind. A black and purple banner stands planted in the earth a few paces back, and beyond that, a grey brick road divides them from a cluster of tall black tents wreathed in purple designs.
“I didn’t know you could…do that.” Fen is still regaining his breath.
Pala stares at her palms, starting to sag with exhaustion that seems to have come from nowhere. She isn’t unfamiliar with the feeling, of being forcibly removed from a reality that makes sense to her. But she’s never been here before, nor has the wind ever felt so strong. “Did I? Was that me?”
“I imagine you’d be able to tell,” says the pink-haired girl with a grin. Already, she is marching towards the road, ponytail swishing, her back to her two captives. “How marvelous our ability to store past experiences in our minds, to recount—even recreate—them at will! Memories compel and instigate. They are the reason we act. So much power is encapsulated in them. So much power.”
Fen seems entirely uninterested in what she has to say. “What did you mean?” he gasps out instead, reaching out to grip Pala’s hand with both of his own. “That you—killed yourself. Why did you say that?”
She blinks back. “Kill myself?” she replies, trembling. Something tugs at her memory. Fear. Her stomach roiling. But she can’t seem to recall anything more. “I…I would never do that.”
var infinity = 5;
var now = 1;
var I = {};
I.know = 0;
var something = -infinity;
I.seekTruth = new function (less) {
time = less;
for (time = infinity; time > 0; time--) {
home = something*I.know; //infinity times zero
}
return home;
};
trace("The truth: "+I.seekTruth(now));
a vapour voice percolates from
the static hailstorm in the mouth
of the radio: snatches of
news from a frosty wherever-abroad, of
clawing deep freeze, cracking ice, all the things
these smoke-capped shingles, on which
the summer is crusting,
and the sultry throb of cicadas boiling
from the hearts of trees
cannot begin to understand
Or at least he's managed to convince everyone that he is; it’s hard to match the report card with the face, particularly when that face is spouting terrible jokes in the hallway. Jokes such as the gem that ends with this punchline:
“The poop! Get it? Get it?”
Outside of his fellow toilet humour connoisseurs, who guffaw enthusiastically and slap him on the back, no one can help feeling slightly less intelligent than before for having understood the joke.
"I made that one up myself!" he exclaims amidst their groans. Of course he made it up. No one else could possibly have.
It's not that they don’t appreciate it, really. Everyone in the BU Marine Biology faculty knows Chen Hong Yi, the Chinese student with the mad pranking skills and the endless catalogue of bad jokes. He's infuriating, or he's fun, depending on who you ask. The one thing he never is is boring.
:::
Boring. It gets so boring sometimes. You know how it is, when one owns goods in such excess that there is no longer any laudable modesty in pretending there’s nothing there.
There are people who make use of that extra capacity to memorise classics, and there are those who spend it proving old mathematical conjectures. And then there's Hong Yi. Hong Yi who finds feats of the mind so droll that he regularly engages, instead, in the practice of feigning idiocy. Being silly. Baiting snide remarks.
He loves being smart, no one can tell him otherwise. But people seem a lot more drawn to That Dumbass Hong Yi than Straight-A’s Star Pupil Hong Yi.
:::
Alright, so maybe he actually does get a kick out of strapping horns to the tops of doors and watching the reactions when tutors slams them shut; maybe it’s because he is an incorrigible prankster that he keeps ten fart cushions in his locker for the days he feels inclined to conduct an orchestra of flatulence and vehement denial. Or the reason he has purple food dye. Or the electric gag pen.
But that’s not all there is to him, he’d insist. Obviously there's some profound meaning behind his enjoyment of bad fart jokes.
:::
Hong Yi, ever the socialite, makes the effort to be there when his friends decide they’ll be going out tonight. Even though he’s wary of being out too late. It's common courtesy to be there with your buddies while they’re going through alcohol-induced humiliation.
“Don't you think it’s a bit...I dunno...late to be out?” He shifts on his feet, squinting down at the road beyond the Towers.
Flashing a grin, Jacob slaps him on the back. “Stop being such a mummy’s boy!”
Pete’s sleek new car charges into the driveway, and suddenly everyone’s being bundled into the backseat. Hong Yi protests to no avail. Doors click shut. The engine revs proudly.
As the car rejoins the traffic down Commonwealth Avenue, Jacob flings pulls his buddies into an aggressive football huddle. “For the benefit of Berrigan, we’re down for beer pong,” he says. "Harold chose the game, think we stand a chance?”
Beer pong? That will--as far as he's read--involve beer, balls, and gravity.
Berrigan snorts. “Yeah, easy-peasy!” he says. The rest answer with equal vigor.
:::
Chen Hong Yi loves the sea.
He lived his life before in Beijing, and has lodged two years at the Warren Towers. But he considers the glassy, blue New England Aquarium as much a home to him than either place. He spent a semester of his life there, learning from behind the glass with all that blue light upon him, blue so intense he thought it might seep into his skin. It was the professor he was attached to there, a scowly Dr. O’Malley with the disposition of a hunter, who had recommended him to the folks at the Marine Biological Laboratory.
It’s hard to explain what precisely he loves about the deeps and its secrets. He thinks fish are absolutely rad, as are the invertebrates that cohabit the greatest niche of the earth. He has an entire notebook filled with notes on marine animal behaviour. He watches silly octopus videos in his free time. But he thirsts after the mystery and the strangeness, still, as if something deep down were calling him to join it.
It’s quite something, this love. Vast and fierce enough that he’s set all his life choices irrevocably around it.
There is a catharsis in watching the seagulls circle over the white masts in Boston Harbor, listening to those messy white birds scream at the morning for fish. He sort of thinks it must be nice not to know the restriction of roads and walls. It must be nice living on the wind. He sometimes sees them go out farther than the shore, farther than the last visible boat, out to where they are swallowed by blue.
:::
Chen Hong Yi is not an idealist.
He misplaced his idealism long ago, one day, while he was staring at the wall, gravel grinding at his knees as the skin on his calves was split by a rattan cane.
Like every other student, he has been topping classes as long as there have been classes to top. School starts them off early, and almost as soon as he is eligible for competitions does he start bringing awards back home, trophies and plaques that rapidly accumulated and fill the shelf his father installed for the very purpose so a second, then a third, has to be nailed beneath it in subsequent years. His parents are so very taken by the shiny cups and medals.
Fertile field suddenly thrust into their hands, they take immediately to sowing. On Sundays, Hong Yi is locked up alone with his books. Given little choice otherwise, he learns not to hate them but to look to them for comfort. They open windows of salvation in his little world of concrete and dust.
Elementary knowledge becomes amateurish expertise. His novicehood morphs into a flowering, angry sort of thirst that is not soothed even when he’s opened and scoured every last book in the study.
It is perhaps the first time he’s ever seen his parents smile, when he comes to their room one evening and says the books are too simple for him.
:::
A dormant dream of theirs is reanimated then, one that both were forced by circumstances to abandon.
Hope becomes insistence. Insistence moves their hands. Insistence becomes paranoia.
It’s not enough, they bellow and screech, eighty is not enough, not when there are twenty marks left unattained, twenty whole rungs left to scale. Eighty isn’t enough to make you a doctor, eighty is a peddlar’s score. They have him answer the strokes of the cane with a mantra of borrowed aspirations, until he is sobbing promises and pleas.
Hong Yi makes good his pledge. Eighties become nineties and reports on his excellent work displace complaints about his conduct.
Then nineties stop being satisfactory, and his parents start goading perfection out of him.
:::
Chen Hong Yi is not one to abide by rules, most of the time.
He's gotten to know Harold's house over three visits, but he has no less trouble navigating it than the first time. It’s hard to see through the menagerie of party-goers bouncing to the throb of the speakers and the gyrating lights, now a furious shade of green. There's kids sprawled over the sticky tables and a band on the stage that's totally killing it. The lights shift again, this time to green, and men are talking up women, mischief and the threat of malice in the placement of their hands.
Hong Yi and his lot avert stares from the rest. The third table on the right is all set up for the messy game about to get underway.
They’re welcomed by friends; no one minds sweaty hands all over their shoulders, or thick alcoholic breaths clouding up the air. Friends laugh in his ears and offer to buy him beer. Cheeky idiots. They know about his acetaldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency (though possibly not by name). Typical East Asian trait. Turns him as red as a firetruck. Sucks to the highest degree.
At the table, Harold is drumming his fingers on his forearm, Harold of the infield, unrecognisable now in his v-neck tee and torn jeans.
"Hey, they're here!" A grin widens his lips. "Jake the Rake!"
"Good to see you didn't chicken out!" Jacob retorts with equal spirit. "Ready to lose?"
"I'm ready to have fun."
A game of scissors-paper-rock determines that Jacob is to start. He soaks the ball in the nearest cup and lifts it level with his eyes. He doesn't contemplate the cups, nor does he weigh the ball--merely swirls his hand and flings it at the triangle of cups, so swiftly that no one is ready to gape. “Woah, slow down!” Hong Yi yells, snatching the table’s edge to watch.
The ball arcs, and squarely makes a cup in the third row.
Chorus of cheers, noise and expletives. Nothing they aren't familiar with. Harold downs the shot, makes a foul-mouth exclamation and a massive grin. Then he takes the ball; he’s in his element now; he’s thrown a thousand times. Everyone can see the ball soaring across the field.
The shiny red sphere flies in a stirring of breaths, and plops neatly into the second cup of the first row on their end. Yells and high-fives are exchanged. Jacob sniffs at the furor and flicks the sticky ball out of the cup into Berrigan’s hand while he gulps the drink down.
The Aussie throws next. It is an unfortunate throw. Everyone’s eyes follow his clearly-misaimed ball, cheers going up at the other end of the table already. But in the split second following, Hong Yi’s fingers tighten on the table--and he seeks, for moments, his connection with the tug of the world beneath his feet.
The ball grows inexplicably heavy.
The curly-blonde-haired boy on the other team drinks.
Amid cheers and back-slapping and complaints of nausea, Hong Yi leans into the crowd to listen. “Did you see that?” A sceptic in the background. “The ball wasn’t supposed to do that.”
“It’s the Asian guy. He tampered with the ball. Or he used his nerd powers to move it or something.”
"That's some straight-up X-Men shit, man!"
“Didja see him touch the ball? I ain't seen him touch the ball once.”
“But he was staring at the thing like some freak! Nerd powers, I’m telling ya. Just watch—”
Hong Yi clears his throat, and their lowered eyes dart towards him, before the conversation abruptly moves on to an unrelated topic.
He grins. Of course he didn’t tamper with the ball.
::
It grows clearer and clearer, as the months seep into each other and stretch into year-long streaks, that his interests are beginning to stray—from the definiteness of the path that’s been carved for him in blood and gravel under knees. Till now he’s expected to be a doctor or an engineer, just like he’s been told he will be all his life. Till now he’s had no questions.
But the questions are coming now, all at once, like a flock of attacking gulls. And he thinks it must have to do with the pictorial guide lying open and heavily-tagged on his desk. The gaping hatchet fish and its monstrously pearly eyes. Searching the deeps with lights like a landing strip along its back.
I want to be a marine biologist, his mind whispers suddenly, fear and hope mingling. He doesn’t know how he knows. He only hears the sea.
I want to be a marine biologist, he drags the words bleeding, screaming from his throat, two months later, and he is answered with the most ruthless caning he’s had.
You’re a waste, they say then, yelling at each other without addressing him at all. You were supposed to be something good, you wretched child, is this how you repay everything we’ve spent on your education?
Even though he doesn’t think this is something to feel guilty for, the guilt comes anyway, like a twelve tonne tank, mowing his heart down beneath its treads.
Snap. The sting of the rod makes him bite his tongue and choke back everything he was prepared to say. All the explanations and excuses about wanting something different, something new, something that they—with their pathetically tiny lives and equally tiny minds—were never allowed to imagine.
You’ll either be a doctor or an engineer, they scream even in his dreams. Don’t settle for a lesser vocation. We won’t let you.
They force him through medical dictionaries. Journals. Moralising lectures that make clear that he has been bereft of any choice. Their earnest hope is stained by grudges and frustrations, like seawater by oil slick. They mask their pleading with beatings and emotional blackmail.
He gasps for air without letting fall a single tear, it’s not that hard when you’ve spent a decade learning how not to cry. Nothing is wrong, he thinks; his parents only want to send him to the sky because he was made, they say, to soar.
But somehow he only feels like a fish out of water.
:::
Chen Hong Yi thinks he’s doing a good job of making American culture a part of him.
It’s all for the better, he thinks, particularly when he’s going to be living here for an indefinite time to come. And it helps that he quite loves it—all the uninhibited luxuriation, as if he could rule the world if he so much as asked for it.
And it's easy. Except, maybe, where his race is concerned, and everyone decides they know him before they've met him. But hey, he knows how to take a joke. All the same, he does his best to bury his accent under borrowed vocabulary and intonation. Within a year he speaks like a real Bostonian, keeping his memory of his homeland where no one will ever find it and use it to their advantage.
The bustle peaks at around nine-thirty. They’ve made two-thirds of the frats’ cups, and the frats have taken out half of their own, but Hong Yi hasn’t had a drop and it’s his turn to throw.
Everyone’s a little addled by now, so they invite him forward with rowdy chants. With a smirk Hong Yi tests the weight of the ball, syrupy with beer both dried and not.
He throws. The speakers are booming and the lights are getting lower. The table legs echo the strain they feel.
In one continuous and mesmerising motion, the rubbery red projectile skims the surface of one cup and lands in the adjacent one, making two cups in a toss. A guy on Harold’s side—Hong Yi thinks he recognises the pitcher at the last game—curses and lifts both, tipping them in his mouth simultaneously.
The accusations of cheating and tampering from the other end have become audible now—but he knows they don’t believe their own calls. The entire throw was out in the open, viewed from all sides. No tricks. Nothing makes a ball bounce like that but skill.
And gravity powers, of course. But he’s not about to tell them.
Fist-bumps around the table have become roughish hugs, the beer is getting to everyone’s brains. Before he can return their sentiments though, his eye is drawn by a flash of red and he turns in time to see the pitcher make a cup on their end. “Hey, Chinaman,” snaps a voice. “Drink up.”
Hong Yi blinks. Looks like he forgot to screw up this guy’s attempt. The glistening ball bobs in a cup in the front row. Well, rules are rules. Picking the ball out of the red plastic cup, Hong Yi tosses it to Jacob. “Sorry, liver,” he whispers, and tips the fizzing beer into his mouth.
