I Can't Fly – 5

“She knew it was coming. She didn’t know what it was.”

Aspen looks up from the palm she has just decided to use.

The woman still holds one fist against the center of her chest. Her other hand rests open beneath the blue bead, green thread crossing two of her fingers.

She bends beside the breakfast tray and sets the bead down between the overturned cup and the bowl. It rolls half a turn before the thread catches under the cup’s rim. She pinches up one corner of the pale cloth and holds it beneath her nose. Red and blue-green soak into it while she holds it to her skin; when she lowers the cloth, the center has already darkened to black.

She tests the cloth by loosening her fingers around it. Nothing moves. She presses it against her chest anyway, then turns toward the rest of the pale cloth. Orange dust has settled over one side in the shape of a broad wing edge. A fold near the center still holds the deep sloping hollow made by Aspen’s heel.

The woman crouches and gathers the far corners. She brings them together, shakes nothing out, and folds the orange dust inside. Her palms smooth the length between them. When her finger brushes the dust, she stops.

The arrangement she has kept in her face comes apart without producing any single expression Aspen can name. Her mouth no longer holds itself tight around anger. The skin between her brows releases. No breath leaves her until she folds the cloth over the dust. Her hands move faster after that.

“Hey, sorry, what’s your name?” Aspen asks.

The woman looks up. “My Ainm?”

The correction is too immediate to be a question of pronunciation. Hit-t could have been a stutter. Remember-m had not. Now name and Ainm are apparently different things. Their language keeps cutting distinctions into places where Aspen has only one word.

“Whatever I’m supposed to call you.”

The woman brings the final third of cloth over and presses the fold flat. Her breath leaves hard enough that all four wings lower behind her.

“Would it matter?”

Yes?

The answer reaches Aspen cleanly and stays behind her lips. “I—uh, guess not. Then, who else here would know something about this?” she asks. “The dream. That red thing. How I get… away from here.”

The woman lifts the folded cloth and places it on the stool. “No one you can ask yet.”

“Why?”

“You cannot go outside.”

Aspen’s upper wings behind her spread before the threat has finished passing through her. The floor remains clear between her and the curtained opening, but the woman stands closer to it. A little band beneath Aspen’s ribs loosens before she understands why. She does not have to step through that cloth and find out what a world built around wings looks like. She can remain beside the wall where the gray plush proves home still exists, even if it exists badly.

But this room isn’t giving her any answers.

Aspen’s hands curl. “You’re keeping me in here?”

“What will everyone outside think when they see you?”

“What? Is Lyra someone important?”

The woman’s gaze drops. “Yesterday they saw her after I painted her. It was her Qimmo, so they called to her from the terraces. Every line is still on her wings.”

Aspen looks over one shoulder. The nearest upper wing adjusts to let her see and exposes more of the pattern than she intended. “I… see.”

“So they know who wore it yesterday. They know who she answers, who she avoids, how close they may come. You do not.” The woman taps against her knuckle with her thumb. “Not to mention, your scent—”

“Then they’ll know I’m not her. And they’ll panic?”

“They will know something is moving her body.”

The wing that reached for the woman folds another inch but does not join the others. Aspen feels every word along its root.

“I’m not something .”

“They don’t know that.” The words close hard. Nothing in the woman’s face softens around them. “And what would we even tell them?”

Aspen opens her mouth.

Something took seven minutes while her body continued pushing Jamie’s swing, smoothing his hair, tearing a leaf. A red figure performed those movements in a dream beneath another world. Lyra knew the figure was coming and gave it somewhere to go; now she is standing in Lyra’s painted body while Lyra is not.

She went to the treehouse. She offered her blood. She demanded an answer.

If she begins with the blood, she invited it. If she begins with the missing minutes, it used her. If she begins with waking here, the explanation still ends with a question she cannot answer: where did Lyra go?

No words come. The woman’s thumb closes hard enough on her knuckle to mark it, and her wings draw inward until the upper edges hide the lower pair.

“What do I do?” the woman asks nobody.

The aqua light strengthens. At first Aspen thinks moisture has moved across her eyes. Then the black wood around the cocoon changes with it. Each low mushroom cup beneath the rim fills from the center outward, pale aqua thickening along its gills until the silk above takes on a colder color.

The nearest mushroom bends. Not with the loose dip of something top-heavy. Its stem pulls into a curve. The glowing cup turns away from Aspen, away from the cocoon, toward something outside as precisely as a facing turning toward a sound.

