I Loved It – 2

Lyra has described this railing to me six mornings in a row. She never described any of this.

My hands are already near it when I understand I have hands here. My wings beat behind me, all four of them holding me in the dark air above the inner hollow, and no ache gathers at my roots. That is the first thing she told me about this dream. The wings do not tire.

She stands several paces ahead of me, facing the hollow. Her left lower wing hangs a little closer to her leg than the others, the same tiny delay it has when she is frightened and pretending to be annoyed. Her shoulders are too still.

“Lyra?”

She does not turn.

At first I think the hollow has swallowed my voice. It is large enough for that. Hinter opens beneath us in its impossible depth, terraces and bridges and curtainways set into the living inner wall, clusters of glowing mushrooms scattered down it like quiet eyes. The hollow continues so far ulward that the eyes normally give up before finding an end. In waking, their aqua light travels over black heartwood, and the distance carries warmth, wing-drafts, cooking smoke.

Here, the lower hollow is gray. The gray mixes badly. A grown ledge becomes a flat hard path and then becomes heartwood again before its edge can be trusted. A bridge loses one end in a straight pale thing made of slats, low to the ground and uselessly narrow. Patches of shredded gray cover parts of the floor far below where bark and root should show. Thin poles and hard-edged shapes interrupt the tree at impossible angles, made with no patience for grain or curve, as if some other home has been nailed through ours.

Wingless figures move through it. They are far away and gray like the rest, walking along the hard paths, passing the strange low frames, behaving as if the broken place knows how to hold them.

“Lyra'nim,” I say again, louder.

No answer. I move closer until I am almost beside her. A crude box sits near the wall where no box should be. Beside it rests a clear little container crowded with narrow sticks. Most have washed into the same uncertain gray as everything around them. Red, green, and blue remain clean enough to name. I do not know what work asks for such things, yet the sight of them makes my mouth go dry because Lyra described colors in the dream every morning and then laughed at herself for sounding like a priest reciting a child's lesson.

A square hatch is set into the terrace floor near the outer railing. Lyra does not look at any of it. She looks down.

Far below, something hangs over the shredded gray ground. A narrow seat, empty, held by two chains. It moves forward, then back. Forward, then back. The motion is small and steady, though no one sits on it and no wind reaches it in any way that should matter. The chains creak each time it returns, and the sound climbs the hollow with a thin, patient insistence.

I wave my arm in front of Lyra. “Can you see me?”

Her hand tightens on the railing. I think she has heard me. Then I see her eyes tracking something below, beyond the moving chained seat.

A red figure stands behind it. Everything near the figure has difficulty keeping its edge. Gray structures and gray people smear together as if remembered through dirty sap. The red figure holds its shape. It is person-sized, wingless, and cleanly separate from the place around it. I cannot see a face. I cannot see cloth, hair, skin, any honest detail. Only red in the shape of a body.

The empty seat swings backward toward it. The figure waits. A narrow seam of sick yellow opens at its shoulder, no brighter than thread. The arm moves after it. When the red palm meets the seat, yellow passes through the fingers and catches for one instant in the first lengths of chain. The chains draw tight as the seat shoots forward, rising high. It climbs, pauses at the end of its arc, and returns with the same narrow creak. By then the hand is red again.

Lyra makes a sound too small to be a word. I reach for her shoulder. My fingers meet the cloth of her sleeve. I feel it. I feel the weave and the warmth beneath, and still she gives no sign that I am there. Why won’t you look at me?

The red figure reaches to the side, one hand toward empty air about the height of a child’s head. Its fingers spread, lower, and pass once through nothing. For the length of the smoothing stroke, yellow lies flat beneath its palm, curved around the crown of something I cannot see. Then the hand goes still, and the color goes out.

It stands up properly. Both hands come together near its waist around something too small for me to see. The fingers pinch. Pull apart. Meet again. Pull. Again.