:::
There is this one advantage Hong Yi has over conceivably every other person he will ever meet. Quite a meaningless advantage, though, which he finds to be useful in activities as specific as shifting heavy luggage and as frivolous as winning beer pong.
As a child, he observed that things around him had a habit of either collapsing on their joints or toppling inexplicably. It was at least three years after the realisation that he was the cause of these events that the boy, now ten, learnt to control the timing and severity of these accidents.
He decided to hide the fact from others, and it was the one rule he never broke, strain as the secret did against his prudence. People would never be ready to accept something as absurd as that.
:::
Whenever he is at the clinic, Hong Yi likes to huddle in a corner of the couch and watch the ornamental fish dart about the tank on the shelf. When no one is looking, he places a hand on the shelf’s underside and makes fish sink to the stones, grinning when their bulbous eyes dart to the face in the glass.
Bright, beautiful things. He wonders, as he is watching them gleam, how it must be to be trapped in a tiny artificial tank, so very far from the lakes where their forefathers were caught.
Then he realises that he does.
:::
“I’ll go again,” he holds out an arm to stop his half-inebriated friend from taking the ball, and feels an elbow collide with his chest. He’s only had one cup, Jacob’s had five and it’s obviously not doing him any good. His eyes narrow. They're gonna win this.
Hong Yi barely has to interfere. The little white ball bounces once off the rim of the only remaining cup, then falls right in
“You cheating--” yells the pitcher; there’s beer all over the front of his shirt. He makes a vulgar jibe about his mother, and all at once Hong Yi feels his insides turn to ice.
"Shut the fuck up," he says.
Heloses footing for a second. “Mummy’s boy, eh?” he shouts in answer.
“Yeah,” he replies with a smirk calculated to annoy. “You say it like it’s a bad thing.”
:::
Look at these scars, look what you did so I’d follow the path you wanted to follow, but couldn't follow.
He has shed tears in front of his parents before—but this is the first time the tears have been for anger.
Look at all my awards, isn’t that enough for you? Aren’t you proud?
This time the slap stings deeper than the skin, and he is sent to kneel beneath the shelf of his trophies, each one an accusation.
We punish you for love, love, always love, and fear. It’s the reason your subpar grades aren’t worse, you ungrateful son.
I earned those scores myself, he thinks without any tears, I earned them because I loved to read and to learn and to know. I want to know more. More about biochemistry and invertebrates and evolution and abiogenesis and being and lightning and freedom.
I didn’t learn for you.
He says none of this. It is basic respect. Respect founded not upon the perceived infallibility of his parents, but upon his love for them.
:::
He watches their opponents down their last cup, finally conceding that they've lost and their opponents are now officially members, even laughing and congratulating them, too drunk to be ashamed of defeat.
Not a second’s staring longer, Hong Yi dashes off to the toilet, two fresh cups of beer sloshing in his stomach.
“Killing me,” he gasps, slamming the door shut. Better get it out.
He reaches to touch the wall, not to steady himself but for quite the opposite. He feels himself grow weightless, lets the sickening weakness of gravity wash over him while he loses his balance. Then he flings himself forward and vomits.
The lights brighten unbearably while the gravity in his vicinity returns to normalcy and Hong Yi, slumped against the corner of the room, attempts to flush the toilet. Should have kept the puke for some future prank, he weakly thinks for a moment, before deciding no one deserves something that sick.
When he leaves the toilet, the drunkards have managed to drag each other into chairs, and a very sober Pete is waiting to take them home.
:::
“That thing the guy said. It really grabbed your goat, didn’t it.”
It is half past eleven, and the bare streets are hauntingly pale, streetlight glowing off the tarmac. The carpark is near full end to end, from what he can see from the backseat of Pete’s car.
“How did you know? That was the calmest I was the whole night.” He tilts his head on the cushioning, trying to see through the darkness and the pressing silence, but the far-off streetlights prove insufficient.
The dashboard clock glows a quiet green, 11:00. He hears the traffic light turn green; the cars have started zipping by again.
“Yeah,” Pete says, turning his head halfway to catch a glimpse of his friend. “It’s scary when you’re calm.”
:::
Yes, I am calm.
Chen Hong Yi knows the difference between what he wants and what he’s meant to have.
He, like the ocean, has seen and known too much. Too much dark treasure, too much spilt blood, for him to be calm knowing it.
Through a public WiFi connection, he secretly applies for a transfer to a high school in Boston, Massachusetts, and writes to his high school in interest of the same. Then, every night after, he grits his teeth and broaches the topic with his parents.
Somehow he is never met with corporal punishment, so weary of fighting have his parents grown. They hold their ground, but he advances. He digs towards the underpinnings of his parents’ beliefs.
Then he begins picking away at them, risking what he fears—like a bitter tinge at the back of his tongue—will be disownment.
He asks why some professions are preferred, why they are glorified.
Because they pay well, of course. And because it will make us proud.
Do we really need a so much money?
We need as much as we can get.
And I can get that money anywhere. I promise I can.
Promises don’t make up for lost opportunities.
I’m losing an opportunity. I’m intelligent, I’m a genius, it’s on my testimonials, it’s on all those trophies, it’s printed in my tests reports and on certificates and imprinted in the scars on my legs. I don't care, you can't lie to me about that. I could be good at anything.
This, he sees then, in their eyes, is the truth they were afraid he’d someday learn. That his intelligence surpasses their own. That it surpasses anything this society could device for it.
That he could, indeed, do anything, and excel in it.
He sees right through their game now, of course—they thought the fear kept him on his feet—but no, it was never fear, it was never pain, it was the eddying of froth on the edges of waves, telling a chemical story, a luminescent story, whispering a rumour, of the life beneath and how it began.
Yes, you are, they finally concede.
His eyes well up when at the listlessness on their faces, he doesn't want them to know it hurts to watch but the hurt makes itself seen.
I promise they will want me wherever I go.
You’re not thinking this through. You could be so much more.
I could be so much—more.
:::
Late one night in the humid, blooming, blustery red depths of summer, his parents relent, just in time for the transfer forms to be signed.
:::
The silhouettes of the fuzzy dice intercept the faraway lights. Beneath the musk of beer and vomit the perfume of the car is still faintly perceptible. A scent like jasmine.
“I guess he did sort of piss me off,” murmurs Hong Yi, studying the unremarkable screen of his phone, as if waiting for a call that won’t arrive. “Like, he was boozed and all, but...”
“Don’t let them get to ya,” answers his friend after a pause. “I’m surprised you haven’t gotten that sort of thing before. You’ve been here for four years, right?”
“Yeah. But tonight—”
He scrolls through his message history with his mother. Nothing too personal. Mostly her asking after his health and him promising he’s fine. Even when he’s not. She’s too far now to send him to the doctor or boil him tea, and worrying her over his health will only wake livid fears she can’t soothe away--
—tonight I wish I’d never left.
Rising from his slump, he yawns and throws the car door open. “Thanks for the ride. See you.”
Pete grins in answer. “Go get some sleep, nerd,” he says.
:::
Chen Hong Yi is a veritable genius, though no one likes to admit it.
“The goddamn nerd. Don’t know how he does it. I mean, he’s got the vocabulary of a fucking five year old. Does he sleep in the aquarium?”
“The real question is, does he sleep with the professor?”
Apparently someone has made the top of the list again. People are already joking about hammering a plaque with his name to the top of the notice board.
He decides he will take part in this self-glorifying exercise, and suggests the plaque be made of gold. Then he asks a classmate if she’d like to borrow his pen for that form she needs to fill, extending the item in her direction.
Hilarity ensues as she stiffens and shrieks, letting go.
“Shocking, eh?” he chortles. “Sorry, do you actually need a pen? ‘Cause you can have this one.” He flings her the one in his pocket. This one is not rigged with an electrical circuit. He’ll keep the special one for himself, in case someone needs it in future.
:::
Today is a good day. Five great (and totally unnecessary) Facebook posts, and one-third of Homestuck under his belt. Crazy stuff, that. He dearly hopes there’s no weird time/space shit going on in his vicinity—the world’s complicated enough as it is.
Flicking at the curtain, Hong Yi is met by dull grey sky, thick as pudding. He groans and thrusts a hand under his desk to snatch a book off the top of the stack. Summer is on the brink of beginning. He’s got the air tickets. His luggage is packed under the bed.
I forgot to mention that I was participating this month. I'm not posting anything outside of this intro until it's done, because every part of it needs to be open to plot changes until I'm finished.
The universe begins in an explosion that resembles a dandelion clock--so bright that its light pierces and persists through the far reaches of time, weaving nets of superclusters through the monarchial dark, pioneering the virgin universe. The dark stares back, pliant to the bright stranger’s entry.
Thirteen billion years later, a sixteen-year-old girl finds an abandoned mobile phone in a corner of her schoolyard and, being slightly less scrupulous than most and slightly more familiar with cravings, particularly for things one cannot own, she pockets it surreptitiously. She's had her fair share of scuffles with the prefects, and while not averse to aggression, she'd rather not get into trouble if it can be helped.
One would think the latter event the direct consequence of the former, but in absolute objective truth, there is no temporal hierarchy between the two. Neither event caused the other, the Big Bang did not cause the discovery of the phone, even if the discovery can apparently be traced to factors that were generated by the Big Bang.
The Big Bang happened contingent on the fact that the phone would someday be found.
This is a quality of time rarely discussed by beings of the third dimension, because it is not easily-acknowledged by minds confined to such a planar paradigm.
He loves this thunder. It makes him feel alive, the way it rattles the joints of the chamber around him as he is tossed through time and space. It's as if that roar has woken a slumbering joyous beast in him at last!
Fingers against the walls, he thinks of his old smoky days below. He remembers the streets in the gloom, the fog, and the umbrella overhead—he lived, so he did, but was that living? He thinks he has never lived till today, because today is the first time he has been afraid to die.
He loves this thunder. It sings death, death, death like a black whisper that writhes through the shivering gaps to wring his neck. Six long seconds he listens to the thunder in the steel joints encasing him, clamouring against each other. The best that the year has to offer this side of the Channel.
—that side? Perhaps the Channel and the things it divides grow irrelevant when you are this far beyond its limits.
Somehow, despite the meticulous calculation, the years it spent in review, he knows he will not arrive where he's meant to go. Somehow he knows the universe conspires. Somehow he thinks this is fate's design, that he should hear this roaring thunder and suddenly believe the things he has so far pretended to be false.
He is afraid; he cannot deny that. In all likelihood—one-in-two hundred thousand, they say—he will arrive quite safe, a little battered, and normally he would believe them. But ah, this is different, his heart says lucidly—this is today! He has lived too long on the good sides of probabilities.
It is time for chance to swing wildly. It is time for him to be unlucky, at least this once.
:::
When the bespectacled man appears at the window today, she stares at him until he is gone.
The world is soundless beyond her walls, but up here, when she closes her eyes, she pretends she knows how the new car engines sound. She imagines they rumble like her father's old truck, lights streaming across the driveway.
Curling her fingers around the corners of her peculiar physics textbook, Adelaide thinks of sunlight.
She has lived like this too long. Thinking of people she will never meet. Longing after faces in print. In all these years, with only her books for sordid company, she has read about lust, about the wilderness where sex means that the individual never truly dies but ripples through genealogies, its little pieces captured in strings of code.
Sometimes, she begins to think she is part of that code herself—when by some whim of fate her eyes get caught on photographs of dead naturalists, greek statuettes sometimes, and she feels a honeyish happiness trickle through her. She lingers on those printed faces, and thinks they are quite pleasing, sometimes imagines them walking this empty room with her. And of course, pictures are not all she has. She has, on three separate occasions, grown obsessed with the face in the glass.
This week is the third occasion. When those eyes peered in yesterday, Adelaide looked right back. It made her think she is still alive, the eagerness with which she sought the face of the bespectacled man. Alive and not irrelevant, not isolated from the rest of this vast beating code. But her staring seemed to terrify him, so he left sooner than usual.
She sighs and waits for lunch, which eventually arrives in a tray shoved into the room by a mechanical paddle. Bland paste as usual. They try for variety by randomising the dishes everyday, but is there so much to be excited for between pellets and goo?
Something flashes in the glass. Heart pounding, her eyes lift to the dim shape that has appeared. The man with the glasses. Her heart flutters; she catches his eye and tries for smile. She can make out his eyes today. Perhaps he cares for her; perhaps that is why he comes to check. Perhaps she should tell him she is glad that he does.
But his gaze twists into a frown today, one of such dislike she grows afraid and retreats into her blankets. He vanishes into the dark, and she fears that she's offended him so that he will never return.
She pounds a fist into the mattress. This hapless, fatuous staring. She has been severed from life, hasn't she? That is what they've been trying to do, all these years. Excise her from the system. Why does she still feel it, then--this twisted, shrivelled, diminished version of the grand heat of the blood, that sacred mating drive that compels the jacanas to break eggs?
Like all the days that have flown before this, Adelaide tosses another day aside, flings it like a mayfly to the sky to which it belongs. The rise and set of the sun is only an informed event now; she can only imagine how it looks when Rayleigh scattering sets the clouds ablaze. It must be... She frowns at the face in the toilet mirror. ...It must be beautiful. She remembers finding the jonquils beautiful.
The lights hum an ambivalent warning, the way they do a minute before they cede their light. Ten o'clock. She places the automatic toothbrush on the cleaning tray. A push of the button sees it sliding through a gap in the wall.
:::
Deep in the night, as she stares off into the fathoms of the black ceiling above, Adelaide grows sad. It is a sadness she doesn't quite recognise, enough that tears begin welling at the corners of her eyes. She can feel the dry, listless air-conditioning against her skin, making strands of her hair flutter. Everywhere she turns in this darkness, she sees loneliness staring straight back like a ghoul.
She wonders what has become of the world outside. She knows it's still there; she knows because that bespectacled face returns, and must go somewhere else when he is not at the window. But does that matter? The traces of grey in his hair, the scratches on his glasses, that is all she has of the world.
The sadness throbs and her lip trembles. No, she can't cry—not for this.
Breathing a sigh, she pulls herself out of the blankets. The cold swallows her feet. Her eyes sweep the dark room, where the faint glow of a few things has sharpened to clarity—the outline of a book catalogue screen beneath a polyester cover, the little square window above the food panel, the clock above blinking an electric blue 10:14. There isn't anything abnormal about this layout; she has seen the same thing every night for eleven years. The same blue lights in the same dim places.
