What Wood Remembers - 11

Raine stays beyond the curtain until the mushrooms open. I was never good at keeping track of time, even when I had clocks.

At first, their cups hold the same aqua they have held all day. Then the nearest one loosens along a seam I thought was only a darker part of its flesh. A second thin layer opens beneath it, then a third, exposing wet gills that brighten as soon as air reaches them. One after another, the mushrooms under the shelf and along the floor turn themselves inside out until the room contains more light without anything having been lit.

I finish what she brought instead of thinking about it. Neither of us tries to fill the time. Sometimes I hear one of her wings shift against another. Once, the outer curtain lifts and three weights tap the floor; a voice crosses the hollow too far away for words to survive the wood, and Raine says nothing until the pressure of the passing wings is gone. I eat. The sap stops tasting like an intrusion and I don’t know whether to love it or not.

Jamie gets bored first. He stretches along the floor-silk, puts both hands beneath his head, and plants one sneaker exactly where I was about to lower my hip. “This is the good side.”

“You have the whole room full of sides.”

“Then why are you taking mine?”

“Move your foot, loser.”

He drags it back by less than the width of his shoe. My thigh presses down beside his leg, and three pale folds immediately climb around it.

The tips of Raine’s wings appear through the slit beside the table. “Which silk are you using?”

I look down. Orange dust remains in the creases of the silk I dragged out of the barricade. “Do I really need to use one?”

“It gets cold when the Sleeper shifts.”

“Oh yeah, that Sleeper Baby thing. What is it?”

She pauses before speaking. “Ulward.”

“It’s down? That isn’t what I asked.”

“It is what I know·sel.”

I keep my grumbles quiet. “Then, uh, I guess I’ll just use this silk here.”

She sighs. “I can’t see what you’re pointing at.”

Jamie smirks at me. Shut up, Jamie.

“The one you picked up earlier. It’s pale, and yeah. I fell on it when I woke up here.”

Her green tips go still.

“That one is mine.”

Jamie turns his head toward the curtain. I put a hand across his mouth before he can ask why a stranger left bedding in another girl’s room. He licks my palm.

I snatch it away. “Oh, alright.”

“I left it here.”

A weird feeling wells up in my chest, as if I don’t belong—but in a different way than before.

Jamie looks at me. “Did they have a sleepover?”

Do they have sex like normal people do? Wait—no, what am I thinking? It really could’ve just been a sleepover.

Wait. If this bod—AH STOP. Disgusting. Gross. Stop thinking.

Stop thinking.

I wipe my hand on Jamie’s raincoat and cough. He makes an offended sound and scrubs the wet place against my arm. “So, uh, what silk do I use?”

Her hand inches out from beneath the curtain, but she yanks it back, remaining silent for a moment.

“It’s fine. Just use it. I have another.”

I don’t know what to make of that.

“Fold the thicker section beneath your hips,” Raine says. Her voice has flattened into practical use again. “Keep the corners loose so your wings have space to breathe. If one catches around a root while you turn, don’t pull against it. Wake fully and free the silk with your hand.”

I find the thicker layers by rubbing them between two fingers. “Stupid hassle.”

“And don’t let two wet wings rest against each other.”

My upper wings are already trying to overlap behind me. I separate them. The inner surfaces drag for a fraction of an inch before coming apart, and a narrow coolness follows where the moisture had begun to hold them together.

“Why?”

“They’ll bind by morning. Scales get stuck.”

“Forever?”

“Until you rip them out or someone gentler separates them.”

Jamie raises his eyebrows. “Like picking a scab!”

Raine cannot hear him, but one of her lower wings gives a tired inward pull at the same moment. I almost answer for both of us. Well, whatever. Better he speaks stupid than not at—

The floor moves.

It begins with a fracture too deep to reach my ears cleanly. I feel it in the heel of my hand: one long grain forced against another somewhere under the room. Like earth shifting, but… wood.

Before that sound has finished, a smaller break opens inside it. Several dry cracks happen inside that one, each carrying thinner splittings, and those contain finer failures that enter the floor beneath separate fingers. I cannot tell whether something large is shifting below the tree or whether every layer beneath me is breaking in the shape of the wood around it.

All four wings close over Jamie. Their roots pull tight enough to lift my shoulders.

The sound is low but deep, larger than the room, the terrace, the whole hollow I saw outside. I reach for that depth and find skin. The floor continues grinding beneath my palm.

“Is that the Sleeper?”

“Yes.”