Another follows beneath the tray. Then one beside the wall. The light does not simply brighten—it gathers toward the same side of every cap, each little cup presenting more of itself toward whatever stands beyond the room. A second cluster answers from outside the room, strong enough that blue-green leaks beneath the curtain and lays a thin bar across the floor.

The woman’s chin lifts. She does not ask what happened, instead she turns her face toward the curtain and draws one deliberate breath through the clearer nostril.

Aspen imitates her but only smells warm heartwood and damp mushroom flesh. The sweet drink spilled into the bowl. Steam gone thin above breakfast. The wet mineral edge of the woman’s blood, close enough to sit bitterly behind Aspen’s teeth. Nothing tells her who or what stands outside.

Aspen inhales again, harder this time. The breath dries one side of her throat.

Wait. Why are we sniffing when that thing is outside?

Aspen tilts her head.

Maybe smell works differently here. Is it more sensitive? Or am I doing it wrong—

“Hermit'to, may I come in?”

A voice reaches from outside without needing volume.

Aspen stops inhaling. The first word does not behave like the others.

Hermit.

She has heard a sound. She knows she has heard a sound. Two syllables spoken by a man she cannot see. A word she does not recognize, even if she should . But somewhere between the sound entering her ears and becoming language, something else begins.

There is no face attached to it. No remembered dictionary sentence. No image, no book page, no voice from school saying what the word means. Instead, Aspen becomes aware of a direction that she couldn’t perceive before. Inward.

Her eyes remain on the curtain, but the sensation turns the other way: toward a point held so completely in itself that approaching it somehow produces more distance instead of less. A person standing still while paths lengthen around them. Nearness failing. Every route ending with the same untouched center.

The impression is so immediate that Aspen checks her feet. She has not moved. Still the strange direction remains.

Hermit?

Something in the word is closed. One mushroom beneath the cocoon twitches. Its cap had been facing the outer room with all the others. Now its stem has pulled partly straight, not enough to turn fully toward her but enough that aqua crawls around the rim and brightens along the side nearest her ankle.

Then the woman answers. “Lyra cannot receive you right now.”

The mushroom bends away again.

Hermit from outside. Lyra from within.

“I understand,” the man says. His voice is smooth enough that the curtain seems to remove nothing from it. “I will remain here.”

Remain. The word hooks briefly into the unfinished thing beneath Hermit . Aspen presses her tongue against the back of her teeth.

The woman’s shoulders have gone rigid. “Why are you here, Hierophant?”

The second title enters as Aspen’s eyes lift to the direction the mushrooms point. Past the black heartwood. She searches for eyes where there are none. This word does not turn inward, instead it passes through. That is all she gets at first. A line continuing after it should have ended. Wood becomes an inconvenience rather than a barrier, and the faint pressure of being found on the wrong side of something.

Her shoulders tighten as the wings behind her lift by a fraction. There is a man there, and he has not seen her. Still, she has become horribly reluctant to call herself unseen.

The intuition does not finish. It begins to, then seems to encounter the first one. Hermit and Hierophant. The two sounds touch somewhere along her tongue as pain prickles suddenly along the bridge of her nose. Aspen presses two fingers there. It was not a headache exactly. A headache occupies flesh.

This feels as though the shape of her attention has acquired an extra corner and her skull has not made room for it.

“Something appeared·sel above this terrace before first light,” he says. “I came to ask what began·sar beneath it.”

The pain eases enough for thought.

Appeared·sel. Began·sar. More pieces, each spoken too cleanly to be a mistake.

He noticed something.

The woman did not seem to have noticed anything before she entered. This man came because of something above them. And somehow that feels consistent with the unfinished pressure behind Hierophant .

“Then why has only he come?” Aspen asks under her breath.

The woman glances at her and Aspen barely notices. If something appeared above the house, why is there not a crowd? Why has only one person walked up and politely asked permission? The thought collides with the pressure again. Aspen hates it immediately.

“Come in slowly,” Aspen says.

The woman turns fully toward her. Her clean hand closes around the edge of the folded silk, but Aspen keeps her attention on the curtain.

“Thank you,” the man says.

Something jingles in the next room. Not keys, this sound was too light and irregular. Air presses against the curtain as the light outside intensifies. Footsteps cross toward them.