The sleep is getting heavier on her eyes. Why is she awake still? Something sits awkward in her belly, something she might call regret. Why hasn't she fallen asleep? Why did she change the butterfly? Why does she feel these codes and strings? Nighttime, she finds, is a good time for futile musings. She never sought an answer anyway...
A shadow shifts in the dark. Shock pierces straight through her thoughts and sets her rigid.
Her eyes flit about, but her room is unchanged and empty as ever. Well, then, all this loneliness has made her too eager to see something extraordinary. She resolves not to let loneliness deprive her of sleep--
Until the blue lights appear.
Adelaide shrieks as her floor lights up, electric blue. Her back bangs against the headboard; the smarting pain joins the throb of her heartbeat. Her fingers have gone numb and the hard blue glow is still there, sturdy and bright. Throwing tall fingers of shadow all around.
Danger, instinct shrieks. Danger, danger where there are things you don't understand. How can a light be danger? Danger pretends to be good.
But curiosity burns on her thoughts and she needs to look.
Dropping to her knees, Adelaide begins to crawl to the edge of her bed. This must be meant to happen, she whispers to herself. No danger. There hasn't been danger for eleven long years. They must be testing a new signalling system. She sucks in a breath, grits her teeth together as if in prayer or pleading, and peers over the edge.
Her eyes widen in the light. There, on her floor, glows a string of words:
I AM HERE TO TAKE YOU AWAY
Adelaide curls her fingers and shivers. Take...me...away. Feelings engulf her, like a storm that engulfs an entire city, roaring so violently that she bows and begins to sob. Is it real? Is this hope? Fear? She is afraid to hope. She only stares, tearfully, at the great bold words still there.
Through the blur of her tears, she faintly sees the text blur and dim, before solidifying into a new message:
DO NOT FEAR, I AM A FRIEND
A tingle races up her neck. Her eyes dart about the room, but even in the new blue light, nothing much is detectable to her eyes—just the gleaming of couch legs where she knows it stands, and shelves where her books slant against each other. There are still too many shadows, and she takes a second survey of the area. The person responsible for the messages must be here—where? She sees no changes in the room, no displaced furniture, no human figures by the faintly glowing walls.
But there is a new silhouette in the window.
She clenches her jaw so she doesn't make a noise.
The shadow shifts. As if to prove it is alive. The words are blurring, forming again.
PLEASE DO NOT FEAR ME
She looks up, more curious than afraid. "Are you help?" she says. It shifts again. Surely it can't hear her.
Finally making up her mind, Adelaide slips, all jittery, off the edge of her bed. The carpet is cold at the touch of her toes; fear churns even colder in her stomach. Carpet changes to terrazzo. She stumbles half-blind through the thick darkness.
There at the window, she presses her fingers against the glass, as if they might feel some warmth, but all they find is more ice. "What do I do?" she says, hoping her voice carries through it.
On the floor behind her, the lights begin to swim, and she turns. The text has rotated to face her.
I WILL FREE YOU
Her fingers curl and uncurl again. Free. The word is lighting bonfires in her. The text changes.
NEED YOUR HELP, PLEASE ANSWER
Adelaide nods listlessly.
DO YOU REMEMBER HOW YOU ENTERED?
WRITE YOUR ANSWERS
"Oh—" Adelaide scrambles into the dark by her bedside, stubbing her toe on the corner. How did it happen? The wall was open, and she turned around in time to see it slide shut--
She finds the pen in the drawer; the paper is on her shelf in the form of a ring-bound notebook. Her fingers slide across spines and crimped pages till they find it.
Feverishly glancing to check that the silhouette still waits beyond the glass, she blindly scribbles her reply on a page, handwriting turned ugly by fright:
This wall opened like a sliding panel
and racing from her bed to the window, she presses it against the window for the silhouette-visitor's eyes.
It moves, and so do the blue words on the floor, to be replaced by a succinct:
THANK YOU
Barely after she's taken in the cold gratitude of those words, they scatter into nothing, and the room is dark again. They are burned into her retinas, though; her nerves are still buzzing. Is this escape? Real escape? The thought is too strange and it leaves the silence ringing.
The room is dark as pitch. Turning back to the window, she finds it empty. The same blue shines through as always, from the corridor outside. But she refuses to leave the wall, not when—not when she can almost feel it, the warmth. Of the person on the other side, just moments ago.
The silence it begins to weigh inside her skull. Ten minutes. The shadows are swimming with imprints of lights behind her corneas. Any minute now. Any minute. She can wait a minute longer. It will happen. The silhouette will return...
:::
When twenty dark minutes have come and gone, and her feet have begun to ache, Adelaide can no longer remember seeing the words on the floor, at least not in a way that stays. Like a dream.
All at once, a swarm of questions, confusions, descend upon her. You were being silly. You don't know if the silhouette will come back. You don't know if it was real.
She barely manages the trip across the room; it almost drowns her in stillness—she slumps onto her mattress, where the cold blankets engulf her like they always do. Did you really believe it for a moment? Did you think someone would come after eleven years?
The tears have returned, because she can still feel the hope glowing in her veins. Eating her alive. The letters in light, the blue silhouette. It still rings, all rings, like the aftersound of thunder. Was it all, despite the sharpness of sensation, a dream? Of course.
Adelaide is pulling the covers over her feet again, readying herself for the emptiest sleep yet--when a click resounds like a gunshot, and she stiffens.
She throws the blanket aside and rises, breath quickening.
She hears it, the grind of machinery. Something begins to hum, even as she is craning her head to listen. It isn't like the hum from the air-conditioning; it moans from outside the walls, and it is so uncannily loud.
Then the bed beneath begins to shiver...
A straight gash of brilliant blue opens at the left corner, where two walls meet. She flinches and shades her eyes, breath coming in harsh, trembling gasps. In that hazy light, she can just make out the lines, of the ceiling panels, of floor outside—
She breathes so hard her ears begin to ring. Outside. She feels the swirl of the world about her, feels the light sing through her cells. The gap widens, and bright ceramic blue glares into her eyes so she must squint, and a new smell erupts into her little L-shaped room. It smells of—of needles. Alcohol. Imperfect sterilisation. Constellations of memory reignite in her brain.
And as she sits there shivering and gripping at the sheets, a voice comes to fill her room, for the first time in a decade.
"It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Moore."
A silhouette stands there, outlined by the glow of the corridor, no longer a blur behind glass. He is right here. Breathing the same air as she.
Adelaide's eyes widen as she struggles to make his face out. "Why—did you—" she whispers, limp and quivering, fingers tangled in the cloth.
His head tilts, and the room lights up, though she sees the bulbs are still dead.
Adelaide's mind swims momentarily, with the face of the man whom the silhouette has become.
He is not the bespectacled man. He has all of his hair—a lovely sunny blonde, cut to his shoulders—and is dressed for windy weather, collar turned up and girdled by a scarf. She cannot stop watching him, as he watches her with fascination of equal measure—cannot avert the thousands of movements and expressions and nuances of motion he engages continuously—it is so strange, so alienly enrapturing. To see a living person.
Raising his eyebrows, he straightens his coat. "Forgive my manners! Felix Mercer," he says, extending a hand as he approaches—she withdraws. "Explanations must wait. As I've mentioned, I am here to remove you from this facility. And I think it bears mentioning that I did not enter by the most legal of means. We must leave quickly."
Felix. Felix Mercer. She fights to remember, as if struggling to catch a flickering bird. The terror is bright in her head. But he is right, of course—the wall is open. She realizes everything this entails, with a widening of eyes. She can see right down the corridor, right into the burning blue lights...she needs to run now.
Shifting nervously, Adelaide manages a timid "do I take anything along?".
He is already there beside her. "Anything that warrants its burden," he replies, offering her a hand in this shadowless light.
She recoils for a moment; wrong screams her mind, wrong to touch anything that lives, anything that could breathe and change; she will turn it into something monstrous—
But his unfamiliar grey eyes strike the match of her courage. He isn't the bespectacled man. The past. The chiming dark. He is a stranger. He is someone she's never seen before.
And because of that, she trusts him.
Picking up her notebook and pen, sliding them into the pocket of her skirt, she gingerly grips the offered hand.
"Are you ready?" he asks; his eager smile surprises her.
She nods, even though she isn't. He takes her,stumbling, to the blue corridor. Sounds are stirring somewhere beyond, security guards.
Grinning, he takes her about the shoulders and readies himself to run. "Keep quiet," he says, "and they won't see us."
:::
Suddenly they are dashing breathlessly through the corridors; she swears he'd be laughing if silence weren't so crucial. Who is he, this strange young man whom the light seems to follow? He swoops down pathways and she fights to keep up, eyes clammed shut, tears trickling down her cheeks.
The thought that she could lose this chance at freedom any moment—now that she's so close to touching it—is excruciating. One glance, one second's recognition, she will be a prisoner again. And Felix, kind, wonderful, mysterious Felix who ventured so far to find her, will be a criminal by law. She doesn't know him, not quite, but she knows she doesn't want him to be a criminal by law.
Footsteps. A guard turns the corner ahead. She sobs softly but doesn't scream, feels her companion's grip tighten about her shoulders and pull her up against the left wall. The uniformed man strides towards them, surly grey. Keep quiet—keep quiet and they won't see us. She bites her fingers so she doesn't shriek, hangs tight onto every breath.
But the guard barely gives them a glances, and marches straight by, not finding it strange at all that a well-dressed man is roaming the lab with their prisoner under his wing. Adelaide watches, still, until his back has shrunk from sight and his footsteps from earshot. Then Felix is moving again.
The corridors are dim as caves; as they pass, cloaked scientists flutter like ghosts between doors. None turn to look, but their footsteps make her shiver. They pass incubation rooms with glass doors; rows of plants glow dimly in machines. They soar by photonics labs whose heavy doors stand shut, thick with black-and-yellow warnings. The entrance to the particle accelerator beneath the city is here in this place, too, and its double doors whiz past as they whirl down the grey stairs. Another guard comes and passes; his stun gun is never raised. But it is near enough that she grows rigid with fright.
The labyrinthine lab never seems to end. A map of the world is building itself in her mind now; it is vast, cold, horrible. This is not the world about which she read. Adelaide feels like weeping. She only clenches her teeth, draws closer, and hopes that Felix knows what to do.
:::
Dim corridors fly behind them. The boom of rain grows louder. Gleaming concrete passageways give way to a narrow carpeted corridor, and they slow to a walk, and something about the air tells her they are almost there—almost out. Perhaps the scent of more civil air conditioning, which is growing to overpower the odors of sanitation and the brutality hidden beneath.
A door with a rectangular button looms up at the end of this passageway. Before they pass through, Adelaide glances at Felix, asking with her eyes, how did you get in? He smiles and shakes his head as he pushes the button.
"After you," he whispers, holding the door open for her.
Felix takes her arm again on the marble floor outside. Smiling still, he leads her across the sparkling lobby, right past the receptionist's counter.
Adelaide stares out ahead at the curtain wall between here and outside. She's almost afraid to believe that the darkness that fills the glass, smudged with orange at the corners, is the sky. It isn't nearly as much of a blur as she expected. It is so—crisp and sharp and...cold.
"Almost," whispers her companion. The man at the counter straightens as the doors slide apart for them, before deciding the two leavers are no cause for concern and returning to his work.
The warm air outside blasts against her face, making her gasp.
She almost doesn't realize when she is finally outside.
The first thing to demand attention is the wind. The wind is monstrously loud; it claws—scrapes—at her frigid fingers and across her ears, singing harmonically, the way her air-conditioning never does. The driveway is fuzzy with rain, the curb sinking half a foot to the glittering, watery darkness. There are towering lights far, far beyond, all visible from the vantage of this hill—cheap signs and myriad window-specks, dotting the horizon just beyond a hedge of rails and parking stands.
She can see the city, San Francisco. The rain smells of something old she cannot quite place. She feels it whip at her cheeks.
Suddenly frigid, terrified, exhausted, her bones long for the safe coziness of the L-shaped room again. She tries to turn around, but Felix hasn't let go. "We must find lodging," he insists. The dark, wet roads sprawl on outwards around them, into the hazy streetlight.
"We can't. If I'm seen..." It strikes her suddenly that she is not free. She is still a fugitive. Every citizen of this place is her enemy—every child who knows her face, every storekeeper.
"You will need a disguise," Felix answers quickly. "I believe I can disguise you for a while, at least until we have a reservation somewhere..." She watches as he reaches into his pocket for a collapsible black umbrella and pulls it open. He calls her under its shelter, and they begin down the sidewalk, descending the hill, plunging into the city below.
While they walk, Adelaide pulls her hands into her sweater sleeves and curls her fingers, feeling rain splash against her shins. "Mister—Felix, sir..." she murmurs.
"I'm barely any older than you," he says. "You needn't address me that way."
"F—Felix," she corrects herself, "I still don't understand why—you came here. Or how you managed to get in at all..."
He sighs. "I suppose the explanations must come now," he murmurs, brushing a hand on his coat. "I am a traveler—or so to speak, and I have been stranded a month in San Francisco. You could say I was growing too idle for my liking."
"That—" she ploughs frantically through her vocabulary for an appropriate response— "is...unfortunate. There are many airplanes away from here; you could obtain a directory..."
"Actually...that is not the issue." His eyes dart to the dark road running parallel to their route, diving in between swaying black trees that taper towards the sky. A lightning flash reveals the grounds. His voice grows earnest. "Miss Moore...promise you will believe me."
"There are few things I'd disbelieve," she replies, a little sadly, as she glances at her fingers and remembers the caterpillar that once lay curled in them.
Felix sighs and stares out at the city spanning the horizon. The hill upon which this laboratory sits is like an island in a sea of light. "I hail from quite different a place ," he says. "Where I live, my nation—Great Britain—is locked in a race with France to build the fastest transatlantic route."
"Great Britain? With—the castles and the jousting tournaments?"
"You're a few centuries out of date, my dear," he laughs quietly. "My father was a chief funder of the Tunnel Machine. I suppose I found that inspiring—in a way he likely did not intend. Days after the launch was announced, I paid to be the machine's first subject."
He turns to check that she is still listening, and seems glad to find her enraptured.
"The journey was set to take place a month ago," he goes on. "It would last no more than six seconds, and, if the script had been kept to, would have taken me halfway across the world. A month ago, the machine was prepared, and I departed from the site as planned."
