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rainbowfic2012-03-30 05:08 pm
settecorvi) wrote in rainbowfic2012-03-30 05:08 pm
Tyrian Purple #7, Alice Blue #21
Name: Chel
Story: Demiurge, The Bonetrain to Pandemonium
Colors: Tyrian Purple #7 (three seeds), Alice Blue #21 (today isn’t any other day, you know)
Supplies and Styles: Brush (atavism), oils (dream a little dream), pastels (logic)
Wordcount: 2,735
Summary: It turns out that using an extradimensional predator’s skeleton for public transportation is occasionally hazardous to health and sanity.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Reference to imagined self-harm
Notes: Criticism is deeply appreciated! What didn’t work for you, or could be improved? Mods, may I please get tags?
Naveed slips into her mental architecture as soon as she’s settled comfortably in her seat. The bonetrain to Pandemonium takes a radian on a good day, two if the conductor is cautious or the train skittish, and the novelty of riding between the worlds has long since faded. So she performs the mental twist that feels something like a dive and something like a sneeze, and exchanges the train compartment for her embodied mind. The windswept cavern of her antechamber unfurls around her, golden in the light of an eternal and internal afternoon.
The nearest tunnel – the one closest to the surface of her thoughts – leads to her patient files. Its walls breathe a dim coolness that hits her face like a slap after the sunlight as she steps inside. A short walk down it brings her to the portcullis, a knot of verdigrised vines that twine back from her touch with the rasp of metal on metal to let her in.
The closeness of the corridor drops away, the space more felt than seen for a breath until light flickers to life with the crackle of electricity. Overhead, a myriad of hollow glass globes hang suspended from the ceiling like strange fruit. Her presence kindles light in the one above her, which leaps to its neighbors, and from them to theirs in a wave of illumination washing ahead of her as she enters. The susurrus of their slight swaying accompanies her quiet footsteps. Unlike a physical cave this vast, her steps sound no louder than they had in the tunnel. She didn’t like the thought of her every movement magnified and echoed back at her, so she’s done away with it here.
A glance at the schedule pinned to the entrance, carefully transcribed from the physical copy, confirms that Daine del Ciresque is her first patient of the day. That leads her to the other end of the vaulting chamber, past a forest of pillars hung with paintings or carved with quotations, a replica of the Rose Fountain, a Kathkadir rug woven in an eye-mazing pattern of red and blue, and all of the other linchpins she’s used to anchor her notes.
Daine’s are bound to a match.
She takes it from its alcove, pulls a handful of memories together into a comfortable cushion, and sits with her back to the cave’s collection. The match weighs heavily in her cupped hands, for what it looks like. Memories compressed so tightly always have heft. She flicks the mental latch holding them in, and its contents expand in a giddy whirl of color to hover around her. A mosaic of palm-sized pictures curves around her right side, windows into memories of past interviews if she wants to relive them, each focused on Daine’s face and neatly dated in one corner. A sheaf of notes fan out to her left. The top sheet is her revised treatment plan based on last week’s session, and at a tap of her fingers it drifts down to float in front of her. She weaves a construct of her favorite writing desk with the ease of long practice from memories of the slide of smooth wood under her hands, the faint scent of cedar, the broken curlicue from where she’d banged it into a wall.
At a distance, she feels the bonetrain pulling out from the station, followed by the vertiginous lurch as it leaves the Elarion worldstrand. Cradled in the quiet of her mind, she settles into a sihara’s work.
***
The anxiety comes to her as the taste of tin on her tongue, filtering through her concentration so subtly she can’t pinpoint the moment it passes from background noise to an irritation too intrusive to ignore. A quick ping to the delicate, usually subconscious filaments that connect her to the physical world even in the depths of her architecture confirms that there is now one other person near her. Someone so frightened that it’s reached through not only her architecture, but a layer of memory.
She surfaces from the replay of a session two months ago with a blink, and the memory collapses back into its frame to resume its place in the collection. Without the buffer, the metallic tang swells until she nearly gags on it. She folds the files into their linchpin hastily. Layers upon layers of memory and notes wrap upon each other with all the precision of origami. The match goes back into its alcove, and she hurries out of her mind.