The wrists turn against each other on the last one, and whatever is between them comes apart without ever becoming visible. A thin blonde vein appears between its hands. Whatever that vein runs through comes apart after it. Two gray scraps flash between the red fingers, then fall and lose themselves in the below. A smudge of gray is left on its hand, and it leaves it there.

The red figure lifts its head. It looks above the chained seat, above the gray people and their hard paths.

Toward us.

My own wings beat once too hard, shoving me half a step back from the railing. Lyra does not move away. Her face has gone very calm in the way hers does when fear has found no place to put itself.

The red head lowers. It leaves the hanging seat and moves toward the center of the hollow, although walking is a poor name for what happens. One step begins behind the seat and ends too far away. The space between positions goes missing. Its feet touch gray ground, then empty air, then gray again, and each place bears its weight as if ashamed to refuse. Nothing about it jerks. Nothing hurries.

Only then do the hard lines scattered through the gray below resolve into one construction. It rises through ledges, curtainways, bridges, mushroom shelves, homes—all the way toward us. It does not bend to any terrace or ask permission from any wall.

I stare at it, failing to understand why such an absurd vertical path would exist. Then the red figure places one foot on the lowest visible crosspiece. Its hands grip the rails and it pulls itself upward. The understanding comes so plainly that I feel foolish for needing it. There is nothing on its back to lift it. Each time it wants to rise, the hands must drag the body after them.

Lyra turns from the railing toward the hatch. Her lower wings draw close against her legs, and the delayed one comes last, shivering once before it settles. “That was for it to or-come?”

The climbing sound begins to count upward. Wood knocks against wood. Hand, foot, crosspiece. Hand, foot, crosspiece. Slow at first, then steady, then clean. The red figure climbs past the lower homes. Past a bridge where gray people continue walking without looking. Past a shelf of mushrooms whose usual aqua glow has gone the same dead gray as the air around it. The chained seat still moves below.

Lyra plants one foot on the hatch. The square boards shift under her weight, then hold. She braces her other foot on the living terrace, wings flaring to balance her, all four spread wide enough that the eye-marks along them face the hollow.

I drop beside it and put both palms on the boards. Splinters bite my hands. I push until my shoulders burn and the muscles at the base of my wings tighten.

But the hatch does not know my weight. It groans beneath Lyra's foot and steadies when she bears down; my hands slide over rough wood without changing it.

I am close enough that my sleeve brushes her ankle, and she stands alone.

The climbing knocks rise directly beneath us. Hand, foot, crosspiece. Hand, foot, crosspiece.

“Please, someone hear—”

It stops.

The hatch lifts a fraction. Lyra's heel slips, catches, drives down again. I stop beating my wings so every part of my weight should fall through my arms. I feel every place the boards touch me. The boards cannot feel me.

The gray line beneath the hatch widens.

Then the surface under my hands gives by several finger-widths, folding and sliding away from the force I had been throwing into dead wood.

“Lyra—”

My right upper wing strikes wood.

The blow shivers down every branching vein into my back. My body jerks sideways; the left pair flare to catch me, and one smacks the opposite wall hard enough to shake dust loose.

Black wood answers. It answers everywhere. The shelf rattles because I hit it. The silk caves beneath my knee because I am in it.

My knee drives into the silk and leaves a deep hollow that collapses around my shin. My fingers close around the cocoon rim. The silk tightens inside my fist. I can pull it.

For a few ticks I do nothing except hold on.

My right lower wing is still caught against the shelf. I twist away too sharply, forgetting its edge extends beyond what I can see, then correct and ease it free with a soft rasp.

The relief is embarrassingly immediate.

“Lyra.”

The room receives her name properly. Curtain. Shelf. Wood. My own ears. No answer, because of course there is no answer. She is not in my room. I know where she is.

One hand catches the loose edge of my wing-wrap; the other catches the cocoon rim. I haul myself upright and sway. My lower wings open automatically to catch me. Finally, everything obeys. I have to find her.

