Author's Preface
The blood reaches the end of the body and has nothing but its memory of the veins.
A faint wet sound travels through the inward spiral. Blood reaches the red pin from the last tightening curve. The exposed wood has already filled with a thinner wetness of its own, warm aqua liquid lifting through the black grain, and the two fluids move together so closely that the light can no longer find a seam between them. There is nowhere left for either one to go, but the motion continues.
My knees seem to press nearer my chest, though the skin between them does not slide. The ache beside my hip and the cut beyond my shoulder touch me at the same time. I try to find which part of the circle lies farthest away. Every part answers against my skin.
Sounds remain beyond the barricade—wood under weight, cloth shifting, a voice trying to become a word—but I cannot place one to my left or right. The sense that arranged a tree inside a forest reaches the surface of my skin and returns. There is no larger frame. There is no scale that matters unless…
The red pin trembles. Its point leans, scores a short line through the wet center, and springs free. It strikes my shin before falling beside my foot. Where it stood, the heartwood sinks by less than the depth of a thumbprint. The depression widens without pushing my knees apart. Warmth rises from it and presses along both shins as if another pair of legs has been folded into the space between them.
I stop breathing. Something else does not.
Air enters close to my throat. It leaves across the backs of my hands. The wings are closed too tightly for another chest to expand inside them, but a second breath lifts the hair along my wrist.
“You were.”
His voice.
None of the wings move. Cold air enters along my cheek. The pressure remains around my skin, every turn of the spiral still close enough to touch, but something now breathes inside it with me.
I see the white rubber edge of a sneaker planted against the black floor. A dirty lace has been tucked beneath itself instead of tied. Above it, a raincoat gathers at one knee, yellow holding inside the dimness without taking any aqua from the mushrooms. Both sleeves cover most of his hands. His hair has been flattened over one ear and pushed up behind the other, as if he slept on one side and somebody tried to fix only half of it. He lifts his head. Nothing on him glows, but a soft bedroom light lies across one cheek where no lamp exists.
“Jamie.”
The upper wings cross behind his head close enough that the edge of one should touch his hair. My knees already fill the place where his shoes are. If I tried to measure the distance between his shoulder and my ribs, there would not be enough room for his arm. He sits there anyway, all of him fitted between one breath and the next.
“Jamie—Jamie, how…”
He looks at the hand lifted toward him, then follows the narrow wrist upward. His gaze travels over the hair hanging on my cheek, the face beneath it, and the orange membranes closed around us. His mouth opens. For a moment I wait for him not to know me.
“You look like a bug.”
My breath comes out in two broken sounds. The first closes my throat; the second shakes it open. Jamie raises one eyebrow. Only the left. The detective brow.
I hug him with the whole length of myself. One wing scrapes the floor. Another opens along the wall. One sleeve-covered hand becomes trapped between us.
“Ow—Aspy, my wrist.”
The name reaches me without stopping at the face he is looking at. My fingers go loose around his shoulder. Then I feel him beginning to pull away and close them too hard again.
I release him only far enough to find it. His right hand is bent beneath the sleeve. I pull the cuff back and turn the hand over. Four fingers, thumb, half-healed place beside one nail where he tore the skin with his teeth. I press each knuckle. I move the wrist carefully in both directions.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Does that hurt?”
“You hurt it.”
“Now.” I bend it again. “Does it hurt now?”
“No?”
I take the other arm. He tries to pull it away, so I catch the elbow and shove the second sleeve up. No blood. No bruise. I put both hands into his hair and feel across his scalp. He ducks, complaining, and I follow. I touch behind his ears, under his jaw, along the narrow bones of both shoulders. When I press lightly against his ribs, he twists so hard that his knee strikes mine.
“Stop. I’m not broken.”
“Hold still.”
“You’re making it hurt.”
My hands stop. Jamie drags both sleeves back over them and glares at me from beneath the hair I have made worse. His lower lip has the same pale split near one corner. I put my palm against his cheek. He turns his face into it with an irritated little push, as if my hand is simply in the way.
A drop falls from my chin and darkens the back of his sleeve. I wipe beneath one eye with the heel of my hand before he can look up, and the movement shakes another drop onto his cuff. Jamie rubs that one with his thumb, looks at the wet skin, then looks at me.