Space is not compressible within mental architecture any more than in the physical; or rather, you can, but you shouldn’t. Change the dimensions of your mind without due preparation and watch it crumble. Her mental avatar is more fluid, especially within her own realm. She lets her stride lengthen past what her physical legs could ever manage with the sort of practiced inattention that sihara get very good at, goes from shadowed tunnel to sunlight so intense it’s as much pressure as brightness, even as she rises—
—to open her eyes on the train compartment, now containing one very sweaty young man on the opposite seat. His corona of surface thoughts takes the form of sparks, a whirl of glowing motes that dance around his body. Fear has dulled them to guttering grey embers and set them swirling in a frenzied cloud that fills the compartment like faintly luminescent ash. This close, the taste of tin lies sharp in her mouth. Saliva pools thickly on her tongue. No matter how assiduously you train, it’s difficult to convince the body that a thought’s flavor can’t be swallowed down.
“Is this your first time on the bonetrain?” She makes her voice quiet and gentle, but he still starts sharply.
He wrenches his eyes from the window to offer her a sickly attempt at a smile. He’s daen, so it involves two rows of sharp teeth, but Kaadi has accustomed her to serrated grins.
“That obvious, is it?”
His hands are clenched white-knuckled on the armrests, and fluffs of stuffing leak through the holes his claws have torn in the upholstery. Sweat sheens his forehead and has reduced his careful chignon to a frizzy mess. Every time the taste of metal starts to fade from her mouth, a new spark hits her, and it returns with the edge of an anxiety not her own.
“I spent my first ride looking exactly like that.” She offers him a conspiratorial grin and leans forward with her elbows on her knees. It’s open, informal body language, and it brings her into range of more of his thoughts than the fear he’s shooting off like fireworks.
Her admission, her posture, or some combination thereof makes him relax fractionally and focus more on her than the view.
“I’m Naveed,” she says, and offers her hand in the Lianese way. “I’m a sihara.”
He clasps her hand wrist-to-wrist, pulse-to-pulse, and his architecture shimmers into view like a mirage, around his head without obscuring it. It’s as though there is suddenly more space unfolding about him in a disregard for dimensions designed to produce headaches if you think about it too much. His mind is built of pale stone in the clean, curving lines the Lianese favor. The arch above the double doors displays the Questant armed and armored; it is otherwise bare of ornamentation. They wouldn’t carve She Who Strives over a private residence, and since she’s not portrayed with a book or telescope, it’s not a research institute. A detective’s office, perhaps, or a guardhouse.
He must love his job, for his mind to settle into its shape rather than his home’s.
“Aide Morille del Sadine,” he’s saying. Then, “Sihara? That sounds Aesir.” Amber curiosity flames through his corona as it curls a tendril towards her. His interest tastes like oranges.
“Quite correct. Think of it as a therapist who can mindwalk,” she tells him.
He draws back at the word mindwalk, and sour-milk dismay edged with tin fills her mouth.
“It also means that I’m very nosy.” Her self-deprecating smile invites him to reciprocate, but the one he offers her in return is thin. He remembers to keep his lips closed this time, so he must be used to working with humans. He remains poised and wary, and it is more than time to steer the conversation to less fraught topics.
“What brings you to Pandemonium?” she asks, and the sourness fairly curdles on her tongue.
“Accounting work.” He gestures at his briefcase. “Boring stuff, if you don’t have an unhealthy interest in numbers and the adding thereof.”
He’s an excellent liar. She can see nothing in his face to give it away, hear nothing in his voice. But his corona contracts into a thin ring of mustard yellow that drones “Twelve times one is twelve, twelve time two is twenty-four, twelve times three is…”
“It doesn’t sound very interesting,” she assures him. She can barely hear herself over the sound of him avoiding the thought of whatever business he’s really about.
He doesn’t do anything so obvious as relax, just nods and continues to do his multiplication very loudly.