One. The floor takes it.

Aspen feels the contact through the soles of her feet before the sound finishes.

Two . Measured. Heavy without dragging.

Three.

The glowing cups along the wall turn one after another. Nearest first, then the one beyond it, then the cluster beside the table. A sequence of little aqua faces tracking a body Aspen cannot see.

“Stop.” Aspen tries not to shiver. The next footstep does not happen. “Stay behind this one.”

The feeling beneath the word Hierophant finishes assembling. Completion arrives as certainty first, the way her hand once knew how hard to throw the moth before she could explain why six turns mattered.

She steps to her right. Only one step. The curtain gives no sign of anyone turning after her. No shadow changes beneath it and no shoe adjusts. But the pressure does. It had occupied the place where she stood. Now it occupies this one.

Cold moves over both forearms as she looks at the heartwood between them. It’s solid, thick enough that she cannot hear him breathing.

Above—seer—eyes—purple.

A mushroom beneath the cocoon tears itself away from the others.

Its stem pulls sideways toward Aspen so suddenly that the cap wobbles. Aqua gathers hard along the rim nearest her. Light climbs her ankle, distorting over the bones and tendons there, brighter and brighter until the blue-green nearly whites at the center.

Aspen looks down as the pressure behind her forehead splits.

Hermit. A center that makes approach fail.

Hierophant. A line that keeps going where barriers say it should stop.

They were positions, not definitions. Two pieces of something much larger become adjacent inside her. For one nauseating instant Aspen can almost feel empty places around them. Not words but places where words could go.

The impression opens farther than her thoughts do. Her vision gains a false depth—not blurring, not doubling, but the horrible conviction that the visible room is only the front surface of an arrangement continuing in directions her eyes have never needed to follow.

The man is behind the curtain and not hidden by it. Aspen is standing here, but Hermit presses the idea of here inward until the location begins to feel like something that could be held rather than occupied.

Her teeth ache. Aspen realizes she has clenched her jaw. She lets it go, but the inside of her head does not close with it. For a second the sensation is almost good—but then it stops. The mushroom facing her trembles and whatever made Aspen important to it passes. The stem bends back toward the curtain. Aqua drains from her ankle as the cup rejoins the others.

The room becomes flat again. Not fully. Never fully again.

“Is something wrong, Hermit?” he asks.

Aspen looks at the curtain. The delayed lower wing draws tight against her leg, but no hand touches the cloth. No face appears around its edge. He waits as though he already knows exactly where she is.

“You had-sh·sat a bright Qimmo yesterday, Hermit,” the man says.

-Sh·sat? Shat? What are you saying?

Aspen almost corrects him. The denial reaches the base of her tongue before she catches it. Whoever stands beyond the curtain already knows Lyra’s title, her Qimmo, and perhaps whatever those mushroom stems did. “What appeared above this terrace?”

Silence holds on the other side for one breath longer than an ordinary answer requires.

“There is a child crying·sel above these rooms,” he says.

Jamie?

Aspen shivers. A picture comes from every other time he tried not to cry in front of her and failed. It is enough to move her one step toward the curtain.

No–no. Who knows what he saw. Could be any kid.

“Then why can’t we hear anything?”

“...Have you forgotten how my eyes work, Hermit?”

Aspen looks at the woman. The woman gives one small downward movement with her clean hand: stop. Her eyes cut toward the curtain at the same moment a draft lifts its edge away from the curved wall.

Only part of the man’s face appears in the narrow opening. Dark, weathered flesh. A deep ridge running from beside his nose toward the corner of a mouth Aspen cannot see. Above it, one eye holds an iris of gray muddied with mauve and no pupil at its center. The eye is already directed at the woman’s raised hand.

The cloth settles over his face again.

“Is something wrong, Hermit?” he asks.

Aspen makes her voice pass through the unfamiliar throat without rising. “Where is the child?”

“Above us. Its face occupies much of the upper hollow.”

“It’s… face?”

“Very.”

The answer arrives with such distant courtesy that Aspen cannot tell whether he has made a joke.

“The mouth is open in a cry,” he continues. “There are no eyes. Two birth-lines emerge from the places where the eyes should be, pass through the roof of these rooms, and descend into the hollow.”

What the fuck? Umbilical cords?