Her lips form an o. "Did something go wrong?" she breathes. "Were you meant to arrive elsewhere?"
He shakes his head. "It was calibrated to send me to San Francisco," he replies, "and so it did. However, it was immediately obvious that there had been a malfunction. My welcoming committee was not at the landing site. It did not take me much asking-around to discover I had arrived nearly two hundred years too late."
"You're...two hundred years old?"
"I thought so for a while, too, until I discovered that historical records of 1894 described a place quite vastly different from the one I knew. There was no record, even, of the Great Race! I found it terribly odd that something of such massive influence could vanish so wholly from records."
"Then...you aren't two hundred years old."
"Hardly. I have thought upon the happenings of the day hundreds of times over, and the truth of the matter has since clarified itself. It is...considerably terrifying." He casts a glance at her; she hasn't withdrawn her attention once. The umbrella dips. "I believe...I arrived in the wrong universe."
"Universe?" Adelaide echoes dumbly.
He nods. She almost grimaces; this must be some elaborate joke, or a barefaced lie. But then she remembers her promise, and does her best to keep it, particularly since it's the first one she has ever made.
"I didn't know...there were other universes."
"Neither did I, nor did anyone living in the same one as I. Quite a discovery, I'd say; it's unfortunate I may never return to report it." Felix looks out at the cloudy sky. "My father...must be worrying himself sick. Perhaps they've cancelled the experiment. I..." Shadows cross his face. The rain murmurs. "...I hope he does not spend the rest of his life searching."
Hearing these admissions, and privy to another's sadness for the first time in so long, Adelaide finds she is afraid to answer.
"I—am sorry," she tries.
Felix laughs. "There is no need to be, but thank you," he replies. "It is my fault more than anyone's. I gather from the state of your technology that my route home will not come swiftly, not for a decade at least. I have grown resigned to a life here. San Francisco has offered me much in the way of interest—but none so much as the stories I've heard of you. The Genome Rewriter."
She shivers at the way he says it, that nickname she has come to fear herself. The shame weighs on her. "Why?" she answers.
He must have noticed the shame come over her, because he pats her shoulder until she is at ease. "We're very similar," he says. "I came to believe it necessary that I seek you out and convene with you. Perhaps in a coffeehouse. With tea between us."
She would like to enjoy what he describes, but the thought is too cold, too far. "Similar?" A chill of understanding creeps over her. "You can...change things?"
"Not the same things as you. You did notice we were largely ignored by the guards, didn't you?"
"Yes—I meant to ask about that..."
"That is because I have been refracting the light around us." He spreads his arms slightly, allowing her a moment—to be afraid, to cast frightened glances about. "If you recall, too, I did project letters onto your floor—"
"—you did?!—"
"—impressive, yes?" He tilts his head, looking proud enough of himself that she cannot help but nod. "I'm a changer of light. I have developed many uses for this peculiar ability—none too devious, I promise!"
She is surprised when she laughs, she isn't sure for hope, relief, or dumb amusement. Something has been squeezing her heart from the day her seven-year-old self discovered the eight-winged butterfly lying dead by the husk of its own cocoon. That something loosens its grip all at once. Eleven years alone, and suddenly he says...
A howl erupts into the sky behind them. Shrieking, Adelaide leaps closer. "They know!" she shouts; the shock has wracked tears from her eyes. "Hide me, please, please, if they come they'll take me—"
"Hush, I already am hiding us," he murmurs. "We will be invisible until we need to be seen."
Are they really? Adelaide cannot tell. But she knows...she believes she can trust him. She knows she must. He...he is the one person standing between her and her prison. But she continues to quake in her shoes, which weren't made to guard from the seeping of rain.
The alarm continues to scream behind them, ripping the wind; even the rain cannot mute it. She drives her gaze forth so she doesn't have to remember what's waiting behind, with steel jaws and flashing eyes. She ploughs forward into the cold, the blinding rage of streetlights.
The wind grows blustery as they hurry towards the junction. Her nose has begun to run in the cold. She barely remembers the feeling. They turn down the street and pass before towering streetlamps, following the glittery arc of the road into the greater foggy tangle of streets far ahead, but before they have arrived at the junction, he pulls her off the path into the grass, where he begins to unbutton his coat.
"Wouldn't want you catching a cold so soon after escaping."
"Don't you—need it?" Adelaide interjects. He lays the black longcoat over her shoulders anyway, and shakes his head.
"You haven't been in this weather for years," he replies. "Conversely I know it well." He gives a disdainful sniff that sounds like London, and tugs the coat into place.
Felix returns to the sidewalk before she can reply; things ripple and curve about him, then he is no longer visible to her. She hears a strain of wailing from the hilltop; her fingers curl, and she dashes after him into his bubble of safe invisibility.
:::
The road finally meets the four-way junction, upon which the streetlights glare. Cars aren't quite as noisy as she remembers them being, nor as stern and square. They streak by sleekly, so she doesn't notice them until the lights glare off their hoods. Beyond the junction, shops begin springing up on roadsides, facades sparkling with brazen promotions and welcomes, some masquerading as the legacy of civilisations they barely understand. All blurred behind a golden veil of rain. Adelaide supposes the magazines have been telling the truth about these shops and their silly trends.
Felix, though, doesn't seem to think much of their flashy dressing. He quickly loses himself in a smothering of pedestrians, and she fights through the crowd, struggling to keep up with him in the dazzling blur of umbrellas and coats. This isn't, this isn't how she has imagined the city. She has no bearings; she's lost jostling through a sea of hems and shoulders. Cars swoop by in rushes of wind; their watery hoods are deluged by the light of neon storefronts.
Somewhere very far down the same street, Felix eventually comes to a decisive stop before a dim grey unit wedged between two glittering shops. It is four stories tall just like all its comrades, with two columns of windows, its bright glass door sheltered by a plastic canopy.
"Here!" he calls out between the pedestrians, waving. He holds the door open for her, as before, and she plunges into the reprieving woody warmth, but hangs back on the threshold: a queue of two waits in the chairs by the counter, and neither member of it looks extremely trustworthy.
Without warning Felix appears at her side and whisks his coat off her shoulders, asking, "Would you mind a plain look?"
Adelaide shakes her head slowly. She doesn't think she understands.
"It's a pity that a face so pretty must be hidden," he sighs, and taps her forehead, before leaving for the queue.
An unfamiliar flicker makes her stiffen. There is a new nose between her eyes. Her fingers move to touch it, but they sink right through, as if into a mirage. Felix—he said he'd hide her face. Of course.
Adelaide frowns at her own silliness, and continues to watch her new companion, twirling a finger in her sweater. He has done so much, in so short a time, and done it thankless. She thinks she should thank him—no, she must—as profusely as she can afford to. But when can she say it such that it won't seem sudden? She is awkward enough as it is, without having to contemplate the timing of a polite thank you. Yet it would be ungrateful of her, she thinks, to say nothing till they part ways. Perhaps a note is in order—something slipped secretly into one of his pockets, the next time he obliges to hand her the longcoat.
Felix returns soon, flashing a receipt in front of her eyes. "We will reside her until a more permanent arrangement can be made," he says, and wastes no time to take her to the dim staircase beyond the counter. "I hope it does not bother you that we will share the room."
"Of course not," she replies. To imagine being alone on the first night away, deep in the tangle of streets that is San Francisco...
She realizes, gradually, that she must stay with him till the authorities have forgotten. Forgotten her, forgotten her crime. She'll be in the news tomorrow. They'll be scouring the streets for her till they're sure she's dead. And he must hide her till then.
The world is swirling, swirling; she feels like a particle on a greater tide. Maybe their cars are waiting outside. Maybe they're questioning the receptionist right now.
"Go on ahead," says Felix, nodding at the woody staircase. She shuts her eyes. Lets his voice be a small beacon, in this darkness.
Safe, safe and free, her mind fills to the brim. I am not lost. I have a guiding light.
:::
spiderweb
"Not too shabby!" comments Felix, hands on his waist, as he inspects the room they have just unlocked with the keycard.
The room is small but not oppressively so, cosy in other words, maroon carpet beneath their feet. Its clean beige walls meet a burgundy ceiling, from which spherical ceiling lights dangle. Beyond the turn of the wall and the bathroom door, a large bed stands flanked by nightstands. Lamps hang over the pillows, shaded so they glow a lovely honey. A metal desk is backed up against the wall facing the bed, a red armchair reclining beside it. The window that looks into the room is veiled by a cream curtain.
Coming up beside her, he asks again, "Are you sure you do not mind?"
She turns. His coat is hanging in the wardrobe, so he stands in a grey waistcoat and a white shirt. "Mind what?" She can feel the sleep hanging upon her eyelids; the great white blankets are so very tempting.
Raising an eyebrow, Felix shakes his head and decides to change course. "It is far past your bedtime," he murmurs, pacing before the bed.
"Th—thank you."
"Hm?"
She weaves her fingers together. Suddenly the words are jammed in her throat. "Well...you—saved me, and you're paying for this, and it's of no benefit to you...so I thought I should thank you."
"Oh, you are welcome," he replies, another kindly smile coming to him. "But of course, your friendship has more than compensated the effort." He tilts his head and gestures at the bed again. "Go ahead; I did interrupt in the middle of your sleep."
She nods many times, profusely, before dropping onto the cushy bedside and pulling her shoes off. The night is warm enough so she takes the sweater off and leaves it in a bundle on the nightstand. The night is so warm. Perhaps the cold of being alone and far away has already seeped so deep. She never realised till now, now that she has a friend.
:::
Morning circles the room, faint gray, pink, colors nuanced and strange. Adelaide blinks her eyes mistily open, expecting her ceiling panel with its circular lights. Her head swims for a while when she sees deep red instead.
Then last night bursts through the windings of her mind to inundate it. She remembers a confusing swirl of lights on the street, and lots of pedestrians. She isn't...in her room. She is safe. She remembers the strangers by the counter, and Felix—
When she first lifts her head to look about, she is alarmed to find Felix is asleep in the armchair. He's being too polite, refusing to sleep in the bed without invitation. She makes a note to give him permission tonight. Keeping as silent as she can, she shuffles across the bed to the window and draws the curtain. Gray light pours through, and a pair of windows set in green stares back from across the street. The streets are already bustling below.
While he is not awake, she studies the brochures on the glass desktop, and hovers about the telephone at the corner of the desk. An unexpected plant has placed itself at the corner of the table, sprouting out of what looks like a small brown drawstring bag, a plant she recognizes in a single nervous touch. Narcissus jonquilla. She remembers the textbook, the leaf, the—light.
Adelaide tries not to gasp with sudden understanding. She stores that new knowledge away, and begins to sort through the brochures on the tabletop. One of the guides tells her she can order breakfast-in-bed by dialing 819, so timidly she picks up the receiver and tries.
Her companion wakes without her notice, in the midst of her experimentation. "Good morning, Miss Moore," he mutters, startling her away from the phone. "What have you been up to?"
"Good morning," she replies. "Um, I opened the windows, found an odd dish in the drawer, and...ordered breakfast."
He raises an eyebrow. "You did?" He is interrupted by the doorbell. "...so you did." He frowns. "You'll have to hide, or else I must disguise you again."
Her eyes widen, and she slips obediently into the bed where the turn of the wall hides her. She listens as Felix crosses the carpet, sleepily, and opens the door. A conversation ensues between him and the room service employee outside:
"Good morning, Sir." The lady sounds old but not tired.
"Good morning to you too, ma'am." He's managed to sound lively, at least as much as morning grogginess allows.
Wheels rattle on the carpet. "You ordered breakfast?"
"Yes, I did. Thank you."
The clawing of hunger at her stomach sharpens when the first whiff of breakfast reaches her. Food, not pellets—real food. She shifts on the mattress.
The door clicks shut. Felix arrives at the bedside with a tray of two dishes, laden and rich. Heat wafts against her chin. It smells of an old diner in her memory, the one down at the end of the street where she used to live. Her parents used to take her there when she was good.
Mum, Dad. Should she visit now, flag a cab downstairs, risk the ten-mile trip? Will her family shun her like the rest of the nation—will they think her a monster?
Felix turns. "You look dazed." She shakes her head blankly and reaches for her plate. He shouldn't have to listen to problems that shouldn't matter by now.
She eats on the bed, as she often does, but he insists on dining at the steel-glass desk. "Did you sleep well?" asks her companion between mouthfuls.
"I think so."
"We must take you to a hairdresser," he says musingly, "have your hair dyed, perhaps obtain 'contact lenses', as they're called..."
"I could change them myself," she ventures. She could, but is it safe—or right? It...it must be right. Felix used his abilities to save her. And this will safeguard them both.
"Oh! I forgot you could." He taps his chin. "Blue eyes. Blue eyes will suit you, I think."
She blinks, and decides not to respond. "Okay...and, is that all? Is that all we will do today?"
Considering the question with a pursing of lips, Felix folds his arms. "To ease your reentry into the San Francisco of year 2060, I suppose I could take you to tour it—a strange arrangement, considering you are the citizen and I, the tourist!" He grins. "Fish out of water, us both. I imagine much has changed since you last saw it. Eleven years, was it?"
She nods. It must have. Both things, the city and she.
"This must be how butterflies feel," she murmurs pensively at her scrambled eggs, "emerging from their cocoons."
"Quite so," Felix replies. "I imagine San Francisco will surprise you, too."
:::
Before the sun has crawled above the arachnoid antennae of the fortresses of shops, Felix takes Adelaide into the city beneath their window, the city in which they will be eternal fugitives; it won't hurt, she thinks, to get to know it better.
With the help of street signs and some agreeable conversations with pedestrians, her companion locates the shop of Dania Mille, hairdresser extraordinaire—but she only dares to enter when he is guiding her with a hand upon her arm.
Adelaide wears her false face as the chemicals are massaged, foaming, into her locks and the hairdresser begins an inane conversation that remains largely one-sided. Even though her visage is absolutely unrecognisable, a little sharper and terribly strange, she's afraid to give anyone a proper glimpse of her face.
Mishap avoids them today, though, and the new light brown shade settles nicely into her hair, just as the noon sinks calmly into the streets. Their fellow customers are none the wiser when the pair leaves the little shop's air-conditioned comfort, Felix sixty dollars poorer.
"You needn't have," Adelaide murmurs when they are outside.
"Sixty dollars? That has not impacted my finances in the least."
"You...did you bring money from your world?"