“You must be quite devoted to your work, to take the bonetrain when it frightens you so,” she adds.
Sky blue relief rushes through his corona, mixed with flecks of grey, and it relaxes from compact ring to a broader spiral. Better fear than giving away his assignment, apparently. He leaps onto her redirection with gratifying alacrity.
“It’s not the bonetrain, per se. I am absolutely fine with reanimating the skeleton of an extradimensional predator and riding it like a pony. I am even comfortable sitting inside it, it’s not like the thing has a digestive system anymore. What makes me want to crawl out of my skin, not to put too fine a point on it, is taking said beastie for a jaunt between the worlds.”
He stops to take a breath and glances sidelong out the window set between two of the train’s ribs. The space beyond is black, not dark but empty in a way that drives home how vibrant and vital the night sky is. The worldstrands cut through the void in stark lines that do nothing to illuminate it, silver-white and gold and lapis lazuli, gleaming windows back into reality. They form a tangled web that would shame any spider, kissing and parting at strange angles, passing through each other or running parallel with no discernable pattern. Keener minds than hers have tried and failed to find one. They exist on a scale that beggars the imagination and boggles the eye. This close, the Moraine strand the train skims along is so wide that it forms its own foreshortened horizon. Their compartment seems a tiny, fragile bubble of warmth and life surrounded by the vastness of the worlds and the spaces between.
There’s something almost freeing about it.
“Who in all the worlds looks at a snake big enough to a make a meal of an elephant and thinks, ‘You know what? That’d make great public transportation,’” Aide demands of the universe.
The universe not looking likely to answer, she takes it upon herself.
“I suppose it takes a special sort of logic. They must have decided that if it could survive the void between the worlds in life, its skeleton could remember how.”
“Great plan. Let’s remind the thing of life, then take it back home and trust it not to get any ideas about being too alive.
“Do you even know the statistics on feral bonetrains?” he asks softly
“Yes,” she says. “It’s comparable to death by overland travel.”
His corona fuzzes into disarray in surprise at the sound of her voice, then steadies back into a stable orbit.
“One in every hundred bonetrains will reawaken and attempt to leave the worldnet,” he recites, as though she hadn’t spoken. He’s talking to the voice of his fear, not to her, and all the color has seeped from his sparks.
“They’ve lost two this month alone.”
She reaches out and touches the back of his hand to draw his attention to her, away from the scene playing out behind his eyes. She catches a snatch of it – tumbling into darkness with sickening speed, panicky scream building in his throat, the mindwalker clawing bloody grooves in her cheeks as alien thoughts core out her mind like an apple – choked with the taste of tin and the fresh snowmelt of a terror so deep it freezes the tongue and leaves no room for words.
“Aide, I have ridden the bonetrain every week for three years, and not once have I felt it so much as stir.”
He huffs out something between a laugh and a snort.
“That just means the odds are less on your side with every trip.” Moreso now than ever, she catches, and files it away under ‘Ominous Statements’ for later consideration.
“I don’t think statistics work that way,” she points out. “One in every hundred might wake up, but I’ve read the same books as you, and fifty-six times out of that hundred, the conductor can soothe the train back to sleep before the passengers know there’s been any malfunction. You can’t turn fear off like a faucet, but reminding yourself of the facts every time that little voice starts—”
“It’s the facts that have me worried. This isn’t some irrational phobia.”
He places a hand flat-palmed against the glass separating them from the void.
“It’s far more perverse to not be afraid of it,” he says softly. “How does everyone else on this train blithely ignore the fact that the only thing stopping us from spinning off into nothingness is just how well a stranger can tweak the long-dead pathways in a monster’s cranium? You only have to look out the window for a reminder.”
She looks. You always notice the negative space between the worlds before the strands themselves. The eye tries to find something in the depths to latch onto, until it dreams up vague shapes and suggestions of movement that disappear with a blink. It would be so easy to tumble between the worldstrands into the blackness beyond, until the worldnet is no more than a cat’s cradle beneath them. The idea is exhilarating. It bubbles up in her like the giddy urge to jump when peering from a high ledge, like the start of an adventure, like rising towards wakefulness after lying too long asleep.