⬤

I am out of my room before my wing-wrap is tied properly.

It slips on the first turn down the passage, and I catch the loose end with my teeth while flying too fast through a corridor built for people with more respect for corners. The passage mushrooms are still mostly closed, aqua showing only between their gills; half the green curtains hang dim with sleep, though early wings have begun to stir through the hollow.

I test one breath against the waking hollow and catch its people only in pieces: salt beneath my tongue, cloth warm from a shoulder, the pressure of a remembered palm between the wings. I am moving too quickly to hold any one impression long enough to know whose it is.

Someone below calls a complaint when my draft knocks drying cloth from a rail. I do not turn back to apologize.

Lyra’s terrace is many levels above mine, but I know the route without needing to look for it: the curtainway beside the cracked mushroom collar, the last upward sweep where the tree breathes hotter near her door. Her outer curtain hangs muted green, still weighted shut at the bottom with its three cloudy blue-green sap beads.

I push through to find the main room quiet. The cup on the low table has not been touched. The wing-brush I left here two nights ago still lies on the shelf where she pretended not to notice it. The mushrooms under the table glow softly, aqua gathered beneath their caps and spread across the black grain, behaving like nothing has happened. I cross to the second curtain and lift it.

She is awake.

That should be enough to make the dream loosen its teeth from me. It does not. Lyra stands beside the cocoon with one hand on the wall, staring at the black heartwood above it. One lower wing keeps drawing toward her leg, easing out, then drawing in again. Her fingers rub once beside her ear, too hard; when she lowers the hand, a thin shine remains near her jaw.

I follow her gaze, but there is nothing above the cocoon. Only black heartwood, the aqua thinning before it reaches the ceiling. There’s no hatch or dead boards. No red figure dragging itself toward her from below.

“Lyra,” I say.

For one tick she only watches me, and I see her do the old counting thing she pretends is not counting: face, hair, wings, hands, back to face—the route by which she has always had to find me when breath gives her nothing. At the end of it, she looks relieved.

I count her back differently. I draw one deliberate breath and hold it behind my tongue. Cooled sap and old silk pass first. Then Lyra returns through them: ash with a bit of heat underneath, and the certainty that someone behind a weighted curtain has remained awake.

Even that does not loosen it.

Her eyes go past me to the wall again.

“Raine. Do you remember?”

“Yes.” The word comes out too fast. I step into the room, nearly tripping. “Yes, I remember. The thing below, Lyra, and it was climbing—”

“It is my Qimmo.”

I stop. Her Qimmo—the day she was given her Ainm: Lyra. I was supposed to be here before the hollow woke properly, before anyone else could call her Hermit from a ledge and make the day useful instead of hers.

I look at the cup, untouched. The hair, uncombed. The markless heartwood she keeps staring at.

“Oh,” I say. “Right.”

Her mouth curves a little. It is not quite a smile. “Did you forget?”

“I was-m in your dream.”

“You still forgot.”

I almost laugh. It catches before it becomes sound, because her eyes move above the cocoon again and the dream comes back with the hatch lifting under her foot.

“Lyra,” I say, quieter. “I was there.”

“Yes.”

I take one step closer. “You haven't even brushed your wings. What are you looking at?”

She does not answer that. Instead she looks toward the same plain wood and asks, “Did it reach the top when you woke up?”

My hands go cold. “What? Um, no.”

Her shoulders lower by a fraction. “Well, that’s good. I do not know what it is.”

“You never said it approached you.”

Lyra’s fingers rest on the edge of the cocoon. The silk shifts under them, dull and pale, with none of the dream’s dead planks or gray seams. “That's because it didn't.”

Her gaze lifts again. Heartwood. Nothing. The same nothing I have now begun to hate.

“It’s nothing.” She looks at me then. Her face is tired in a way I have seen only after funerals and Council prayers that go too long, when she holds her wings perfectly still and lets the rest of herself sag.

“Can it not have today?” she asks.