Both lower wings draw inward until their edges brush Aspen’s calves. Cords do not come from eyes. Faces do not stretch above houses. Jamie is ten, not an infant, and no part of what the man describes should fit him. Still, he said child. Aspen cannot afford to discard any shape.

“Uh. Where do the lines go? Is the child a boy?”

“I cannot see their ends from inside.”

His voice changes direction slightly. Aspen imagines the pupil-less gaze lifting through the room’s ceiling.

“I can show you where they descend,” he says. “Will you follow me, Hermit'to?”

“She doesn’t go without me.” The woman’s answer arrives before Aspen can give one.

The man notices. Aspen knows because the silence is just long enough to hold it.

“Of course,” he says.

The woman returns to the tray. She picks up the blue bead by its green thread and closes it inside a pocket in the wrap across her chest. The little black bundle follows into a different fold, bound once more beneath a narrow strip of pale cloth.

The gray moth stays fixed above. Aspen touches the place beside her temple where the ornament used to hang. Only the red pin answers, still anchored in her hair; its end moves against her scalp when she lowers her hand.

“Okay. I’ll go,” Aspen tells herself.

The woman comes to Aspen’s side. She leaves enough room that their arms cannot brush and positions herself between Aspen’s nearest wing and the curtain without touching either.

Aspen lifts the weighted edge. The next room is wider, arranged around a low table and several shelves grown from the wall. She has time to see a cup left untouched and mushrooms shining beneath the table before the man takes everything else.

He is old in the face and nowhere else.

He stands taller than Aspen expects a person to stand in a room this low, broad through the shoulders and chest without becoming thick, his length carrying enough weight to make the room feel narrower around him. Age has drawn the dark flesh of his face into ridges, but they do not hang from the bones the way old skin should. The lines meet, divide, and stop like faults set into weathered clay. They look less as though his face has sagged than as though each expression was placed there long ago and given time to harden.

When he inclines his head, none of that age enters the movement. Three hazel wings fold behind him, their membranes uninterrupted except by the raised supports. Aspen counts again: upper left, upper right, one lower. The asymmetry bothers her before she knows why. And no circles stare back from those wings, no eye-shaped marks darkening the spaces between branches.

His eyes bother her more. Gray and dull magenta run together through both irises. They rest first on Aspen’s face, then the red pin caught in her disturbed hair, then the bright Qimmo lines crossing all four orange wings. The attention does not feel like ordinary looking anymore.

His gaze moves once to the woman standing guard beside her.

Whatever he makes of the arrangement changes only the deepest line beside his mouth. He looks upward again.

“Hermit,” he says, and steps aside to leave the path clear.

Aspen passes him without offering her back completely. The upper right wing makes space the way an arm might come up between two bodies in a crowd. He notices that too, or his pupil-less eyes happen to lower at exactly the right moment. He does not reach for her.

As they cross the room, his attention travels through the heartwood above. “One line passes there,” he says, indicating a dark convergence in the grain near the ceiling. “The other enters beside it, then separates.”

Aspen sees black wood, aqua caught along a grain that bends around a shelf and continues toward the outer room without any line passing through it. When she looks at the woman, she finds her watching the same empty place.

At least we’re both blind.

Hierophant walks beneath what only he can see. He moves without the testing steps, shortened balance, or careful turns Aspen expects from someone with that face. His body simply goes where he places it. His nearest hazel edge passes a shelf by less than the width of her thumb. The other misses the woman by nearly the same distance. He never looks at either obstacle.

The outer curtain waits ahead. He lifts it with his hand as morning enters vertically. Warm air moves along Aspen’s bare calves while a cooler current passes over the upper wings. Both pairs shift into it. Aspen looks for the hallway ahead. There is none. She looks for the next room. None.

Eventually, her eyes search for the blue horizontal line where ground becomes sky.

They do not find it.

The home continues for several paces as a rounded terrace—and then it ends. Beyond it is black.

More black.

Black above.

Black across.

Black so far below that distance would begin erasing texture, if the color hadn’t already. For several breaths Aspen cannot make the arrangement become outside. Outside had a sky and ground and walls that stopped. Here the walls continue until they become the world.

Below, the black expanse curves away into a hollow so enormous that her eyes keep trying to flatten it. Hundreds of openings interrupt the far interior wall, some no larger than pinpricks at this distance, each veiled by green cloth or edged with pale rails. Terraces grow from the vertical surface in shelves and lips and uneven rings, stacked upward and downward without any obligation to meet. The horizon is the heartwood, and the mushrooms are    .