It doesn’t feel like something she would think.
She grabs for the thought and catches the tip of its tail with her mental fingers as it tries to slip away; it writhes in her grasp and twists on itself to sink needlelike teeth into the webbing between thumb and forefinger of her avatar. Her hand goes numb and shreds into nothingness. She snatches at the intruder with her remaining hand, makes an involuntary grabbing motion with its physical counterpart. The thought feels scaled and slithery and colder than ice, it feels serpentine, and she realizes its origin at the exact moment the train jolts to a halt.
They sit frozen and breathless for a beat, not quite daring to ask, “Is that the end of it?” Their hands have found each other across the narrow space between their chairs. Then the train jerks sharply downwards, stills, and bucks again before Naveed can recover her equilibrium. The conductor is trying to guide it into the Moraine strand below them before it can go tearing off into the void, and that the train is already too awake to let itself be steered is ominous. Aide keens a guttural, almost metallic rasp that could never come from a human throat. The quiet moan of plating stressed to the breaking point echoes him. The lights flicker off overhead, leaving them illuminated only by the cold, faint glow of the worldstrands.
“You had to say it,” Aide sighs. He sounds more resigned than frightened, as though the arrival of disaster has obviated the need to fear it. “You just had to say nothing was going to happen, which means that by the laws of nature, the gods, and narrative, something had to go terribly wrong. Now we’re going to be in the forty-four percent. I hope you’re really happy, and… hey! Where’re you going?”
She’s halfway down the hall before his longer legs catch him up to her.
“I felt its thoughts,” she tells him distractedly.
“So?”
“If I felt its thoughts, then it has a mind.”
Frightened faces peer out at them from the other compartments. She can feel the threads of the bonetrain’s stirring thoughts slipping through their coronas like a cold current.
“If it has a mind, I can walk it.”
She rifles through her mental arsenal without slowing, pulls up every scrap of information in her halls on bonetrains, on animal architecture, on the undead.
“And maybe, just maybe, I can stop the train from going feral and taking all of us with it.”
Story: Demiurge, The Bonetrain to Pandemonium
Colors: Tyrian Purple #7 (three seeds), Alice Blue #21 (today isn’t any other day, you know)
Supplies and Styles: Brush (atavism), oils (dream a little dream), pastels (logic)
Wordcount: 2,735
Summary: It turns out that using an extradimensional predator’s skeleton for public transportation is occasionally hazardous to health and sanity.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Reference to imagined self-harm
Notes: Criticism is deeply appreciated! What didn’t work for you, or could be improved? Mods, may I please get tags?
Naveed slips into her mental architecture as soon as she’s settled comfortably in her seat. The bonetrain to Pandemonium takes a radian on a good day, two if the conductor is cautious or the train skittish, and the novelty of riding between the worlds has long since faded. So she performs the mental twist that feels something like a dive and something like a sneeze, and exchanges the train compartment for her embodied mind. The windswept cavern of her antechamber unfurls around her, golden in the light of an eternal and internal afternoon.
The nearest tunnel – the one closest to the surface of her thoughts – leads to her patient files. Its walls breathe a dim coolness that hits her face like a slap after the sunlight as she steps inside. A short walk down it brings her to the portcullis, a knot of verdigrised vines that twine back from her touch with the rasp of metal on metal to let her in.
The closeness of the corridor drops away, the space more felt than seen for a breath until light flickers to life with the crackle of electricity. Overhead, a myriad of hollow glass globes hang suspended from the ceiling like strange fruit. Her presence kindles light in the one above her, which leaps to its neighbors, and from them to theirs in a wave of illumination washing ahead of her as she enters. The susurrus of their slight swaying accompanies her quiet footsteps. Unlike a physical cave this vast, her steps sound no louder than they had in the tunnel. She didn’t like the thought of her every movement magnified and echoed back at her, so she’s done away with it here.