“You cry-baby.”
“No.”
He holds up his thumb. “I’m not even crying, and I’m younger than you.”
“I know.” I pull him against me again. “I told you to stay home.”
The words enter his hair. It smells like the shampoo Mother buys in bottles too large for the shower shelf and the old fabric of his SpongeBob pillow.
Jamie squirms enough to free his mouth. “You left.”
“That doesn’t mean you follow me.”
“I’m part of the team.”
He says it as though the answer has never required more than that. No blue triangles. No missing path. No hand rising through a floor. I loosen my grip so I can see him.
“How did you get here?”
“I followed you.”
“From where?”
He glances around the enclosed space, taking in the wing stretched behind him and the wet cuts in the floor. “From home.”
“...What?”
“Didn’t you come from home too?”
“Yes—but, no. What happened before you arrived here? Where’s Mom?”
His eyes drop toward the sleeve gathered over one hand. His thumb works beneath the cuff and pushes out a small point of cloth before disappearing again. My hand tightens at the back of his neck.
“I don’t know.”
The last warmth of her palm lies flat beneath mine again. Red polish, chipped thumbnail, ridges pressing into skin from the other side of the floor. I look at Jamie’s face for a sign that he has seen any of it. He has already turned toward the nearest upper wing.
“You have four,” he says.
“Um, yeah.”
“Weird. Can you move them?”
“Jamie.”
“What?”
I catch him by both sleeves and hold him at arm’s length. Ordinary sight gives me everything I ask for: the end of cloth against his wrist, the short line of skin before his hand disappears into the cuff, hair stopping at forehead, raincoat stopping at air. I can count the distance between our noses and see it widen as my elbows straighten.
I reach for the other sense. Jamie should occupy his own amount of this room. His weight should interrupt the arrangement between cocoon and wall. He should have a center the circle must contain beside mine. Instead, the relation passes over his shoulders, curls back along my arms, and ends at my skin.
I push him farther away. His sleeves pull tight beneath my fingers. His face becomes smaller to my eyes. Within the enclosed scale, nothing changes. He remains near in a way with no distance inside it, fitted entirely between my hands and the places my hands begin.
My stomach contracts. Both upper wings draw inward until their edges touch his shoulders. My fingers close harder around the cloth.
Jamie looks down at them. “Why are you squeezing me?”
I try once more to find where he weighs against the room. The sense passes through every boundary I can see and returns carrying only me.
Why is he not more surprised?
“Aspen.” His voice lowers. “Why are you being so weird?”
I pull him back against my chest before the question can make him further away.
“I’m just feeling weird today.”
“You look weird too.”
“Just stay here.” I turn him and put both of his feet inside the carved triangle. “Where I can see you.”
He tilts his head but doesn’t say anything. His left sneaker comes down across the wet groove. The black line shines beneath the tread. When he lifts his foot to turn, no print follows him and the liquid remains joined from one side of the shoe to the other. I look at the clean sole. Jamie follows my eyes.
“What?”
“Don’t touch that.”
“I didn’t.”
“You literally stepped on it.”
“That’s the floor.”
“I mean the black part.”
He looks down. “The floor is black.”
“The wet black part.”
“I wasn’t going to touch the blood.”
“You just di—how do you know it’s blood?”
“Smells like it. And my shoe touched it, so that doesn’t count.”
It is exactly the kind of distinction he makes when he wants a rule to remain technically unbroken. I hear myself begin to tell him why it counts. The explanation fails because the blood has not behaved as though anything crossed it.
I sit against the wall and pull him down beside me. He leans into my arm with enough weight to press my shoulder toward the wall. I move my hand between him and the wall. My knuckles find the wood. His shoulder remains against my palm from the other side.
“Stop doing that,” he says.
He gives me the eyebrow again, holding it there until I move my hand away from his shoulder. The nearest mushrooms have opened a little since the working folded inward. Every glowing cup remains angled toward the membranes around me. Jamie’s yellow sleeve passes between two of them. Neither stem turns.
I stop searching. I am tired of methods that can take a person apart without putting anything back.
Jamie reaches toward the orange surface behind him. I catch his wrist. “Don’t touch the wings.”
“Are they really real?”
“They’re real.”
“They look painted though.”