I came with the red figure still climbing behind my eyes, with Lyra standing on a hatch she could not hold shut, with my own useless hands pressed against dead boards. But she is here. Alive. Barefoot beside her cocoon.

I open my mouth. Lyra waits.

I reach into the pocket of my wrap and pull out the present. It is smaller than it felt when I made it last night. A narrow pin of red sap-glass, green thread looped through the eye at its blunt end, and one small blue sap bead hanging from the thread. The red glass is pale enough for the hair beneath it to show through. I tied the thread five times last night, pulling it apart whenever the bead sat a finger-width wrong.

Her eyes leave the wall. “You brought that while panicking?”

“Uh—well, I couldn’t forget.”

“Like how you forgot your wing-wrap is half tied?” Her hand lifts toward the ornament before I have even crossed the room.

I catch her wrist. “Not yet.”

She blinks.

“Don’t ruin it before it has been admired.”

“I was going to touch it gently.”

“You never touch gifts gently. You inspect them.”

“That is how I appreciate things.”

She gives me the smallest real smile then. I smile back before I can decide whether it helps.

I step close and slide the red pin into her hair above her ear, where the shorter strands always escape first. Her hair is cool and heavy under my fingers. I set the pin a little higher than she would choose for herself. The blue bead falls against her temple and swings once before resting near her cheek. Mushroom light catches through the red glass above it, turning the pin purple-pink for a blink.

“There,” I say. “Lyra.”

She touches the bead with two careful fingers, not the pin. I let her.

“It is pretty,” she says.

“It is also structurally excellent. I molded the sap by—”

“If only you didn’t almost forget to bring it.”

“Am I going to be hearing that until next Qimmo?”

“At least.”

She looks past me again. I turn with her this time, hard enough that my wings shift. The wall remains wall. The heartwood gives back nothing but grain.

“Lyra'nim, stay here.”

Her eyes return to mine. Her fingers close once around the bead.

“I am-m here,” she says.

The paint case is in my other pocket, tied shut with the same green thread. I had meant to bring it out after breakfast, after teasing, after making her stand on the terrace while everyone called the greeting and she pretended to hate it. Now the case seems too bright for the room. I hold it anyway.

Lyra sees it. “You brought paint?”

“I brought several things. Myself included.”

“Will you do my wings?”

Usually this is where I begin pestering. Lyra endures Qimmo paint the way she endures old people kissing her forehead and children shouting her title from places they should not be climbing: stiffly, with sarcasm.

“Of course,” I say before she can change her mind.

She takes the low stool beside the cocoon before I can choose a place—near the wall, of course. Better light waits by the outer curtain. I almost tell her to move, then see the set of her shoulders and let her sit where she can watch it.

Lyra settles onto the stool. Four wings loosen behind her. The upper pair ease outward first, orange deepening where the support veins crowd near their roots; the lower pair follow along her hips. Three answer together.

The fourth stays folded against her left leg for half a beat. Then it remembers.

I reach toward it before the tremor finishes, intending to catch the stronger vein just beyond the root so it will not bump the stool, and Lyra lifts the upper left wing at the same instant, opening a narrow space for my arm. We both stop. My hand hangs between them. Her upper wing stays raised.

“Sorry,” we say together.

Usually that would make her laugh first. Today the corner of her mouth only twitches.

I let my hand fall. “Scared?”

“You always reach for the other one first.”

“Well, that's because you always try to sit on it.”

“I have never sat on my own wing.”

Her lower left gives another small inward pull as if taking her side. I look at it. Lyra notices me looking and deliberately extends it farther. Cute. Once, I wouldn't have noticed.

I take the paint case from my pocket and kneel behind her. “Several things,” I say. “I brought several things.”

“You already told me.”

“I need you to appreciate my preparedness.”

“Your wrap is crooked.”

I look down. It is. “Turn around.”

