Author's Preface
Her hand is still warm against mine.
I wait for her thumb to pass beside the cut again. It does not. The warmth lies flat beneath my whole palm now, too broad to be her hand, and the fine ridges press into each fingertip without any fingers between them. My hand is spread. Mom.
Bile shoots up my throat and something in my back shivers. I open my eyes. At first, nothing changes. Then a low aqua glow climbs from somewhere beneath me and catches along the ridges of a surface close enough that one line blurs when I try to follow it. The surface curves away on either side. Everything between the lit ridges is black—not dark brown. Black.
My left hand is planted against it above my head. I slide one fingertip forward. The ridge forks beneath my skin.
Grain. Wood.
Black wood.
Wait.
The hand comes narrow at the wrist and pale enough for the veins to show. When I turn the index finger toward the light, the place where I cut it is smooth. Not even a tender seam. I press my thumbnail into the exact spot hard enough to hurt. The pain comes only from the nail.
I turn the hand over. The palm has creases and nothing else. The wall has left no soot or paint on it. No old white interruptions. The hard little place along my middle finger where a pen rests is gone.
I know this hand from the inside, and I have never seen it before.
I set my palm back against the black wood. It is warm, but my shoulder isn't bearing enough weight for the wall to be holding me. I try to step back. My right foot reaches and finds only cool air. The other is hanging too.
Something behind me tightens and releases in a pattern too quick for me to separate at first. Each downward stroke pushes air past my calves and sends a broad pull inward through four roots beneath the skin. Do I… have a fan behind me?
My hand leaves the wall. I twist from the shoulders, expecting the rest of me to follow at the usual distance. Something broad opens behind my right side and catches too much air. Three of the forces correct together, dragging against their roots with one hard, coordinated pull. The fourth, low on my left, remains folded for half a beat.
I’m in the air. The thought drags a gasp through me. My chest lifts, and the four things lose the rhythm they had been keeping without me.
Then something behind me snaps open. Its edge strikes the wall with a dry slap. Three more beat harder. One drives me sideways, one backward, and one catches nothing at all. Everything soft inside me climbs toward my throat. The wood runs upward past my face. The floor rushes up beneath my feet.
My heel lands on a loose pale fold and skates. I hit the floor hip-first, crushing something broad beneath my ribs. Pain streaks from its far edge into my shoulder blade. Another surface slaps down beside me, lifting faint orange dust.
“Mother?”
The word vibrates in a throat whose size I misjudged and touches the backs of teeth that are not where my voice expects them.
I say it again, quieter. “Mom?” The same voice answers.
The pale cloth is wound around my ankle and bunched beneath my hip. It slides beneath my palm in one direction and catches in the other. Something broad trapped beneath my side twitches. When I roll away from it, orange comes with me. A green line rides one raised branch toward the edge; a narrower red curve follows beside it.
Beyond the cloth, small mushrooms glow aqua from a seam where the floor curves into the wall. Mushrooms. Their light spreads over the black floor and climbs the wall toward the place my hand left.
I look up for the place my hand left.
The wood there is not empty.
High in its curve, something interrupts the grain. No—the wall closes around its middle without a nail, cut, shelf, or gap, swallowing the plush body nearly to its seams. One felt antenna bends forward. The loose thread still hangs from the left wing.
My moth, but the blue is gone.
“You are not allowed to be picky,” a woman’s voice comes muffled behind me. “I brought breakfast before first light, and that makes me too virtuous to argue with.”
At the first word, the lower thing beside my left leg draws inward. I feel the movement beginning somewhere behind and below my ribs before I see anything move. My hand closes on the pale cloth beside me, expecting air, but another fall does not come.
The floor stays under my hip. Whatever has been moving me through the air has stopped trying. I pull the cloth from my ankle and get to my feet with one hand against the wall. I turn toward the voice, and there is no door. I look twice.
Instead, a length of green cloth hangs from a curved opening in the wood, the bottom weighted so it sits almost flush against the floor. The cloth bows inward before anybody touches it. Something displaces air on the other side, then a hand appears around one edge and pushes it aside.
A woman comes through sideways carrying a shallow tray. Her blond hair is twisted up badly, one loose strand stuck to her cheek. A cup and steaming bowl crowd the tray—
There are things behind her, four green shapes folded along her back. For less than a second my brain tries to make them clothing. A cape split into pieces. A costume. But she steps around a stool and the lower two lift. Not because a string pulls or her hands touch them. They simply know the stool is there.