“They are painted.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Because I can feel them?”
He twists his hand out of mine and extends one finger toward a vein in the membrane before I can stop him. His fingertip lands on the dry green line. Sensation travels from that one point into my shoulder blade. I flinch. Jamie jerks his hand back.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I told you.”
“That’s weird.”
“You touching things after I tell you not to is weird.”
“No, it isn’t.” He looks past me at the second upper wing. “Are you a fairy now?”
The word strikes emptiness before reaching anything I believe. “No.”
“You kinda look like one.”
I sigh. “You don’t know what a fairy looks like.”
“Neither do you.”
I open my mouth, then close it. Jamie smiles because he thinks he has won something.
“Jamie, why do neither of us know what fairies look like?”
He looks deliberately at one wing, then another. He shrugs. “Ask google.”
“There’s no google.”
“Oh. Can you fly?” he asks.
“Apparently.”
Both eyebrows rise, and he shifts onto his knees. “Can I ride on your back?”
“No.”
“Come on. You didn’t even think.”
“I thought enough.”
“But if you have four—”
“No.”
“What if I hold onto your feet?”
“Jamie.”
“Fine.” He draws out the word until it has several unnecessary parts. “Well, what’s outside?”
“People.”
“Bug people?”
“Close enough.”
He starts to stand. I catch the back of his raincoat and pull him down.
“You can’t go out there.”
“I just want to look.”
“No. Stay here.”
“Why?”
I see the people beyond the terrace again, each one trying to smell a person through the face they recognized. I see Hierophant’s smile closing a new explanation around me while black blood repeats it in the air. I cannot place Jamie among them. The mushrooms cannot place him two feet away.
“Because they don’t know you.”
“They don’t know you either.”
“They think they do.”
His thumb stops worrying the cuff. He sits with me in the circle, knees pulled up and his hands hidden inside the sleeves, looking at a small gap between two of the wings at my back, as though something might pass through it. The right lower wing folds along his legs. The left begins late and bumps his ankle before settling over the other. Jamie lifts one covered hand and presses from beneath. The membrane rises with it. I feel the little warm shape of his knuckles without seeing them.
“Why do you keep touching the wings?”
“They’re cool.”
The four wings can keep air from his skin. They can hide his raincoat from the curtain gaps and leave only enough room for him to breathe. I adjust the upper edge near his head, then the lower membrane across his shoes. For once, I do not ask which movement belongs to whom. There is a cold place beside Jamie’s ear. I have something broad enough to cover it.
His hand comes out of the sleeve and catches a strand of unfamiliar hair hanging over my arm. “Does Mom know you look like this?”
The strand slips from his fingers. I almost pretend not to hear him.
“I don’t know.”
“Your hair doesn’t stop at your shoulders anymore. She’s going to be mad.”
“She’s stupid.”
“So why is it different?”
“What’s different?”
“Everything.” He studies the strand between his fingers. “Are you really still Aspy?”
I snatch the hair from him. My grip misses the first time because these fingers are narrower than the ones he remembers.
“You called me that. You know I’m me.”
“Well, that’s because you are.”
“Then yes. I’m Aspy.”
“Oh. Okay.” His eyes settle at the floor. The air seems to flow right through him, but I feel every bit of his weight.
The three weights on the outer curtain strike something in the next wood. This is not the small uneven taps left by somebody entering sideways with a tray. All three hit almost together. Air drives through the main room ahead of several hard wingbeats and presses the bedroom curtain against the barricade. The pale corner of floor-silk lifts from the gap, then sucks back into it. Mushroom cups beneath the table turn toward the outer room in a quick succession of aqua.
The first impact pulls my head around. Jamie remains beneath my chin, worrying the edge of one sleeve between his teeth. Only when my arm tightens across his chest does he look toward the curtain too.
Footsteps cross the outer room too quickly for the old body I remember on the terrace. It must be him. He stops at the barricade.
The table does not move. No hand tests the stool or reaches beneath the curtain. Silence gathers on the other side, interrupted by a breath drawn close to the floor. The narrow slit beside the table darkens. He touches the curtain without lifting it. The cloth draws tight around a brow, the weighted edge rises by less than the width of my fingernail, and an eye enters the gap.