He shakes his head in the burning noon, the sun blazing upon his hair as they pause outside a cafe among empty tables, wafts of air-conditioning bringing some reprieve. "I did, however, bring a gold locket," he replied. "Not one I fancied particularly; it was but a gift from an acquaintance who has since come to abhor me. The auctioneer seemed thorougly enthralled with the good state of the supposedly two hundred-year-old artifact."
"Did it fetch you a lot?"
"One million, six hundred thousand dollars in your currency," he says, quite fluently for such a remarkably hefty sum. "I do personally favour financial investment as an income source, though. I have, for example, shares in Faro Technologies—"
"But don't you—need a computer to do that? All this investing business, I mean..."
He grins. "What else would I have done with a million dollars and a month's boredom?"
"You're terrifying."
"Oh, acerbity at last!" he says. "It works charmingly on you."
She wonders if she should take offence, because she feels none. She has studied the art of speech but she isn't in the habit of manipulating her tone and diction to specific ends. "I mean it," she replies. "You have earned a frightening amount for a month of idle living."
"Barely idle! A stably-paying job is like a heartbeat. I recently chanced upon a dying news company in terrible need of good penmanship. A good time to catch any company, really. It pays me well."
"Wow...your luck must be amazing."
"Strategic prowess is easily mistaken for luck."
They hop to the opthalmologist's next, where Felix chooses her a box of weekly contact lenses—all blue. He seems to have set himself upon blue already; Adelaide doesn't think her grey eyes are much of a giveaway, but every change she can make to her face—she knows—will be invaluable now. Blue it is.
He then offers to pay for a new set of clothes, and she insists on a market where she supposes they will be cheapest. He is very visibly alarmed and attempts to convince her that no one should be allowed to make purchases in a place where the clothing cannot first be sampled, but she knows—and insists—she cannot burden him with more expenses.
"I am a millionaire," he answers pointedly.
She shakes her head, and hopes refusal is not offensive—not as much, at least, as the offence of accepting would be. "I don't think millionairehood would make it any less rude of me, if I remember what rudeness means," she says, and borders on snappiness—to her surprise, later.
Between changing rooms and cost and rudeness, they eventually settle on a roadside boutique that minds itself quite well, if a little modestly. Their prices are equally well-though-modest; fifty dollars gets her two new skirts, and another seventy or so go to top wear of various sorts. She asks him about underwear next, but he seems very reluctant to discuss it altogether, and leaves her to make her purchase in a store upstairs, half a dozen shopping bags in tow.
The evening, they become patrons at a relatively obscure cafe in the southern part of the city, in a place where the freeways cross and there are less eyes to discover her. It is strange how quiet the roads have become, how high the buildings tower over her where she sits at the cafe table, as if bridging the gap between the ground and the scant fiery clouds above.
"How have you been feeling?" asks Felix over his tea. Earlier at the counter, he seemed visibly displeased with the plastic cup in which it was originally offered, but the Dusk's Delivery is a place that respects itself and the counter staff replaced the container in due time.
Pursing her lips at the swirly marbling of the tabletop, Adelaide tosses the question about in her head. "You mean...how I have been feeling ever since leaving the lab?"
"Yes, that, and also with regards to the city you've just seen." He casts a meaningful glance at the jagged faraway skyline where the buildings are taller.
She fumbles with her empty saucer. "It's amazing," she says, just a whisper. San Francisco is all the colours she's forgotten. Grey till the morning is properly awake. Blue with the sky arching above it. And it grows so searingly orangely hot so soon, like when bulbs overheat, or when—she has read—airplanes rub against the air. They passed the coast; the old sea waits there still, though the bollards are gone and gleaming fences stand in their place.
The city has changed again, and keeps changing, even as she stares at the rough black tarmac. The skyscrapers gleam purple and blinding gold upon their little cafe. Down the street the first shops have lit up for the night.
"There is more that will amaze you yet," he replies smilingly.
"Oh? Do you have more stop planned?"
"The secret of its location cannot be spoiled now, but I promise you will like it," he replies, and she decides not to pursue the matter. But the question keeps asking itself. Where?
They stay in their seats, quiet-eyed, till the tea menu is replaced by dinner on the screen behind the counter. Adelaide orders pizza for the first time in so long; she finds the portion so large that she must offer the rest to Felix, who very politely obliges, though she can tell—or at least guesses from the furrow of his brow—that he would not otherwise deign to consume the food.
Felix finally decides, at dinner's end, that it is time he completed the tour with a visit to the mysterious place he has so far withheld all information on. She follows him to the roadside, and wears her false face again while he flags a taxi in the wind.
The city is so bright that the black sky peeking into the canyon between the skyscrapers is devoid of stars. Gazing through the window as the taxi glides through the streets, chin on the sill, Adelaide finds she is beginning to think that San Francisco is not as monstrous as it seemed yesterday. Not when the streets are shining, not when she has walked amongst its citizens and seen no threat. The city has almost begun to seem...safe.
But that sense of security is only a result of careful disguising and street protocol. And Felix. No small part is owed to Felix...
The taxi has stop on a particularly busy street, along which great screens on mall facades pretend to be the vivid forests that were hacked apart years ago. The digital greenery glows in pedestrian faces on glittery sidewalks.
Adelaide is alarmed when her companion does not take her down the street but rather up the front steps of the nearest skyscraper and through the glass doors. Servers chorus welcomes as they cross the marble floor. She shivers and pulls her arms close; he takes her arm and convinces her with a smile. The lift rings to announce its arrival.
Where, the question is still there,. She does not ask when he pushes the very highest button in the lift, nor does she ask when the lonely lift ride exceeds a minute's length and she begins to feel awkward in her shoes. That anxiety of being near someone again. She stares at the golden doors to distract herself.
When the lift rings again, Adelaide shrieks, and hears him laugh. "What has you so jumpy?" asks Felix as she dashes through the doors and he follows. It's all dim outside, a deep rich red carpet path bordered by glass walls, beyond which she can only faintly make out a shelterless balcony—and the glow of the city.
"I paid this location a visit once," Felix's voice is a reverent whisper, "but not in the nighttime, and not in good company." He begins down the corridor, passing between ochre lights and the bright patches of floor they light.
She almost feels the question leave her, of what makes her good company when all she does is be nervous and silly. But then they reach the far glass wall, and the doors there slide apart, and the wind knocks the words away. Her eyes sting—where! She still wants, craves to ask—but Felix seems sure that they're in the right place, and she follows him through the battering gales to the rooftop's edge, to place her hands on the frigid rails.
"Felix—where are—"
The lights drown her eyes, and she loses her answer somewhere in them. It is not a city that she sees, but a network of colourful stars. The lines of gold where the freeways tangle with each other. The reticulation of the roads, the black fathomless border where she knows lies San Francisco Bay, and the bridge that pierces like a bright knife through the void.
She has never seen her city from the top before, but it is so bright, so much brighter than she remembers at all. She doesn't understand this thing, between excitement and surprise, between surprise and fear of falling—she doesn't think she's felt it before, not like this, but her heart thrums.
"Wow," she breathes, just so Felix knows she hasn't forgotten his presence. "Where are we?"
"The Marah Tower," he finally answers. "It was constructed during your time inside the laboratory. What do you think of the them, the city lights?"
"They are...very nice to look at." They are a giant web, woven to trap butterflies.
Lowering the shopping bags to the ground, Adelaide swallows and closes her eyes, waiting for tears. She doesn't think being here will nourish her or heal her, or do anything to help her at all. It is so very empty on this rooftop. Yet she finds this view quite priceless, all the same. This view and this moment. So high above the fog.
"Thank...y-you." Again she loses her grip on the words, and has to straighten her tongue. She is glad she has an excuse not to face him while speaking. "For the hairdresser, and the lunch, and the clothes, and the dinner, and the taxi ride, and the time all this is wasting."
"The hours are not wasted on a friend who needs them more," he says, "and you are most welcome to take all the time you require still. I do have an excess of it."
"Thank you!" Adelaide repeats. She thinks it's not enough yet, if fairness of exchange were anything to go by. Then she remembers what people do to thank each other, so she turns around and hugs him, as tightly as she can.
"You are welcome," he says, "but if I could offer a few words' advice...you may find it useful to acquaint yourself with the social customs of your time."
"I know them, I lived with everyone else till I was seven!" she protests, but withdraws, staring down at the shopping bags fluttering by her feet.
Felix folds his arms, coat corners flapping about. "Strange as it might sound, adults have quite a different set of customs from children." A smile spreads across his face. "I am humbled by the extent of your gratitude, though."
It is ten o'clock before they make it back to their hotel. Adelaide falls asleep in the taxi, and has to be woken by her companion. Upstairs, she finally offers, with droopy eyelids, the other side of the bed, but he refuses, and takes to the armchair before she can protest.
"I will be collecting my luggage from my previous hotel tomorrow," he says. "Don't mind me."
This is the last thing she hears before the brilliance beyond her eyelids—Felix, and his tabletop plant, and the pocketbook he studies—fades into the dark of her sleep.
:::
When Adelaide wakes in the white hours before morning, Felix shows her the news.
She barely has to read two lines to find out that it is about her. Her. They want her back for forty million dollars.
But it is the rest of the news that decides to stick long after she's flung the papers aside. She can barely make it past the second paragraph, but she does, she drags her mind through its dirt. Freak, they call her, threat to public health, malignant menace, anomalous, deleterious, not allowed to live.
It is most destroying to read because of Felix. Felix. Felix has created something in her that can be destroyed. She's begun to believe she is something other than a monster—that like a gnarly ravaging caterpillar she can fall sleep in her cocoon and emerge something beautiful. Something they will love for all its fury. Felix made her think so. Felix made her think it didn't matter.
No, she can change many things, but not the monster she is.
They'll be here soon, too. Someone will see her and know her. Someone will tip the authorities. Someone as near as next door...
...or in this very room.
Assaulted suddenly by myriad feelings she doesn't understand, Adelaide curls up and begins to cry. She cries distrustful tears, wracked and black and cold. She sobs spasmodically, and pants and sobs until her shrieks become breathless and the lights are all dazzling. Through a fog of sound, she can hear Felix trying to calm her down—verbally, uselessly, taking her shoulder. He puts a pillow behind her head and orders something on the phone.
"Quiet, my dear, calm down," he murmurs, pressing the orange juice into her hands. She downs it in convulsive gulps and drops the glass onto the nightstand. "We're still here, and no one knows where you are—"
"If you want to so badly, then turn me in!" she yells; part of her is gasping for life. "Forty million dollars! You could—find—better friends with forty million—dollars." More sobs spear their ways out of her.
"I will not."
"You will!"
"No, I wouldn't."
"You have me! You've caught me! You could take me there right—now—and claim the reward—" She glares; she doesn't know why she does. His fear makes her afraid. "Just another investment, isn't it? You—you meant to do it, you meant to break me out of the lab so—you could turn me in for money."
"No!" The exasperation is so furious it almost leaves a scratch. "I am not that sort of person!"
"Why then? You didn't tell me—"
"Fear! I have been afraid of myself, and the things I can do. But to know that I am not alone in this business of commanding incomprehensible powers...just to know, dear God, I needed that, I needed your friendship—do you see, Adelaide?"
She finally manages to stem the torrent of horror that has wrung these tears out of her, but the hiccuping sobs interrupt her silence every few seconds. "I...see."
Adelaide blinks her eyes open. Another cascade of tears. Through them she sees him sadly smile.
Believe him? He appeared so suddenly, so soon. She barely knows him. A young man with an unbelievable story. Believe him?
Danger, her heart cries. Danger when you don't understand.
How can a light be danger?
Danger pretends to be good.
She slumps against the headboard, tired, tired as the old sea that has been pounding all these eleven years on the shores of San Francisco. San Francisco which has shifted and grown outside her cocoon. San Francisco the spiderweb.
He touches her forearm. It is trust. Trust, in spite of the drowning darkness of the world. A guiding light.
Nodding, she sucks in a breath, and grits her teeth together—like a prayer. A prayer they share.
Original fiction. About what it means to be home, and making happiness for yourself.
He still remembers the days when he called loneliness peace.
Cherry-red pond side days, dull and flat like the stones he so often tossed at the water to smash the clouds below, petals spread like spilt blood on the banks. Pale cream dawn days, like the light that sat on the gliding swans' wings, as they watched, serenely, the stones spin by. He used to play among the children, he should have been one of them. But no one ever taught him stone-tossing; he learnt the art by sight. So it perennially puzzled him, and always would, as to why his stones never skipped like theirs did.
Sometimes he dozed in the waterside warmth, smiling at passing peddlars and pretending they didn't look away-and when parents whispered amongst themselves about why he wasn't at school, he'd mistake their talk for greetings and wave.
He wasn't extraordinary: a child without wings, a child of hair the colour of the light he'd never known. They had always held him in the contempt entailed by the extraordinariness they imagined upon him-on his brow, like a crown among his golden curls. Who was he, after all, besides a lazy snob's child, grown fat off the land, one who by principle did not mingle with the lower folk? Wingless peacock, they said. Thornless rosebush.
They made a game of calling him names. He laughed with them when they played it, and sometimes laughed at himself with all their scorn.
Then among the crimson petals, he would toss another stone to the water, and the chorus of giggles behind him would be followed by the vanishing of faces.
---
He remembers how he held rings at five. Then he was eight, and learning to write a diary.
Dear diary,
nothing at all happened today, nothing of worth.
I don't know why the stones won't skim.
He scrunched up his face for a better idea, for something else with which to adorn the page. Ultimately he decided to abandon the effort entirely, and slipped the book into the gap on the shelf-everything in place, nothing where it shouldn't be. Diary-keeping was a practice meant to save memories, but to him it was but a chore imposed by his English tutor.
---
Evening is a time when strange things happen. It is the time when everyone is going home, businessmen in carriages, urchins on bare feet, fearing the blindness of the dark. It is the time of magical light, pink yet blue, turning the pondwater gold. When shadows are long and hide black butterflies.
The evenings in the twelfth year of his life were as all evenings had ever been. He would watch each red dusk as the street walkers passed, blinded to him, homeward-bound. He would wonder why Mother with her administration and Father with his ships were never home for him, never homeward-bound just like everyone else. Every day, he returned to an empty house, vast and hollow.
"And what is home?" sang his English tutor. "Home is where the heart is!" he cried reply.
His heart wasn't there.
His heart was nowhere, actually, but he never told anyone. He had no one to tell.