A glance at the schedule pinned to the entrance, carefully transcribed from the physical copy, confirms that Daine del Ciresque is her first patient of the day. That leads her to the other end of the vaulting chamber, past a forest of pillars hung with paintings or carved with quotations, a replica of the Rose Fountain, a Kathkadir rug woven in an eye-mazing pattern of red and blue, and all of the other linchpins she’s used to anchor her notes.
Daine’s are bound to a match.
She takes it from its alcove, pulls a handful of memories together into a comfortable cushion, and sits with her back to the cave’s collection. The match weighs heavily in her cupped hands, for what it looks like. Memories compressed so tightly always have heft. She flicks the mental latch holding them in, and its contents expand in a giddy whirl of color to hover around her. A mosaic of palm-sized pictures curves around her right side, windows into memories of past interviews if she wants to relive them, each focused on Daine’s face and neatly dated in one corner. A sheaf of notes fan out to her left. The top sheet is her revised treatment plan based on last week’s session, and at a tap of her fingers it drifts down to float in front of her. She weaves a construct of her favorite writing desk with the ease of long practice from memories of the slide of smooth wood under her hands, the faint scent of cedar, the broken curlicue from where she’d banged it into a wall.
At a distance, she feels the bonetrain pulling out from the station, followed by the vertiginous lurch as it leaves the Elarion worldstrand. Cradled in the quiet of her mind, she settles into a sihara’s work.
The anxiety comes to her as the taste of tin on her tongue, filtering through her concentration so subtly she can’t pinpoint the moment it passes from background noise to an irritation too intrusive to ignore. A quick ping to the delicate, usually subconscious filaments that connect her to the physical world even in the depths of her architecture confirms that there is now one other person near her. Someone so frightened that it’s reached through not only her architecture, but a layer of memory.
She surfaces from the replay of a session two months ago with a blink, and the memory collapses back into its frame to resume its place in the collection. Without the buffer, the metallic tang swells until she nearly gags on it. She folds the files into their linchpin hastily. Layers upon layers of memory and notes wrap upon each other with all the precision of origami. The match goes back into its alcove, and she hurries out of her mind.
Space is not compressible within mental architecture any more than in the physical; or rather, you can, but you shouldn’t. Change the dimensions of your mind without due preparation and watch it crumble. Her mental avatar is more fluid, especially within her own realm. She lets her stride lengthen past what her physical legs could ever manage with the sort of practiced inattention that sihara get very good at, goes from shadowed tunnel to sunlight so intense it’s as much pressure as brightness, even as she rises—
—to open her eyes on the train compartment, now containing one very sweaty young man on the opposite seat. His corona of surface thoughts takes the form of sparks, a whirl of glowing motes that dance around his body. Fear has dulled them to guttering grey embers and set them swirling in a frenzied cloud that fills the compartment like faintly luminescent ash. This close, the taste of tin lies sharp in her mouth. Saliva pools thickly on her tongue. No matter how assiduously you train, it’s difficult to convince the body that a thought’s flavor can’t be swallowed down.
“Is this your first time on the bonetrain?” She makes her voice quiet and gentle, but he still starts sharply.
He wrenches his eyes from the window to offer her a sickly attempt at a smile. He’s daen, so it involves two rows of sharp teeth, but Kaadi has accustomed her to serrated grins.
“That obvious, is it?”
His hands are clenched white-knuckled on the armrests, and fluffs of stuffing leak through the holes his claws have torn in the upholstery. Sweat sheens his forehead and has reduced his careful chignon to a frizzy mess. Every time the taste of metal starts to fade from her mouth, a new spark hits her, and it returns with the edge of an anxiety not her own.
“I spent my first ride looking exactly like that.” She offers him a conspiratorial grin and leans forward with her elbows on her knees. It’s open, informal body language, and it brings her into range of more of his thoughts than the fear he’s shooting off like fireworks.
Her admission, her posture, or some combination thereof makes him relax fractionally and focus more on her than the view.
“I’m Naveed,” she says, and offers her hand in the Lianese way. “I’m a sihara.”