His pupil-less, muted magenta eye. The iris passes over my knees, the wings around Jamie, the hand gripping his sleeve, my face. It reaches the wall, returns to me, and passes over everything again.
His eye does not stop on me.
The old ridge above the eye is pulled higher than I have seen it, opening a thin wet line of flesh beneath the lower lid. A fine tremor moves through the iris each time it returns to my face. Nothing rearranges into the distant patience he wore outside. For the first time, Hierophant looks afraid without choosing how the fear will appear.
“Where are-sh you?”
His smooth voice reaches me through a gap barely large enough for the question. The eye is a few paces from the body. It has just crossed my face twice. I wait for the mockery to show itself and find only that small, uncontrolled tremor.
“What?”
Jamie turns toward him only after I speak. I catch the front of the yellow raincoat and pull him behind me.
Hierophant squints, his iris finally following my hand. It stops where my fingers close around cloth he cannot see, then travels back up my arm. “Who are you speaking·sut to?”
He's only used sut when making guesses.
“Get behind me,” I whisper. The circle offers Jamie nowhere that is fully behind. He crouches against the wall and presses one covered hand into my back. I move between him and the slit. Both upper wings rise from the floor. The right lower folds across his knees; the left follows after and closes the remaining opening near his feet.
“Is that the eye guy?” Jamie whispers.
How do you know him?
“Yes. Be quiet.”
The eye in the slit moves again. It passes over the space beside my hip, through the place Jamie’s head occupies, then returns to the hand he has knotted in my clothes. Hierophant draws a slow breath. It catches before he finishes.
The outer curtain weights strike the floor a second time.
“Hierophant?” The woman’s voice crosses the main room with rapid steps beneath it. “What did you see?”
He does not look away. The gray-magenta iris keeps trying to place me somewhere beyond the visible edge of skin.
Green crosses the smaller opening above the tray as one folded wing presses on the other side. Blond hair lowers into view after it. The woman crouches beyond the barricade and pulls the curtain no farther than the gap already permits. Her eye finds mine at once.
“She’s there·sel.”
Hierophant’s lower lid tightens. “Tell me where the body is·sel.”
He wants perception. He really can't see me, but why?
The woman’s gaze moves between his eye and my face. “Move.”
“Do not break the boundary.”
“I’m not leaving her like this because you don’t understand what you’re seeing.” She rises out of the smaller gap. A moment later, her clean hand appears beneath the curtain and closes around the edge of the table. “I’m moving this enough to reach you.”
The table shifts by a few inches. One leg presses harder into the stool. The shallow bowl beneath it gives a small wooden complaint. The tray bows but does not slip free. She is trying to open one place at a time, watching me through the slit between each pull.
I fold both arms around Jamie. Her hand stops on the table.
The woman’s eye drops to my wrists. It follows the curve of one arm through empty air, finds my other hand spread across a shoulder she cannot see, and returns to the space against my chest. Her lips part behind the curtain.
“What are you holding·sut?”
...Sut? You're guessing?
I look down. Jamie’s cheek presses beneath my ribs. He has stopped trying to see around me. His fingers are twisted so tightly into the cloth at my back that the covered knuckles make one hard row. Fear has drawn his mouth inward, but his eyes remain on the woman’s hand instead of mine.
“Does it matter?”
Her fingers loosen from the table and the wood settles back the fraction she moved it. She does not pull again.
“Why can’t you all just leave me alone?”
All four of my wings snap open. Air strikes the curved wall and lifts loose orange dust from the floor. One upper wing spreads toward the slit, its raised leading branch pulled taut between us and Hierophant’s eye. The other begins to turn toward the woman. This time I feel the turn before it finishes. I do not drag against all four wings. I find the high root making that one choice and pull across it. The branch rotates away from the woman’s hand.
The lower pair open toward the barricade beneath it. Green and red pass through the aqua light as I lay the fourth wing’s edge over Jamie’s head.
Nothing corrects me back.
“Why?” I repeat.
The woman removes her hand from the table. Hierophant remains fitted to the opening.
His iris moves along the blood-filled circle, follows the shared groove from the abandoned square, and enters the inverted triangle. It circles toward the point beneath Jamie and me. There it fails again. No line leaves the enclosure. No part of the room bends inward to locate what the body is protecting. His breath warms the curtain edge, stops, and begins again.