A hundred servants waited on him, but to him he was the only one living there. Life was a ruled line, just like the paths of stones over the pond. He was singular and pristine, and he had no business trying to pry into their lives. He had no choice, not when his nurse told him constantly to be polite and mind his manners.
He kept his door locked most of the time. The lines weren't supposed to bend.
---
Dear diary,
I think I feel lonely.
---
So this evening it was that came upon rosy wings, landing on the eaves of the town to wash it red. Today, he didn't feel like strolling too fast, because what was there to warrant haste? He kicked a rock off the path. There was dinner, and then there was homework, and then there was bedtime. There was nothing else…
He might have noticed the rush of footsteps from behind him if he hadn't been thinking. He didn't. It was only when she called that he realised that someone followed, silent as parrots in anger.
"Snob boy!" came a cry from far behind. He stumbled to a standstill.
Not a bit indignant at the nickname for reasons unknown even to himself, he glanced backwards—and the girl barrelled into him with a straw hat in her fingers.
"You again!" she exclaimed once her brilliant eyes had taken his. Briefly alarmed and faintly flustered, he took the sudden apparition in: auburn hair unruly and unwashed, face a little too dirty, clothes scrappy as urchin's rags. There was the filthy stench of sweat all about her; he almost doubled back before remembering his manners. "You're always here!" she went on, pretending ignorance to his shock. "Where's your mother? Why're you always here? Why aren't you going home?"
"Because I don't have one."
"Yes, you do!" She would not be turned down, stubborn kid. She was pointing at the mansion a little far away, grinning boyishly. "It's right there! I see you go there every day."
He defended himself by folding his arms. "What do you know about me?" he answered-and she was right. He ought to go home before more freaks attacked him like this. So he did. She said goodbye, and he ignored her, and she didn't try to chase.
---
Dear diary,
I met a crazy girl today.
The stones still aren't skimming.
---
He had spent countless afternoons before this stone-tossing-but today, only today, had he suddenly begun to realise that it was all taking him nowhere. He bit his lip. Before this, the activity had contented him enough-he had stubbornly convinced himself so. Why had it lost its charm?
Somewhere nearby, a five-year-old giggled and flung her own stone to the water. It hopped, skipped, and splashed deep into the blue pool on the third impact.
"Quite fine!" came her mother's cry, as she began to lament the stone's failed journey. "Throw a little harder next time!"
Suddenly he felt that sharp diamond of disappointment, right where he never had before. How long had he been throwing blindly and not succeeding? He glanced at the flat piece of rock in his own palm, and threw it-straighter and neater than the girl's throw had been-far more perfect.
It splashed as usual, making not so much as a bounce before it vanished in a flash of water.
Before he could begin to pity himself, and as he pulled himself from the bank to begin homeward, a familiar voice burst in on his thoughts like a battering ram.
He turned—and grimaced. It was her again. Same scruffy hat on scruffy head. She was dashing down the grass to the bank where he stood, crying "hey you" with her arms flapping like an eagle's wings.
"What is it?" he muttered when she finally stopped, gracelessly. She panted and grinned, the way she always did. He wrinkled his nose, the way he always did. Push her away, his heart said. She's so dirty. Shove her away. "Why are you here?" came his question, as coldly as he could manage.
"Why are you here?" she parroted the question-and at this, he almost laughed. She sounds so much like me. Her eyes wouldn't leave him, irritated as he tried to appear, and she pulled the hat off as her breath began to level. "Why are you here? Are you going to tell me that you don't have a home again?"
"I…do live in a—house," he finally confessed. "But it isn't my home. Mother and Father gave me servants and toys, but really there's nothing tying me to it. Not even Mother and Father. They're never there."
The girl pouted back. "Aw, you sound so lonely," she sang, too aptly. He tried not to flinch when she patted his shoulder in a crude gesture of comfort. The last pat became a firm clasp. "Is that why you're here?"
"I suppose."
"Don't suppose! You should know."
"-Yes. I have so many things, but I don't have any friends."
It was about then that he began to see, vaguely. He had never understood why he'd always felt empty despite the abundance in his house, the parents who were loaded with gold and assets (whatever those were), a surplus of things-banquets whenever he desired, a huge room with a gilded bed, thousands of jewelled toys.
There was no one there to share it all with, and that made it worthless.
The girl did not let his frown drag her wildness down. "What?" she exclaimed. "No friends? Then who am I?"
"Being a friend isn't as simple as that!" he burst out. "My choice must be thought over; my parents need to approve; I can't just be friends with some stranger I met on the streets…"
"Well, that's why!" she answered triumphantly. Friend, her eyes shine. "You make it so hard! Almost no one would get past that. Come; we can make it easier, can't we? I'll be your friend. And you aren't stopping me!" She laughed at the sky. "Good evening, friend!"
The sky turned orange as these words were spoken. The swans arced their necks to gaze at themselves. He had to go home, he told her.
She walked him halfway home that day, up till the bustling junction with the ice cream stand, where she said she had to be home too. He smiled at her in strange gratitude, and left her behind among the houses.
When he turned around, he realised that she hadn't walked away.
Then he realised that she had no home either.
---
Dear diary,
I met the girl again. As always. She says that being friends isn't as hard as I think-so have I been thinking wrong all my life?
I haven't learnt to skim stones yet. Is there any point in going on?
---
"Where'd you learn your English?" he asked, and she didn't seem alarmed that he knew her secret. Perhaps nothing could alarm her any longer, not after so many years out in a city where no one looked twice unless to murder.
"Oh, I...I had friends who taught me," she murmured, "but they're gone and all." His eyes grew wide. "No biggie, though. I've had lots of friends, they all last a year or so, then go on their way." A grin seizes her face. "People go where the money is!"
How old was she, twelve? Thirteen? She couldn't be much younger than he. But she must have cut her toes on rocks before, cut them deep and bled brick red, whenhe hadn't ever dared scratch his boots.
"That's unfortunate," he murmured, and was surprised to find this sorrow was real. Real as the smart of rocks cutting toes. "Isn't it ever tiring?"
"Yeah, always is, some way or other." She kept grinning though. As if she saw something on the horizon that didn't exist to him. Something like home. "But it all passes pretty quickly, and I'm always finding new things to be happy for—like dumb rich snobs by the lake!"
He laughed suddenly at the spectacularly blunt insult, eyes closing in mirth; he shook with his laughter. She was so happy, how could she be happy? Somehow, despite her bare, dirt-scraped feet and all the years written beneath her eyes, he had a feeling she knew more about home than he did.
When they parted ways that evening, she was reluctant, almost; her fingers hung onto her battered hat like talons, as if clinging to the sinking sun. "You've been my friend longer than any of the others," she admitted then. "Um, thanks."
"You are welcome." He didn't admit, that evening, that some part of this friendship was saving him. His fingers had already been dirtied by the rocks from the lakeside, so he didn't mind when she decided to shake his hand in gratitude.
---
Dear diary,
The rocks are as disobedient as always.
---
He sat throwing rocks for years to come. Two rocks for every day. The surface gleamed gold every afternoon, and its colours changed with the shifting seasons, each sky to be shattered, invariably, by his failures with the stones. Each piece smashed the water and descended like the last, and his throws began to grow frustrated. New year, midyear, deep in the winter when this town was only brushed by the tip of the cold.
He was growing tired of this game. Am I still innocent, he asked himself now, suddenly, clutching at the newly-picked stone in his palm. So many years; he was still throwing rocks-as before, as always-and they were still plummeting into the pond, as if afraid of his relief, his victory. Now, he knew that this game had always been a distraction; he had never really enjoyed it.
Now that he was past his childish mesmerism, he turned to see the grey world behind. He saw every countenance that passed, jaded to his silent pleading. He saw how their eyes averted him like—like a street rat.
Am I still innocent? Will I continue to fool myself?
"You again."
A voice pushed through the paper walls of his sadness, bored and bordering on flippant. He only had a few seconds to feel his heart leap, before she came to sit beside him on the bank and swing her legs over the water, lean from something he could only guess was undernourishment. Her smiled burned less now, but it was only because her body couldn't afford her the strength for flame. Her frame was narrower, somewhat willowy, her back hunched to cold she'd suddenly begun to feel-but her hair was still a mess, and her eyes were still brown and furious when she grinned. Maybe, despite this, she was prettier. He had never noticed her becoming a little of someone else, someone the same but not quite, someone more resigned.
"Why aren't you going home? Don't say what you did back then. It is your home."
"I told you, I don't have one!"
"Yes, you do! Stop lying to yourself! It's that house, right there!"
Her words made him angry. She was in no position to speak of such things! No position to make him feel guilty about not having the life he would never have!
"Don't tell me about home!" he snapped straight back, much too furious for his liking. Home is where the heart is. "That isn't my home, alright? Everything's as it should be, and yet it's all wrong. I don't love my home! It's just a shell, a cave. There's no one there." He turned away, stabbed suddenly by his own words. "What do you know about me and my life? What do you know?"
A silence. She didn't look angry, but her stubbornness seemed to die a little.
"What do you know?" she answered at last, a sad echo, head bowing like a leaf on a withered stalk.
Guilt wrenched him in the gut. She sounds so much like me. Growling, he swung down to snatch a flat stone up, and stood. "I don't understand this!" he cried. There was nothing more to be said-he was tired of running in circles and finding no end. He needed to make some headway somewhere, but what headway had he made? Eight years, and everything was still the same.
"I've been throwing straight all this time-straight as I can! Why isn't it hopping like it should? Why is it still wrong?"
He flicked the pathetic little stone at the water, sending all his rage, all the years, with it. As always, as it always would-it splashed into the water and sank.
Perhaps because she couldn't see the anger in his eyes, or because she found his failure comedic, she laughed. He turned, trying not to glare at her but glaring all the same.
"Well, that's because you've been doing it wrong!" came her bewildering response, and her grin was suddenly as bold as ever. She took her own stone and stood. "You aren't supposed to throw it straight, that way it crashes into the water instead of glancing off on it. You're supposed to give it a spin."
His eyes must have lit up.
She flicked the stone out of her hand, so casually it made all these years seem like nothing. It went curving from her fingers, spinning like a top in midair and meeting the water at an almost-parallel. The water rose to meet it-and off the surface glanced the stone, magically, hopping a second time, a third-on and on, till it leapt onto the other bank where it thudded into the grass.
"No," he muttered. "That didn't just…"
"You've been following your own made-up rules all your life," she answered. "And by the way, your made-up rules are pretty silly. The same reason you didn't have friends-you keep doing things your own odd way! Sometimes, you just need someone to tell you-yes? Tell you what the problem is. Why don't you try yourself?"
Staring at her, waiting for a signal of approval that she quickly gave, he bent for a stone of his own. His fingers curled when he rose. With a toss that he had practiced all his life, it went soaring like a bird towards the water, but spinning. Spinning like the sun. And it leapt, once! twice!-before it splashed away, and by then his heart was bursting and his eyes stung with the tears of a decade and he wished his father had been there to see it skip.
With a silly, tearful grin, he whirled to see his friend, so changed from the day they'd met; she stared on back and laughed, "you're crying!" because he'd never cried in front of her before. And he found it didn't matter that she was seeing him so weak—didn't matter if she never washed her clothes, or if her hair was a mess, while his was brushed out, his hands soaped to rawness. It didn't matter if there were scars on her shins while there was not a thread loose on his pants. She was the imperfection he had never known.
Both glanced at the orange sun that gleamed across the water. He looked down at his hands, and seeing them brought some sort of rue. They were so clean, so flawless, so empty.
She was smiling at him with bright eyes and some expectation, some special pleading maybe. He understood, because he felt the same hope brimming in him too-and a little reluctantly, he held out a hand.d
He'd actually expected her to be a little gentler, a little more ladylike, but she only laughed at the odd look on his face, and snatched his hand so hard he thought he felt tears coming.
She walked him home again, and though he didn't want to admit it, he did like the feeling of her hand safe in his. It felt like a warm connection he had always sought without knowing it. Perhaps Mother and Father had once cradled him in their arms, in those ancient days from which he could draw no memory-but the warmth was gone, and there were only shallow imprints of love remaining.
That warmth had, for these minutes, for these years, been replaced by hers.
The surly figure of the house appeared a little too soon, but he accepted it. He hesitated at the gates, nevertheless, for they looked so coldly forbidding and she was so real. Mother and Father were probably still at work, and the house was probably just as empty, as grandly meaningless as it had always been.
Letting go, the girl turned to face him, and her lopsided grin was more brilliant than the sun behind her. "Are you going home yet?"
He saw the way she smiled at the word home. A homeless girl. Then he realised that this didn't matter either.
---
But—his dining room full that evening.
There were guests and servants gathered there amidst the family's golden drapery, and a feast spread across the table for every man and woman in the house. There were streamers on the archway, homecoming banners by the doors.
And at the very head of the table, grandly enthroned like deities afar, sat Mother and Father.
"It's late!" exclaimed his father as he rose. "Get yourself cleaned and seated this instant!"
He wondered for five seconds whether it was a dream, because the lights seemed so bright. Then he decided he should smile whether or not it was, and he ran to do as told.
The banquet was preceded by a speech. "To a successful venture and prosperity for the house," announced Father to the chandeliers. As it turned out, the dinner celebrated a valuable new business deal he had clinched. It was about his work again—assets, wealth, windfalls. Mother seemed equally enthralled by the news—not at the sight of their son, or at the dishes painstakingly prepared.
It doesn't matter, he insisted with the gritty determination he'd learnt from the girl by the river—the girl who'd lived half her life on the streets, losing friends as fast as they came. He ate and savoured the honey warmth that filled him up. This was the closest he would ever come, he knew. It's different today. They came home. The house is full. The house isn't empty. It's enough.
That night at the front door, he finally said "goodbye" to the father and mother who had barely heard his voice before. Father smiled. Mother kissed his forehead and returned the goodbye, told him to take care of himself, to listen to his English tutor.
"I want to tell you about everything that's happened," he answered, desperate for another second, as they began to turn. "I learnt to skim stones! I met this girl""
"A girl," murmured Mother, glancing at Father, who glanced back, too knowingly for his liking. He would have defended himself, but the retort was left hanging on his tongue. They had disappeared, and with the grandest of creaks the doors swung together, leaving the entrance hall as quiet as the dusk.
---
Dear diary,
I finally learnt how to skim stones today—she taught me how. She also taught me to love what I have. It's not easy , but sometimes you just need someone to show you how and why. She taught me to love my home just that way, emptiness and all. She taught me to call it that. I don't think she knows.