He clasps her hand wrist-to-wrist, pulse-to-pulse, and his architecture shimmers into view like a mirage, around his head without obscuring it. It’s as though there is suddenly more space unfolding about him in a disregard for dimensions designed to produce headaches if you think about it too much. His mind is built of pale stone in the clean, curving lines the Lianese favor. The arch above the double doors displays the Questant armed and armored; it is otherwise bare of ornamentation. They wouldn’t carve She Who Strives over a private residence, and since she’s not portrayed with a book or telescope, it’s not a research institute. A detective’s office, perhaps, or a guardhouse.
He must love his job, for his mind to settle into its shape rather than his home’s.
“Aide Morille del Sadine,” he’s saying. Then, “Sihara? That sounds Aesir.” Amber curiosity flames through his corona as it curls a tendril towards her. His interest tastes like oranges.
“Quite correct. Think of it as a therapist who can mindwalk,” she tells him.
He draws back at the word mindwalk, and sour-milk dismay edged with tin fills her mouth.
“It also means that I’m very nosy.” Her self-deprecating smile invites him to reciprocate, but the one he offers her in return is thin. He remembers to keep his lips closed this time, so he must be used to working with humans. He remains poised and wary, and it is more than time to steer the conversation to less fraught topics.
“What brings you to Pandemonium?” she asks, and the sourness fairly curdles on her tongue.
“Accounting work.” He gestures at his briefcase. “Boring stuff, if you don’t have an unhealthy interest in numbers and the adding thereof.”
He’s an excellent liar. She can see nothing in his face to give it away, hear nothing in his voice. But his corona contracts into a thin ring of mustard yellow that drones “Twelve times one is twelve, twelve time two is twenty-four, twelve times three is…”
“It doesn’t sound very interesting,” she assures him. She can barely hear herself over the sound of him avoiding the thought of whatever business he’s really about.
He doesn’t do anything so obvious as relax, just nods and continues to do his multiplication very loudly.
“You must be quite devoted to your work, to take the bonetrain when it frightens you so,” she adds.
Sky blue relief rushes through his corona, mixed with flecks of grey, and it relaxes from compact ring to a broader spiral. Better fear than giving away his assignment, apparently. He leaps onto her redirection with gratifying alacrity.
“It’s not the bonetrain, per se. I am absolutely fine with reanimating the skeleton of an extradimensional predator and riding it like a pony. I am even comfortable sitting inside it, it’s not like the thing has a digestive system anymore. What makes me want to crawl out of my skin, not to put too fine a point on it, is taking said beastie for a jaunt between the worlds.”
He stops to take a breath and glances sidelong out the window set between two of the train’s ribs. The space beyond is black, not dark but empty in a way that drives home how vibrant and vital the night sky is. The worldstrands cut through the void in stark lines that do nothing to illuminate it, silver-white and gold and lapis lazuli, gleaming windows back into reality. They form a tangled web that would shame any spider, kissing and parting at strange angles, passing through each other or running parallel with no discernable pattern. Keener minds than hers have tried and failed to find one. They exist on a scale that beggars the imagination and boggles the eye. This close, the Moraine strand the train skims along is so wide that it forms its own foreshortened horizon. Their compartment seems a tiny, fragile bubble of warmth and life surrounded by the vastness of the worlds and the spaces between.
There’s something almost freeing about it.
“Who in all the worlds looks at a snake big enough to a make a meal of an elephant and thinks, ‘You know what? That’d make great public transportation,’” Aide demands of the universe.
The universe not looking likely to answer, she takes it upon herself.
“I suppose it takes a special sort of logic. They must have decided that if it could survive the void between the worlds in life, its skeleton could remember how.”
“Great plan. Let’s remind the thing of life, then take it back home and trust it not to get any ideas about being too alive.
“Do you even know the statistics on feral bonetrains?” he asks softly
“Yes,” she says. “It’s comparable to death by overland travel.”
His corona fuzzes into disarray in surprise at the sound of her voice, then steadies back into a stable orbit.