“Hermit,” he says quietly. “Every path I follow turns back at your skin.”
His iris returns to the arms closed around somebody he cannot see. “What are you afraid will get in?”
“Don’t call me that.” The words come out before I know how many others have crowded behind them. My throat tightens around the next, forcing me to take air through my mouth. “You told all those people.”
“I gave them a way to understand what they had already—”
“You said I was reborn...-l.”
Hierophant’s eye stays on the place my face occupies. I cannot tell whether he has found it or only knows where to keep looking.
“Do you think I wanted that? Am I some fucking prop to you?”
“Their doubts needed form,” he says. “A public contradiction without form would have become dangerous.”
I wish I had a response to that.
“Aspy,” Jamie says behind me. The name catches my next breath. It does not change the three wings held toward Hierophant. The fourth stays across Jamie.
“You told them to let me close.” I have to stop in the middle and swallow. “So leave me closed.”
“I cannot find·sin you.”
Can't smell me, huh. “Then stop sniffing.”
The tremor in his iris stills.
“He was right,” I say. “You’re bored. I saw that smile on your face then—this is like a game to you.”
Hierophant pulls back from the slit by a fraction. The eye remains visible, but the aqua reflection leaves its surface. On the other side of the barricade, no wing moves and no cloth shifts. For several breaths, he does not defend himself.
I keep one hand on Jamie’s shoulder and point the other toward the outer room. “Send them away.”
“Most have left the terrace.” His voice has recovered its smoothness. It does not recover the distance. “Many remain within sight of it.”
“I don’t want anybody to cut themselves for me again. And you stop—” The sentence breaks when my breath does. I start it somewhere else. “Stop telling people what I am when I didn’t say it.”
The gray-magenta iris shifts toward the woman’s gap, then returns. He takes a moment before he speaks.
“By midday, every inhabited level of Hinter will have made another account of you. Some will be kinder than mine. Some will not.”
“...So what? Am I supposed to be grateful to you?”
He breathes out through his nose. “Whether you are or not, it does not matter.” His visible eye stills.
“What those ulward make of you will reach the Rooci. What the Rooci make of you will not stop at you. Their regard will fall upon the Council, and upon Hinter with it.”
I pause. He continues, the skin around his eyes drawing close.
“You are not the only one they watch here.”
For one second, the fine tremor returns to his iris and his upper lid lowers over gray and muted magenta. When it opens again, the careful distance has been fitted back into place.
“You may rest today. The Rooci expect·sut you to—that is the mercy of the story I’ve given.”
He had made an inference sound like permission, but I cannot find an answer that changes any of it.
“But know they will not forget you. Hermit, you are reborn-l·sat. There is nowhere you could hide beneath the Rooci, and that is a blessing.”
He looks up to the moth and lets me see that the look is deliberate.
“You will want to learn.”
The eye withdraws. Cloth settles into the gap. A knee shifts on the other side; weight rises from the floor without the slow adjustment I expect from someone so old. His footsteps cross the main room.
He is gone.
The bedroom curtain relaxes against the table, stool, bowl, tray, and compressed silk. Every gap remains. Through the narrowest one I can see a sliver of the main room and the living light beneath its floor.
The woman remains beside the barricade. “I… I can leave food,” she says. “Something to drink.”
My gaze drops to the black line in the circle. Jamie’s sneaker rests across it without a mark on the sole. His hair is worse where my arm pressed it flat, and a wet place from my face darkens one yellow shoulder.
“Was he right?” I am not sure who I am asking.
“No, Aspy.” Jamie holds my hand.
The woman looks me in the eye. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
I avoid her gaze. “This isn’t fair.”
She says nothing.
“He can’t judge me. What am I supposed to do? Learn what?”
She says nothing.
“What? Why won’t you say anything? I get pulled out there and they all fucking cut themselves like a cult and nobody even—do you think I’m pathetic or something?” Her eyes lower as if in pity. How could she agree with him? “Is it pathetic to just want to go back home? Or… hell, I can’t even get peace and quiet to myself. The fuck do you want from me? Why can’t you just send me back? Why is…”
The woman takes a sniff in my direction. Her eyes do not dim this time.
“You are-sh here in her body, and I don’t even know why. What could I possibly tell you?”