Home isn't made up of the people inside it at any one point in time. It's the sum of events that have transpired within its walls, the events in its history. It's made up of love that has been, the love that will be—love that stays to occupy the space within which it was born.
It doesn't matter that Father and Mother weren't here yesterday, or that they won't be here tomorrow. They were here today, and that's enough to make this place home, to me.
---
He remembers it all too well, because a thousand pages of his diary carry two-line entries about how he didn't know how to skim stones. His diary ends with the entry written on the day his parents finally visited, because that was the day his English tutor finally decided, eight years from starting, that his writing skills had grown sufficient and quite admirable, and that the exercise was no longer necessary. He keeps the diary though. It pleases him to remember his own sadness.
He lost his interest in skimming stones quickly—strange that all the fun had vanished now that he knew how to do it. He was seventeen, after all, and the day was long overdue.
The children who teased him have left already, birds from the nest. Things change, have changed, will change. They have grown tired of their games. The fathers who taught them to throw stones stand now with bent backs and decrepit, reaching hands.
He never did leave the spot, though. For two years or so, he waited there for Rae among red petals. She always arrived with the same laughter and the same irreverence as before—but her dwindling state showed through her mask like light through linen, and he continued to wish he could help somehow—until he finally realised that he could.
It was two years of meeting and parting and dancing around the subject. He owed it to her; she had saved him first—but the words were still so hard. She dodged his questions so glibly it exasperated him. At last, one afternoon, in that pink-yet-blue evening light, he found the need to stop her and ask outright:
"Come and live with me, Rae."
Suddenly, it seemed so obvious. She needed a home. He needed a companion. They could make it. A small, broken sketch of a family.
"Why?"
"Because I can't let you suffer for who you are. Because I want my heart to be here. Because Mother and Father won't come home, and the house will always be empty—"
He clenched a fist, eyes closing.
Life isn't a straight line. It can change. It will change. They'll earn enough one day. They'll come home. We'll live together. It will happen.
Then she gripped his wrist in affirmation, and for seconds, he forgot.
It was late spring in the year 1949. The mud that had been churned up by boots during last night’s storm was beginning to dry on the small side roads of the northern French coast.
A soldier froze in a corridor between bunks, the hairs on his arm standing in a surge of static as a new set of footsteps thudded closer behind him. Gulping, he turned to face the newcomer, all his past offences suddenly springing to the front of his memory. “Good day to you,” he mumbled.
With nothing more than a nod to acknowledge him, Captain Lovelace strode straight by, hands clasped behind her back. “I hope you are having a good day,” the officer answered. Every soul in the corridor trembled in his boots.
As she walked by, her fingers curled around the chain at her waist, and they leaned away, shivering.
:::
Vesper was not having a good day.
She’d been made a huge fool of in the battle of last night. She wasn’t even on the Western Front, and she’d managed to fuck up this bad. In fact, thank God she wasn’t on the Western Front. She’d made a grave mistake, deciding that half-capacity would be enough for the battle.
The Nazis had come with rubber in their hulls.
She couldn’t let this become a habit. The great gash in the right sleeve of her camo uniform would be good motivation—the gash, and the memory of the second bullet ever to come this close to killing her.
And to top things off, she was now grappling with a head-splitting migraine.
For now, she had to busy herself with cleaning up her act. It was for this that she presently headed towards HQ, rubbing her temple.
Before she could make it to the exit, another set of footsteps joined hers. She rounded the corner to discover their owner: Thomas Hart. Hands loosening from her chain, Vesper groaned quietly.
“Morning, Captain Lovelace,” said Hart chirpily, leaning back on the balls of his feet, wearing the dirtiest shirt she’d ever had to look upon. His hair was crusty with greyish dirt from last night; she smelt the rainy mud on him, even three feet away. She had a good mind to yell his ear off, but had the prudence not to.
He inclined his head as she passed. “Did you have a good night’s rest? You don’t look well, if I dare say.”
Vesper pursed her lips because her vision was starting to sway with the pounding of her headache. “Your concern is appreciated,” she answered, “but I am quite fine.”
“In any case, well done last night,” he laughed.
Her mouth opened, but she decided there wasn’t enough evidence that he was mocking her. “I’m glad you think so,” was all she said. Well done making a mess of plans, more like. She glowered, squared her shoulders and marched straight on by—oh, but he’d be mistaken to think she was letting that comment slide. An accidental jab of his elbow wouldn’t go amiss.
Air snapped briefly as she passed and stuck a finger out. “Ouch! Hey!” yelped the private, like a little boy. Little boys, all of them.
Her lips curved. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she muttered.
“But how? That was one point of contact—”
“Grounding. You’d think my comrades would know to avoid leather slippers.”
Vesper left him no chance to answer. No doubt he was contemplating the purchase of a pair of rubber slippers right now.
Precisely the problem. They learn.
By the time she’d exited her company’s building, she was wishing she’d taken her medication with her. Unfortunately the only cure left to her use was deep breathing, and so she went breathing like a fool all the way up the quadrangle.
The air was swollen with wind and the smell of brine. All the buildings of the camp were of hewn stone, slanting in the dim predawn and following the undulations of the ground beneath as if grown out of that very earth. She surveyed the grounds briefly: the layout of the camp was near identical to the one where she’d trained, and the headquarters were at the head of the bare quadrangle, a surly grey figure nestled atop a swell of land with its back to the grey Dunkirk sea.
She wrestled with sea wind as she marched up the grounds, eyes stinging, and thought the brooding morning grey could almost have been Fairford, were it not so blustery. But this is not Fairford; this is France.
She was glad to come into the lee of the building, and even gladder when the door opened without a clatter. She invited herself inside and peered about. The tiny lobby was empty, except for the smell of untouched concrete; a corridor turned right from the entrance.
Only two doors stood along its length: she knew the office door was the nearer one. On it she knocked thrice, then awaited invitation. Here in the army, one always waited for orders. The people above were the ones with the intelligence, the ones who knew if you were charging straight into your doom. The ones down here, where she was—they were pins on a map. Pieces on a big black board.
Vesper stared at the edge of the wall, where the dark wood met concrete. She liked to flatter herself with the idea that she was not merely a piece. That perhaps her skill—her efficiency—gave her some significance to the men at the top of the chain. God knew, they might have noticed that she occasionally immobilised more enemy soldiers than did the rest of her company combined.
But really, she was as special as any other soldier of her rank, wasn’t she? That she’d been left defending Dunkirk, this long way behind the Front, was proof of that sentiment. No more than a piece, passing beneath hands.
Not that that mattered. Not really.
“Come in?” The lilt of the question through the door accompanied another pang shooting between her ears. She winced as she took the doorknob and entered. Lieutenant Colonel Clarke blinked. “Oh, Captain Lovelace. Just the person I wanted to see. And you look terrible, if I may add.”
“Good morning, sir, I might need an aspirin, if you don’t mind,” she answered. An unwholesome pain had wrapped itself about her head. “These haven’t been the best of days.”
The colonel began arranging his files and books. A rifle round rolled halfway across his map. It pointed at the southern tip of Italy. “Why?” The man picked it up and stood it on its end with a metallic chink. From his left palm he produced a brown medicinal bottle and pushed it across the tabletop. “You did a good job last night.”
Vesper was quite sure this was no joke, he being LTC Aldrich Clarke and not another goof like Thomas Hart. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “If you will excuse me for saying so, I consider last night a failure on my part. Which brings me to my reason for approaching you—I believe it is time I get posted elsewhere. I couldn’t harm the tanks before the storm.” She touched the table’s edge. “They installed some form of insulation. And you can bet your badge that by next week they’ll be waterproofed as well.”
To her surprise he smiled, and propped his chin up on his right elbow, much the way schoolboys did to stop themselves yawning. “Oh, then they’ll be insulated wherever you go, won’t they?” he said. “Never mind last night, the battle was won.”
“It’d have been lost if not for the storm.”
“Yes, and you still took a tenth of their tanks.”
“I was completely useless before then.”
He sighed, tilting forward so his shadow blurred across his map. “Do you think yourself so crucial to my battalion?” he inquired, uncapping his flask.
Recognising the weight hanging upon that question, Vesper shifted on her feet as water rang on the bottom of Clarke’s drinking glass. “I’d say I lend it some weight, sir,” she answered finally.
The colonel sniggered inwardly. “That you do,” he said amidst the last traces of his laugh. “But you seem to think it your responsibility to lead us into every battle, or that you are to blame for my company’s every failure. My company’s.” Another chuckle. His whiskers, paled by age, rippled with the laugh. “Give the rest of the men some credit for their training, won’t you? We’re not helpless without you, and not every failure is your liability alone.”
“Yes, sir. I will. But the matter remains. I’m obsolete to the army as long as the tanks are insulated.”
“Oh, then we’ll develop something to counter their development! War is a competition of technology as much as it is of strategy. We have military researchers for that, and last I heard, they’re profoundly enjoying the challenge you pose. A bit of variety, they say.”
Smiling earnestly, he lifted the drinking glass, filled to the brim with water. She took it, and scooped the bottle of tablets off, unscrewing it with her thumb and index. She fished a tablet out with a finger; it dropped and rolled across the colonel’s papers. She snatched for it. A paperclip shot her hand. “I’m sorry,” she muttered and dissipated the currents in her hand; the paperclip dropped like a dead insect. Clarke laughed.
“You really are an oddity,” he murmured as she downed two bitter tablets. “And I don’t mean it in a completely benign sense either. If it weren’t for the war, you’d be of great interest to biologists. They’d like to pick every secret of your ability apart. But war machine is better than experimental subject, isn’t it?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I serve in whatever way I best may,” she said, “and if this is the better way at this time, then it is the one I prefer.” It wasn’t a lie. Though maybe she wouldn’t be professing such blind loyalty when she was strapped to the operating table.
“Don’t fool yourself. You’re a natural on the field.” Clarke breathed a sigh. “But this begs another question. You know you’ll be a public threat once the war is over, don’t you? That there are fears that you will use your powers to best law enforcement and even…seize power?”
“Me? I’d never.” I am the King’s. I am England’s.
He steepled his fingers. “Your prowess on the field is only telling of what you’d be capable of in a civil environment, and believe me, it is not reassuring. Most war machines can be locked away. You pose an ethical dilemma.” He sighed. “But that for another time—”
“We’re all pieces. We’re no more important than each other, to Prime Minister Churchill, to Field Marshal Alexander.”
“Pieces? Oh, no. Perhaps you are but a piece to Churchill. But the Nazis certainly don’t think so. Why else would they have upgraded their tanks for you?” He lifted his head. “Do you know what the machine gun did for World War One? It changed the course of warfare. The trenches were blood fests. The war became a bitter race of technology. You aren’t the machine gun exactly, but you’ve thrown them a challenge they’re having a hard time responding to.”
Vesper frowned. “Then why am I here, defending this dingy outpost in France?” she asked. “With all due respect, sir.”
A change came to his face that was at the same time heartening and terrifying. His eyes were wide and his smile unnerving.
“That brings me to the reason I wanted to see you,“ replied the Lieutenant Colonel. ”Do you know when Dunkirk became ours? This slice of land was captured from France by Henry the Sixth, centuries ago.” He paused. “What most don’t know is that this dingy outpost was taken—and has been defended—for a reason outside war and politics. Scientists suspect it of possessing certain qualities that we intend to look into after war has ended.”
“We?” she asked, straightening.
He smiled. “I suppose I did have vested interest in this area,” he answered. “We all have our lives outside the war.”
“I was no one.”
“And so was I. Or rather, we were.” Clarke’s inward chuckle came again. “No one will believe strange claims like ours. In our proposal we said we were certain there are tunnels between worlds. Know what their answer was? The entire council laughed. Laughed a good five minutes, then had my colleague and I chucked out of the lab for good.”
“I see.”
He gazed off pensively at the door in the right wall, likely leading to the bedroom. “Nevertheless, I am lucky to have convinced some higher-ups to take their chances with my well-evidenced conjectures. And you, Vesper, are here defending Dunkirk because it holds secrets. Secrets more crucial than this little tiff over territory. We need it safe. The Allies could lose, but this land must remain ours.” Again the colonel fixed his eyes on hers. “You understand now why you’ve been posted here?”
“I’m guarding something I don’t understand.”
“The sooner the war ends, the sooner you will understand.” Then he had found some papers to busy himself with, and Vesper was left watching the rapid back-forth of his pen, wondering how she should excuse herself.
She cleared her throat. “Thank you, Sir,” she said. The ache clawed at her skull. “I will leave.”
Lieutenant Colonel Clarke nodded at his papers. “Go have yourself a good rest,” he said. “You did well last night.”
:::
Instead of returning immediately to the quadrangle—there was half an hour before any business of import—Vesper decided on a detour. She rounded the perimeter of the shack, crossed the bumps of a few rocks where the sparse grass blades broke up and sand took their place. Her eyes swept the grey expanse where it faded into the ocean, at a line that rose and frothed white and receded, at the span of battered fence that slanted three metres beyond the tide. In the lull of each wave, she breathed.
Vesper only went as far as the tide line. Rocks and shells rolled aside at the tips of her grimy boots, seaweed squelching. Her soles grew damp. Looked like she’d have to leave them out tonight; good leather had a habit of spoiling in moisture.
After a short survey of the coastline, she made for a tall rock that gazed out over the ocean, sunken in the sand. In the dawn it looked like a curled-up man.
Vesper knew more than enough about scaling rock walls. She scanned the little rocky rise for footholds, then picked her way to the top, three metres from the ground but dizzying enough. There she gazed up into the sky, imagined the shadows of the Luftwaffe buzzing by, specks of bombs sinking through the cloud layers. She imagined smoke blooming upon this very beach.
It’d been in the news, the Dunkirk Evacuation, the television glaring grey footage of the carnage into the room where she’d once played. Nine years ago. Almost half her life ago. Half my life has been war.
She wondered upon that miracle, when three hundred thousand soldiers had been spared by misjudgment and chance. What if the Nazis had made a slightly different judgment of the situation? What if he had called a full attack? Just like sorcerers, the men at the top. One flick of a finger and the world was dead.
I do not think it is easy, being the one to whom others pledge allegiance.
A throat was cleared nearby.
“Good morning, knave,” said a voice, feminine and neutral.