She rotates on the stool just enough that the four wings swing with her, and I put one hand out automatically to keep the left lower edge from grazing the cocoon. In the dream I had felt the weave of her sleeve beneath my fingers, and she had stood alone. I set the paint case down hard.

The lid opens on green first. Qimmo always begins there. Red sits in the smaller well beside it, dense and dull. The red holds my eyes.

My thumb stops against the red vial.

“It isn't the same red,” Lyra says.

“I wasn't thinking about that.”

She raises one brow.

I pull the stopper loose. “Stupid.”

I put my left hand against Lyra's upper right wing. Not the membrane. Never the membrane first. Two fingers find the thick branch of a support vein just beyond the root, where it can take pressure without bending. The scales there lie too fine to feel individually; stroked outward, they give beneath my fingertips with a dry softness.

Farther out, the wing gives easier, so I lighten my hand. Lyra adjusts her shoulder: ready.

“Tell me if I pull.”

“You pull.”

I have not even started yet.

I breathe through my nose and bring the brush to the deepest orange near the root. The bristles hover close enough that the tiny hairs along the leading edge move in the air displaced by my hand. Lyra knows where the brush is anyway. Her inhale catches before the bristles touch.

I set green to the deepest orange near the root and draw outward along the slight ridge of a natural vein. Near her body the wet line is almost black; farther out, where the wing catches more light, it opens into leaf-green.

Her wing tightens beneath my other hand.

“Too cold?”

“No.”

Probably too cold.

My hand can be almost the length of my arm away from her body and still be touching her. The brush passes over a point she cannot see without turning. I wait until the small tremor along the outer membrane disappears.

I touch the same vein with my clean fingers, farther outward this time, and Lyra extends it for me without needing instruction.

Again: I touch. She answers, the left lower wing a beat late.

I look down at the paint before it can show on my face.

Lyra's gaze starts wandering before I reach the outer curve.

I tap the clean end of the brush against her arm. “Eyes.”

She startles enough that all four wings react. “I can't even look around anymore?”

“You can look around when I am not holding wet paste beside you.”

“I barely moved.”

“You nearly painted my knee with your wing.”

“That would improve it.”

The bead in her hair touches her cheek. “You never even told me about that red thing before,” I say. The brush keeps moving. If I stop, she will hear the question too clearly and shut the room around it.

“Well—”

“Am I a child to you, Lyra?”

She freezes. “I thought it...” She is silent long enough that I think she will give up. Then she says, “Sorry. Um, it played with something I couldn’t see.”

The brush leaves a small uneven place in the green. I smooth it before she sees. “Sorry. I didn't mean it like that.”

“It's fine,” she says, and there is a bite in it now, not for me, not entirely. “You know, I see pieces. Pieces of things that do not belong in Hinter, and they change. I... just don't want to talk about this today.”

I let the question rest. Red follows green beneath the brush; one wing replaces another in my hand, Lyra opening each at the old pressure of my fingers. By the time I reach the final lower curve, her gaze has climbed back above the cocoon.

“But I think I gave it somewhere to go.”

My eyes return to her. Her left lower wing has begun moving inward. Slowly. It does not finish.

“Is that pathetic, Raine?”

The question is so unlike her that I cannot answer immediately.

My brush is still in my hand. I think of dead boards that could not feel me, and of Lyra's shoulder warm and unreachable beneath my fingers. Then I put two fingers beneath the nearest wing. It lifts. Just a little. Enough.

I finish the last red line along the lower wing, following its curve until the paint narrows and disappears before the margin. As the brush travels, gold shows through the orange at the two places where my fingers steady the supporting vein, no wider than my touch. It goes out when I lift the brush and let her wing go. Lyra exhales. I lean back far enough to see all four together.

“There,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I expected. “Work of the day.”

Lyra turns her head carefully, trying to see without folding anything wet. She catches a little of the upper wing over her shoulder, then gives up because she knows I will complain.

“Well?” I make her wait. Mostly because I can.