“One in every hundred bonetrains will reawaken and attempt to leave the worldnet,” he recites, as though she hadn’t spoken. He’s talking to the voice of his fear, not to her, and all the color has seeped from his sparks.
“They’ve lost two this month alone.”
She reaches out and touches the back of his hand to draw his attention to her, away from the scene playing out behind his eyes. She catches a snatch of it – tumbling into darkness with sickening speed, panicky scream building in his throat, the mindwalker clawing bloody grooves in her cheeks as alien thoughts core out her mind like an apple – choked with the taste of tin and the fresh snowmelt of a terror so deep it freezes the tongue and leaves no room for words.
“Aide, I have ridden the bonetrain every week for three years, and not once have I felt it so much as stir.”
He huffs out something between a laugh and a snort.
“That just means the odds are less on your side with every trip.” Moreso now than ever, she catches, and files it away under ‘Ominous Statements’ for later consideration.
“I don’t think statistics work that way,” she points out. “One in every hundred might wake up, but I’ve read the same books as you, and fifty-six times out of that hundred, the conductor can soothe the train back to sleep before the passengers know there’s been any malfunction. You can’t turn fear off like a faucet, but reminding yourself of the facts every time that little voice starts—”
“It’s the facts that have me worried. This isn’t some irrational phobia.”
He places a hand flat-palmed against the glass separating them from the void.
“It’s far more perverse to not be afraid of it,” he says softly. “How does everyone else on this train blithely ignore the fact that the only thing stopping us from spinning off into nothingness is just how well a stranger can tweak the long-dead pathways in a monster’s cranium? You only have to look out the window for a reminder.”
She looks. You always notice the negative space between the worlds before the strands themselves. The eye tries to find something in the depths to latch onto, until it dreams up vague shapes and suggestions of movement that disappear with a blink. It would be so easy to tumble between the worldstrands into the blackness beyond, until the worldnet is no more than a cat’s cradle beneath them. The idea is exhilarating. It bubbles up in her like the giddy urge to jump when peering from a high ledge, like the start of an adventure, like rising towards wakefulness after lying too long asleep.
It doesn’t feel like something she would think.
She grabs for the thought and catches the tip of its tail with her mental fingers as it tries to slip away; it writhes in her grasp and twists on itself to sink needlelike teeth into the webbing between thumb and forefinger of her avatar. Her hand goes numb and shreds into nothingness. She snatches at the intruder with her remaining hand, makes an involuntary grabbing motion with its physical counterpart. The thought feels scaled and slithery and colder than ice, it feels serpentine, and she realizes its origin at the exact moment the train jolts to a halt.
They sit frozen and breathless for a beat, not quite daring to ask, “Is that the end of it?” Their hands have found each other across the narrow space between their chairs. Then the train jerks sharply downwards, stills, and bucks again before Naveed can recover her equilibrium. The conductor is trying to guide it into the Moraine strand below them before it can go tearing off into the void, and that the train is already too awake to let itself be steered is ominous. Aide keens a guttural, almost metallic rasp that could never come from a human throat. The quiet moan of plating stressed to the breaking point echoes him. The lights flicker off overhead, leaving them illuminated only by the cold, faint glow of the worldstrands.
“You had to say it,” Aide sighs. He sounds more resigned than frightened, as though the arrival of disaster has obviated the need to fear it. “You just had to say nothing was going to happen, which means that by the laws of nature, the gods, and narrative, something had to go terribly wrong. Now we’re going to be in the forty-four percent. I hope you’re really happy, and… hey! Where’re you going?”
She’s halfway down the hall before his longer legs catch him up to her.
“I felt its thoughts,” she tells him distractedly.
“So?”
“If I felt its thoughts, then it has a mind.”
Frightened faces peer out at them from the other compartments. She can feel the threads of the bonetrain’s stirring thoughts slipping through their coronas like a cold current.
“If it has a mind, I can walk it.”
She rifles through her mental arsenal without slowing, pulls up every scrap of information in her halls on bonetrains, on animal architecture, on the undead.
“And maybe, just maybe, I can stop the train from going feral and taking all of us with it.”