Vesper started. Something about the voice was unbearably odd. Aside from the fact that there should be no other females at this camp…
“Who’s there?” she called back, and dragged herself to her knees—rapidly unwinding her chain from about her waist and shuffling over to the back edge of the rock, crouching close.
When she peered past the rock, she almost let her chain fall from her grip. There at the bottom, half-lost in shadow, stood a girl—barely twelve by her looks, blue-gowned, and huddled inside a hooded grey cloak almost too large for her.
Don’t trust homeless waifs you meet by the sea, the thought crossed her. Too many stories began this way.
Still holding her chain at ready, she let herself inspect the apparition. The hands that clutched at her cloak were pale and slender. Light hair pricked out from beneath her hood.
Without warning the girl looked up, and their gazes caught hold of each others’. Her gimlet grey eyes glittered from beneath the shadow of the hood and her gaze seemed to skewer Vesper’s thoughts straight through.
Then she saw movement up ahead, and glanced up beyond her. The girl’s eyes followed. Another person was approaching from some far part of the beach, red robes swaying beneath a cloak that might have looked more at home a millennium ago.
Bright alarm filled her. “Who are you?“ Vesper shouted, swinging her feet over the edge of the rock and hurrying down its face; even then those great grey eyes followed her unfazed, like a scavenger’s. “Identify yourselves! What business have you here?”
“And why should I disclose any information to you?”
“Because, ma’am, you are trespassing on a camp of the British Army.”
The man had arrived beside the girl by then, long brown hair waving in the wind. Seeming completely heedless to Vesper’s words, he offered up what looked like a charred crab to the girl, who refused it with a curt “later”.
“We are not spies,” she resumed tonelessly, turning back to Vesper. “But did you state that this is an army camp? Is there a war in progress?”
“Don’t you see the planes about? Are you hermits?” They couldn’t be hermits. At least the girl couldn’t be. Not with a dress that glittered the way it did.
“You misunderstand.”
It was the man who spoke this time; his voice was peculiar. A gleam of light peeked from beneath the folds of the man’s robes.
Armour? Surely they aren’t performers–
Narrowing her eyes, Vesper pointed her hook at them. “What do I misunderstand?” she shouted. “Why are you here in the camp?”
“There is too much to explain,“ said the man, "could we secure lodging nearby?”
“Camps are out of bounds to all but military personnel,” she persisted. “Clarify your cause. What are you doing here?”
“We require rest immediately. We only just arrived. The journey through the tunnel has left us without a drop’s nourishment.”
“Tunnel? There are no tunnels here. Tell me, where from?”
“Is this the world of Alice Liddell?”
“Stop it with your gibberish.”
“Was this world founded by magic?”
“You have ten seconds.” She released a surge of electrons through her fingers so they sparked and crackled. “Tell me who you are.”
The man glanced at his liege. “I thought not,” he muttered, and his hand flew to his belt, where hung a scabbard glittering with gems both red and pale.
Vesper gripped the hook tighter, preparing to fling it. Who first, the girl or the man?
"You imbecile!” yelled the girl all of a sudden. “Take us to find lodging at once!”
“I don’t take orders from spies!” Vesper said.
“Then let us settle this honourably,” answered the man, eyes flaring.
Morning was rising; it stained the sand pink. There was some of last night’s storm left in her. She felt the electricity race to her hand, tingly as hot sand.
With a snarl, she flung the chain.
The hook snagged the man’s cloak before he’d drawn. Vesper tugged so it dug through the cloth and bit his armour. The girl yelled. The man’s eyes widened.
As the first shock travelled through the taut links, he stiffened like a corpse, eyes wide. Again the girl shouted, something like “stop”—and Vesper thought she heard the rasp of tears in her voice—then for seconds she wondered how a twelve-year-old could be a spy.
An immense coldness came to seize her from nowhere, like a bitter winter wind. Her fingers ached and grew numb. She shivered, teeth chattering against each other. What—
It was the chain. The chain—frost was crystallising on the chain. Gasping, she uncurled her fingers and let it drop, shivering the deathly cold away.
“Don’t you understand? We’re not of this world!” shouted the man amid her daze, eyes narrowing as he dislodged the hook from his shoulder, dazed but lucid enough.
Vesper clenched her teeth. “I’ll believe you when you can prove it.” That sudden—cold. Was that proof? No one in this world could do anything like that. No one else.
The girl snarled. “I’d have you arrested for your insolence.”
“Arrested? And this is not your country.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You attempted to murder my protector, did you not? That ought to be punishable in any land! Unless, of course, you are so uncivilised a people.”
“The way the world has been the last ten years, it’s hard to say,” answered Vesper.
A moment’s harsh silence proceeded. Then the girl smiled, almost kindly. “Do you still want your proof?” she whispered.
“Proof? Do you think I’ll ever believe your tale?”
“Believe this,” she answered, and with a fiery crackle a swoop of flame consumed her.
Vesper blinked at the space that the girl had once occupied, now empty. Then she noticed the card that rested upon the sand, where her footprints lay. She bowed to pick it up. The Ace of Diamonds. She flipped it over. The girl’s face stared back, wreathed in red curlicues outlined in black.
“Impossible,” muttered the captain.
“Quite possible,” answered the face on the card.
And that was about when Vesper realised what precisely was so strange about her voice. She’d never heard that accent before. Anywhere. Not in this world.
A swirl of hot red erupted from her hand, and recreated the girl on the sand ten centimetres from her. “You—have yet to clarify your cause,” said Vesper blankly. It was like a gale had ransacked the shelves of her mind and thrown the thoughts everywhere. Was she going mad? How should a soldier respond to these revelations? “What—business do you have here in Dunkirk?”
The man lowered himself to his knees, picking her chain up off the floor; he inspected it like a bloodied knife before rising. When he turned to her again to return the tool, she no longer found his gaze so serene.
We’re the glories of chaos and cycles. Not the circular cycles of machines and stars but sinusoidal cycles—sleep cycles, mood swings, the migrations of swallows, spread over an axis of time. People like to talk about circles, but I like to think sine waves are more interesting.
Just like we aren't exactly the same people everyday, or choose the same routes between buildings, the sinusoidal wave does not retrace coordinates on a Cartesian graph. Popular culture is sinusoidal. You know how things get less exciting the longer we’ve known them? How trends fall out of favour?
When something amazing comes into being, it is sparkly and riveting. And suddenly it’s everywhere; writers are referencing them in their magazine articles, catching the crest of the wave. It’s in textbooks and in throwaway symbology on CD covers and in presidential inauguration speeches, and we acclimatise. In a year or two it no longer seems so, you know, novel. And it ages, and it all piles up, until we have ourselves nothing but an artifact of a past incarnation of pop-culture, caked in the dirt of irredeemable blandness.
It doesn't always stay that way. Sometimes, there comes a point when we haven’t seen the thing for so long that we begin to ask ourselves, “hey, where’d this go?”—and then the thing in the fossil suddenly becomes it again. Flip through a shopper’s almanac, if you don’t understand yet. The shop facades stand on Doric pillars. The newest mall that opened downtown is named the Hanging Gardens. Ancient Mesopotamian salads just became it with the restaurant chains and now I hear they’re opening theme restaurants in the aforementioned Hanging Gardens.
One such thousand-year-long cycle is responsible for who I know myself to be. Lately, the oldest mouldiest names have been climbing out of their coffins, and this is the reason my name is Adelaide Moore.
As far as I’ve read, all the famous Adelaides lived in the 1000s. Duchesses, abbesses, opera personae. Apparently, too, I share my name with a city in South Australia much younger than those operas, a city I know I’ll never visit. I wonder if the air there is colder than it is up here in San Francisco, and if my old friends would tell me more about Adelaide, if they could visit me.
But they cannot visit me, and I’ve come to accept that. There has been no one here for years and years. Save that balding, bespectacled face that sometimes ghosts by the only window of my home.
My home. That would be an average L-shaped penthouse apartment to any of my old friends—flat brown terrazzo floors, concrete walls painted an agreeable green, and that one dark little trilayer glass window facing my acrylic-synthetic cotton sofa, barely large enough for a head.
Underneath that window is a sliding panel, painted like the walls, and streaked with friction marks. It slides away so the wall can spit food at me when I’m hungry. There was a period when it disagreed with my biological clock, but I guess my clock synchronized itself with it eventually. Now the first hunger pang is as good as an alarm for the arrival of lunch, which is always some sort of pulpy mess, or pellets.
My bed sits in the other arm of the L, all synthetic cotton with metal bedposts. There is a fake plastic Boston fern on the dresser; it’s an insipid green, not anything like the one in The Pteridophyte Field Guide. That one basks lush and glorious in a world that isn’t abashed to acknowledge it, its insect-nibbled pinnae glowing with exaltation to the sun.
Noticed something? Terrazzo, concrete, glass, acrylic, syncotton. No wood, no hide, no organic wool.
My shelves, like many shelves I saw in the life I had before, are laden with books. They smell like the factories where the pulp was rolled and cut and dried: books about the old civilisations and Hanging Gardens no longer existent, about settlements that clustered around rivers and grew towards the sea, about Romans crying death in smoky arenas and ships launched between continents and the two wars that thrust America to the place where it is. There are stories about the role of silk in advancing China and the big hoary photos of the caterpillars that make it.
Caterpillars have a special place in my heart. They’re the reason. I did something to a caterpillar once, and now I’m never going to see another living creature in my life.
Here, my only means of correspondence with the world outside is a glowing touchscreen rectangle. In it there is a digital catalogue of all books I’m allowed to own. Should I want one, all I have to do is write its name on the sticky note that comes with my meals. I’ll have it by dinner.
I like my books very much, they’re all about technology and biology and Ancient Greek schools of thought. But those books sometimes reference yet other kinds of books, the kind they call “fiction”, and the insets aren’t too descriptive but I think none of my books are “fiction”, nor are any in the catalogue.
Sometimes the word “fiction” haunts me when my eyelids weigh and I slip myself under the blanket and the lights go out on cue. I realise it inhabits a hollow in my mind, and that something outside must fill it, something I feel a flash of wanting for.
Then I think that maybe what I really want is something that book covers cannot hold between them, something that this little L-shaped penthouse apartment can’t afford me.
See, I am dangerous. I changed a caterpillar and now they can’t let me change anything else.
--Yet caterpillars change by themselves, don’t they? Without me to change them, don’t they?
Sometimes, when the dark is a little less dim, when my pupils dilate and that far trilayer window begins to glow dull blue from outside, I wonder about people. I think about old civilisations, Romans pressing screams out of sinners, ships stringing routes across the Atlantic, and silkworm caterpillars, boiled before they’ve sprung from their cocoons.
That's when I know that I need it. Something to do with people who don’t exist. The Greeks and their theatres. Celestial bodies. Artemis and Apollo chiseled from marble blocks. Something to do with “fiction”.
I sleep, and by the next morning it no longer matters. But the chaos continues to thunder within me.
299,792,458
A new book popped up in my catalogue today. The words “Ultra Limited Stock!” popped up in red beside it. I was curious because “Ultra Limited Stock!” books don’t appear all too often, so that’s the title I wrote on the sticky note at breakfast.
299,792,458 arrived with my dinner. I abandoned the brown puree for a riffle through the beautiful new volume. Skimming the content and revelling the terminology and diagrams peppering the pages, I breathed the press perfume soaked into its pages, and then my fingers froze—
—as they found the ragged leaf-end jutting from the gap in its spine.
Narcissus jonquilla. I knew it before I’d pulled it out; I knew it from its cells. I knew it though I was ice numb. There were jonquils by our flagstone driveway, long ago when I lived with the mother who named me Adelaide and the father who surnamed me Moore. The breezes liked the jonquils, yellow as sun. The Ancient Greeks had a sort of false explanation for how the flowers came to be—a boy at water’s edge, in love with himself. I’d know it anywhere.
The living green of chlorophyll, here, in my room. It’s something the printers could never capture.
But that’s not what is most precious about my jonquil leaf, I soon discover.
I turn it over, and scrawled across the blade, in strange wavering loops of unprinted ink, are the words:
“Do you think the planes of space are shifting?“
Epinephrine makes my heartbeat roar. My dinner is untouched.
A map of the universes on the Revolving Door, for my recent writing project of the same name. Positions indicate in what order they lie and where travel is possible. All drawn in SAI except the circle which was created in Fireworks.
The universes:
Black: Wonderland, Orobelle and Dorian's universe. She lives in the Kingdom of Cards though there's probably other kingdoms hanging around e.g. the one based on chess.
Red: Hot world, universe of a yet-unnamed Traveller; its existence is known to the people of Wonderland. Lots of volcanos and tectonic activity there.
Yellow green: Uninhabited/Prehistoric world, totally uninhabited by humans. I'm thinking it's pretty early, before the rise of dinosaurs.
Dark green: WWII world, Vesper's universe, where the Axis and Allies are evenly matched, unlike in our world. Because of that and the nuclear bomb not being invented, WWII does not end in 1945.
Purple: Our world, Hong Yi's universe..
White: Roman Empire world, Marcia's universe, in which the Roman Empire survived 700 years beyond its original lifespan on our world due to the existence of magic which has been kept strictly within the royal family's bloodline.
Grey/Dirty yellow: Post-Nuclear Apocalypse world, Artur's universe, a future in which peace talks failed and two-thirds of the world population was wiped out by nuclear war and majority of land made unliveable.
Yellow: Victorian-Edwardian world, Felix's universe. In which military development has been shed in favour of transport development as the key to economic--and consequently world--domination.
Dull blue: 2060, Adelaide's universe, a future in which technology development has proceeded exponentially; the latest trend in design involves the drawing of inspiration from ancient civilisations.
Orange and pink: Twin worlds, two near-identical universes containing similar people and very, very slight differences. The Traveller Pala Winstead (new character) belongs to one of the two.
VIvid blue: Weather Worship World, Liss (new character)'s universe, in which land has been fragmented into hundreds of thousands of separate pieces, and weather can be violent and unpredictable, hence almost-universal weather god worship here.
There are numerous stable passageways between Wonderland, the Hot world and the Prehistoric world, and the people of Wonderland have come to assume that only three universes exist. The rest of the universes do not know that they are not alone.
This year during Camp NaNoWriMo, writers of all sorts are sharing what they love to pen, and why you should join them. Today, Sheridan Jobbins, screenwriter of Easy Virtue, tells us why the only thing you absolutely have to do is write what you know:
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
kaledo-art
dededos
janainaart
discoholicmusic
prguitarman
areudirty
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