Orange. Green. Red. The blue bead hanging too high beside her cheek. Her hair still uncombed. Her bare feet planted against warm living wood. All four wings making their small corrections against the air.

“My work of the day,” I say again.

She laughs, and this time I feel the nearest wing move with it.

I'm not sure, Lyra. I don't think I care.

⬤

The day goes before I am finished with it.

We eat late. I make her drink the sugared sap she forgot on the table. She accuses me of becoming an old aunt early. She wins two rounds of shell-stones and loses the third because she is watching the place above the cocoon when she should be watching my hand. I do not call her on it until she accuses me of cheating.

“You cheated,” she says.

“You looked away.”

“No I didn’t.”

People call from the terrace throughout the day. Bright Qimmo, Hermit'to, they say. Bright Qimmo, Lyra'nim, I say. Children shout too loudly. Dama sends a little cake with a spiral of green glaze that makes Lyra stare at it for one second too long before cutting it exactly in half. The paint dries on her wings. The bead in her hair remains where I set it. Every time she touches it, she does so as if checking that the day is still attached.

I stay longer than I mean to, but then I stay longer than that.

By night, the Sleeper rumbles. The outer curtain breathes with the cooler draft, and the mushrooms inside Lyra’s room have opened wider. Their aqua light gathers around the edges of the table and beneath the shelf, leaving the black unlit between one pool and the next. The paint case is clean. The brushes are washed. The cup is empty. The cake is gone except for the green stain on the plate. There is no task left for me to pretend I am finishing.

I retie the paint case anyway.

Lyra watches me from the edge of the cocoon. Her wings are folded now, all four marked and dry, the red lines darkened against the orange in the low light. She has been watching me for several ticks.

“You are making a terrible knot,” she says.

I untie it and start over. She lets me get halfway through before she says, “And you’ve failed that knot three times now.”

Tsk. I set the case on the shelf and turn toward the wall above her cocoon. I cross the room and stand directly in front of it. The heartwood is warm under my palm. Smooth. No gray. No pressure from below. I press my palm flat and wait for the dream to remember me. “Higher?”

Behind me, I hear the small shift of membrane against membrane. Her delayed wing draws inward and there's the faint rasp of her thumb moving back and forth over the pale crescent in her palm.

“I was-m inside it with you,” I say.

“I know.”

“You could not see me.”

“I know.”

“You were alone.”

The faint movement against her palm stops. I face her.

“I’m scared,” she says.

I cross my arms so my hands do not reach for her.

She looks above the cocoon again, and I hate the wall for being blank. “I hope it did not notice you.”

“Then I'm staying.”

Her eyes move to my hands, then the outer curtain. For a tick I think she'll say yes.

Then she looks above the cocoon.

“No,” she says.

I wait.

“Go sleep, Raine.”

“I'm bringing breakfast before first light. You won't be picky.”

“I know.”

“You better not be picky.”

She smiles a little. It is tired enough to be honest.

I want to stay. I want to sit on the floor if the cocoon will not take both of us. I think I want to keep one hand on her ankle all night. I want to ask until the answers come out by force.

I almost say 'All right.'

Instead, I go to grab the spare floor-silk.

“No,” Lyra says.

“But I'm not getting in your cocoon.”

“Go home.”

“I was home last night.”

That stops her. I shake the silk out once. “It saw us anyway.”

“That is exactly why I want you away from me.”

“That doesn't even make sense.”

“I don't care.”

The answer comes too quickly. I look at her. Her fingers are tight around the bead.

“Just stay away from me.” For half a tick she almost laughs. Then she doesn't. “Please.”

Her shoulders drop. The floor-silk slips from my hands and settles between us in a pale heap. I cross to the second curtain and lift it. The main room is dark beyond, the low mushrooms glowing under the table.

“Raine'nim,” she says.

I look back.

She touches the bead hanging too high beside her cheek. She is looking upward again.

I speak first. “Do not put the bead lower tomorrow.”

She speaks next. “I loved it.”