The movement starts close to her spine, beneath the cloth of what she is wearing. The fabric shifts first in four separate places I had not understood were openings until now. The shapes pass the stool and settle again, one lower wing a little faster than the other. The upper pair overlap them at the edges without tangling. She does not appear to have thought about it at all.
Wings.
The surfaces are thin: broad sections stretched between raised dark-green edges like branches. They look closer to the wings of a butterfly or a moth, if those things belonged to pale skin and human flesh… Oh.
Something behind me answers. The surface I rolled off. The painted thing that folded when I hurt. The air passing over membranes I could not see. I can feel farther: out through the raised branches, across the thin, slippery places between them, all the way to four separate edges occupying the room behind me.
My skin does not stop at my back.
The woman’s wings settle. Mine—no. I don’t finish that. I look for straps instead. No harness crosses her shoulders. No rods disappear beneath the cloth. Her clothes are cut around four living roots. One upper wing lifts; skin moves where it joins her back.
I look behind myself, only to find that there is too much of me in the way. Orange crosses the edge of my vision near the floor, green and red laid over it in narrow, deliberate curves. One broad surface lies folded along my right side, partly under the silk. Another rises behind it. The dried lines continue across both, their faint ridges catching the aqua light. Someone painted them.
The right upper opens slightly to make room for the twist. Somewhere lower tightens. The delayed thing beside my left leg stays where it is for one fraction too long and then jerks inward after the others. Exactly like before. When I was against the wall. When the air was holding me. When I thought there was a fan.
The thought has no words at first. It is just several pieces becoming one object too quickly.
The woman's upper wings open another inch while she shifts the tray. Mine tense in the same places. I stop breathing deeply because even that changes them. She’s talking and I can barely hear her.
“Lyra'nim.”
I see her lips make the name. It takes another breath before I understand she means the person looking back at her.
The word I had been using for everything without a face finally has one. Fairies. The fairies that kept taking my memory. A fairy stands inside a room built around her wings, looking frightened by what she has done to me.
She knows what happened at the treehouse.
I look the woman in the eyes, not the wings.
“Where is my brother?”
My voice comes out wrong again—too light, too smooth, too pretty—but this time I force it louder.
“What the fuck did you do to me?”
The woman freezes. Her brows pull together—not frightened now. Offended. Her upper wings lift slightly from her back.
“Who?”
I stare at her.
“What?”
The word comes out almost on top of hers.
“Who are you talking about?” she asks again.
“My brother.” I hear my voice rise and hate that my—this throat makes anger sound thinner than mine. “Jamie. Why are you pretending like you don’t know?”
Nothing.
Not recognition hidden badly. Not guilt. Her eyes remain fixed on me with the blank concentration of somebody waiting for the rest of a sentence.
“Wait.” I search her face harder. “Do you…?”
“I don’t—”
She stops. Her attention leaves my eyes and moves over my face, hair, wings, hands. It catches briefly on the lower left wing folded closer to my leg. My back tightens under her attention as if being looked at is a kind of touch.
“Lyra,” she says carefully, “did—did you hit-t your head? Maybe you just…”
“Who is that?”
The tray gives a tiny wooden click. She does not blink.
“Is something like this funny to you?”
“What?”
She straightens without taking her eyes off me. “This is a terrible joke.”
“I’m not—”
“You would never do something like this.” The words begin angry and lose some of their heat halfway through. “Not after your Qimmo—”
She stops. Her mouth stays slightly open.
My head tilts. “What is a Qimmo supposed to be? I… think we’re having an, um—what was it—communication barrier.”
Her eyes start the route again. This time I can almost count it. Face. Hair. Lower left wing. Hands. Face. Her attention pauses on the ornament near my head—or maybe on the hair around it, I cannot tell—then drops briefly toward the painted red and green lines running over the orange behind me.
I’m starting to feel where those colors change on the surface. They feel like paint. Narrow places catch the air differently, slightly stiffer strips embedded in the large spread of sensation. Her gaze follows one green curve toward the root. Her face does something I cannot read.
Then her nostrils flare. Did she just—She takes a tiny breath through her nose. The movement is unmistakable this time.