The mushrooms are    .

Aspen’s body objects before her mind finishes, calves tightening. The black walls crawl down and down. Winged bodies cross between levels. One drops from an upper terrace, folds through a narrow gap, and opens again far below. Two others climb in a slow spiral without touching the walls. Someone carries a wide basket beneath their body while four cream-colored wings beat around its ropes. None of them needs a bridge. None of them searches for stairs.

Aspen has nowhere to go that does not require the structures attached to her back. A warm current rises through the hollow and presses beneath all four orange membranes. Their raised branches take the pressure before Aspen understands why her weight has shifted toward her toes. She pulls herself backward and the lower-left wing continues leaning into the current for one extra beat. Every route she can see eventually becomes air.

A terrace ends.

Air.

A curtainway opens onto a ledge.

Air.

The woman moves close behind her. Not touching. Near enough that Aspen can feel the interruption her body makes in the air. Every person crossing that hollow could look up and see Lyra.

The man’s pupil-less eyes remain raised above the ceiling they have left behind.

“The face begins there,” he says, pointing toward an empty region of heartwood several levels above. “Its lower jaw crosses the hollow.” His finger drops below their terrace. Far below. “Both lines fall nearly straight from it.”

Aspen follows his hand and sees terraces, mushrooms, a curtain opening as somebody begins their morning. No crying face. She searches the region twice. People live and move where he says an enormous jaw crosses them.

“They pass in front of us,” he continues.

Still looking upward, he turns and walks backward to the terrace edge. His heel leaves the wood.

Aspen’s stomach contracts on his behalf. The man takes one more step into nothing, and all three hazel wings open behind him with no stumble between standing and flight. He remains balanced in the air, his one lower wing angling many times a second, holding his heavy body level with the terrace while his sentence continues in the same smooth voice.

“From here, their descent is easier to follow.”

He assumes Hermit will follow.

Aspen makes herself cross to the edge of the terrace. The open hollow widens around each step. At the lip, the wood rounds beneath her toes and disappears. Lower terraces jut out at distances that make their people look small. Between them lie stretches of unobstructed air deep enough for a body to turn several times before striking anything.

Her knees tremble. The four wings open behind her, but the movement does not resemble help when she cannot tell which one has decided to do what.

The man lowers his gaze from the unseen face. “What is wrong, Hermit?”

Aspen looks at him suspended over the drop. She looks down once more. The nearest lower terrace does not come any closer, and the air between keeps moving.

When she raises her head, the unfamiliar mouth has already chosen a nervous smile.

“I can’t fly.”

The woman turns toward her. Her eyes travel over the four wings as if Aspen has said something about Lyra rather than herself: upper right spread into the rising air, upper left held too rigid, lower right bracing near the terrace, lower left arriving late and trembling beside her calf. Her lips part, but nothing comes out.

Before either of them can decide what to do, a body flies past the terrace below. Four pale brown wings beat in a staggered rhythm around a man carrying a loop of empty cups over one shoulder. His face turns toward Aspen. Recognition opens it immediately.

“Bright Qimmo yesterday, Hermit!”

Aspen cannot answer and the body answers anyway. Both upper wings rotate toward the caller, presenting the painted surfaces to the open hollow. The lower right wing angles downward and catches enough air to hold Aspen against the terrace edge. Her hips turn by a fraction. Her left foot settles where it can bear the change. Balance reorganizes around the passing stranger before Aspen has chosen to acknowledge them at all.

The caller waits for whatever should come next.

“Thank you,” Hierophant calls.

The person’s brows rise, but their wings have already carried them above the terrace. They give the Hierophant a short wave and continue upward, the cups knocking softly together until the hollow thins the sound away.

Aspen’s wings remain angled after them. Hierophant looks from the upper pair to the lower right, then to the left wing still completing its adjustment. Something changes along one of the old faults beside his mouth. It does not make him look kinder. It makes him look as though a usable piece has entered a problem.

His gaze lifts beyond Aspen, follows an invisible course through the air beside her, then drops over the terrace edge into the depth of Hinter.

“That’s a strange yellow,” he murmurs.

He extends one large, clay-dark hand toward Aspen. His eyes remain fixed below, following the empty air where he says the birth-lines descend.

“Well. It’s first light. Why don’t we teach you how to fly?”