I pull my head back. “What are you doing?”
She smells the air again. A short, searching inhale, eyes still on my face. Her pupils shift and the offended look goes away so completely that I want it back.
“Lyra'nim.”
The call breaks in the middle. She looks at me as if I have moved farther away without changing places.
“Where is your smell?”
My brain gives me absolutely nothing useful. “I stink?”
Her lips part.
“What?”
“What?”
For a second we only stare at each other. Then she shakes her head once, hard.
“No.”
She steps closer. I feel it first along the outer edge of my upper wings, a weak disturbance in the air before her body is near enough for me to think of backing away.
“No, you—”
She breathes in again. The inhale keeps going past what should have been enough to smell anything. Her eyes dart across my face while she holds her breath, waiting.
Nothing.
She lets it out and tries again, then once more before the last breath is properly gone. Her upper wings rise with each inhale; the lower pair keep drawing close to her body.
“Where is it?”
She comes another step nearer. I move backward. My heel catches on that pale material. The upper wings behind me flare before I can fall, throwing air downward. My body corrects. I hate the correction less than I hate the look on her face.
“What is wrong with you?” she asks.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why can’t I smell you?!”
I stop.
Smell.
Not you smell different.
Not what happened to your smell.
Why can’t I smell you?
The room goes distant in a way that doesn’t feel physical. Woman. Tray. Curtain. Wings.
Me. Or the body she keeps calling Lyra.
I think of Mother’s nail polish reaching me before her fingers came through the floor. I think of knowing her from a smell before I could see enough of the hand to prove anything. My skin prickles along both arms. She isn't trying to figure out who I am. She's trying to find where Lyra went.
The woman inhales again and her eyes shine. This time I understand that she is not merely checking, but hoping. She steps close enough that if I reached out with the wrong hand I could touch her. I don’t.
“Why won’t you say anything?”
“I—”
“Why are you doing this?” The last word rubs against something in her throat. She presses her lips together as if angry at it.
I move my weight backward again, but the wings move differently. The upper pair spread—not far, but enough to widen behind me. Her eyes flick toward them.
She points—not at me, exactly. At the green and red lines dried across the nearest wing. “I painted those. You remember-m that, don’t you?”
My gaze follows her finger. The green line passes along one of the raised orange branches. Red runs near it, close but not touching. The hell is remember-m?
“You did what?”
“Your wings.”
She looks at them as though the answer should be sitting there waiting for me.
“Don’t make me say it.”
She painted my… no. Lyra’s.
A faint change passes through my back. Recognition would be too generous a word for it. Readiness. The same way my old hand knew where Jamie’s crown would be before I had to think about placing it there. I push myself another half-step away.
“No.”
Her face tightens.
“Lyra—”
“That’s not my name.”
She goes absolutely still. I hear the tiny hiss of steam from the tray behind her. I hear the curtain weight tap wood once. Somewhere much deeper in the wood, something gives a long low groan that I feel through the soles of these feet.
“My name is, um, Aspen.”
My name sounds almost normal despite the wrong voice. I hold onto that.
“Aspen,” I say again. “I’m Aspen.”
Her eyes move over my face as if the name might alter it while she watches. It doesn’t. The face stays Lyra’s. Whatever Lyra looks like. She whispers something I cannot catch. Then she comes toward me. Not fast—but that makes me move faster.
I lift a foot between us. “Stop.”
She does not. Her upper wings fold tighter so she can approach without crowding mine. One lower wing turns edgewise as she lowers. Her body knows exactly how much space is between us.
Mine apparently does too, as I feel her before she reaches me. I shiver. “I don’t know you.”
The words hit. I see them hit. Her shoulders draw backward a fraction and her wings fold close around her. I almost feel bad. Then she keeps coming. Her hand lifts—palm toward me, not grabbing—but that does not matter.
“Don’t touch me.”
My right hand snaps up first. My foot kicks too late, the distance from my knee farther than I remember. My shoulders and head pull back.
The wings do not retreat.
Did I do that?
One raised branch rotates outward. Then the next takes tension. The thin orange membrane between them widens with a soft dry pull. Her fingertips touch along one of the raised branches. Sensation arrives in a bright narrow line. Her skin is warm.
Aspen recoils with every part of herself she knows how to command.