Another deep break travels through the first before the word has left her. The mushrooms nearest the wall draw their stems upward. Light thickens beneath their lifted rims. They knew it was happening—I need to pay more attention.

“Is it some kind of monster? Why is it doing this?”

Raine takes long enough to answer that the smallest splitting sounds finish and a new large one begins. “I don’t know what it is, but this is how we know it is time to rest.”

I press harder against the floor. The heat in my palm seems to be drawn into the wood as the mushrooms dim. “It sounds like wood. Maybe it’s part of the tree?”

“Maybe. The sap is drawn to it.”

“Then maybe it’s alive.”

“The tree is alive.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

The tree is full of aqua sap. If I can be sure that aqua is something like returning wants, then… how alive is it? Is it conscious? Why is it doing something now?

Jamie works one hand out from beneath my lowest wing and places it beside mine. The old absence begins gathering around the gesture. I refuse to finish measuring it.

“It does this every night?” I ask.

“Most nights. Sometimes it rests for several. Sometimes the movement reaches the upper bark.”

“And nobody went down to see what it was?”

“The Hierophants Roociward of our current one have said to ignore it.”

What the fuck are they seeing? Roociward must mean the past.

Wait, he mentioned those birth-lines going down from this room. Ah—but those only appeared with me waking here. Why? No, think about this.

His vision isn’t seeing through things. I’m clearly here, but he couldn’t see me. He can’t see me now that Emperor won’t go beyond my skin.

Oh. His vision has to relate to the scale. Do the mushrooms also lean to what has more weight by the scale?

Wait, no there’s more to this. If it was just dependent on scale, then why would he see a child and umbilical cords?

“Raine, um, when you smell people’s… ‘identities’, what kind of smells do you get?”

“That’s a sudden question.”

Huh, I must sound crazy. Whatever, this place is crazy enough as-is. “I was just thinking about it. Like if it relates to Hierophant’s vision.”

Night gathers more fully inside the mushroom cups, as if the sap is being drained from them. Raine shifts on the other side of the opening. “Do you remember the sensation of his title?”

“Yeah, like a line that doesn’t stop.”

“How do you want to interpret it?”

Interpret it? “Well, I thought it meant his vision doesn’t stop at physical things.”

“Can the line not also be a pillar? Or a limb?”

A limb..? “Why would you see it like that?”

“Well, the Rooci watch us from above.”

What—wait. “Are you saying he’s a limb of theirs?”

Raine seems to shuffle beyond the curtain. “If you could reach out and grasp a piece of something greater than you, would you ever want to let go?”

I tilt my head and put the arm out. It is especially pale against the black wood. Emperor will not extend beyond that pale skin. Jamie mimics the gesture, clinging to my side like a smaller bubble anchored to a larger one.

Or a circle.

“...Are we circles?” I regret even asking it once it leaves my mouth.

Raine chuckles. “Are we?”

If Hermit is something like inwardness, and makes a circle… oh. Inwardness. I glance at Jamie, who can only touch me.

I made a circle, and the triangle within it pointed back at me. But triangles that point up call for attention. When Hierophant wanted to make a square, he started with a circle.

“Why does everything start with circles?”

“You would have to ask the Rooci.”

But it’s true. The circle is the base. The circle is connected to Hermit, inwardness, but Hierophant made one before asking me to bless it. The spiral is Emperor, but it seems like anyone can make spirals. The titles aren’t powers only we can use, but… properties?

Inwardness. Scale.

Then maybe Hierophant’s is closer to extension?

It’s as if they’re describing something. The shapes aren’t complete on their own, they have to be used as combinations.

Circle to triangle to spiral.

Base, point, scale it.

If we are… some kind of base, then—oh shit.

Using the Emperor sense is then like making a spiral outside yourself… with your head? Well, it’s a scale.

“So Hierophant is reaching out to… reach out to the Rooci, and that is giving him some kind of special sight. No—he can connect with them more than others.”

“You are answering faster than I am speaking.”

“No—no, wait. Why do these titles fit like puzzle pieces? What are the other ones and why did Fool not—”

“Can these questions wait?” The fabric draws over the floor. “I’ll bring breakfast before first light.” She is standing.

The promise belongs so easily in this room that something along my right upper root leans toward it. I catch the movement before the wing can open.

“We can’t just end it like that. I was just on the verge of something.”

“Maybe. But I gave you an image, not an answer. I am not one of the Council. I don’t know enough to answer all your questions.”

But—that...

Raine waits.

“Okay,” I say.

The green tips withdraw. Her steps cross the main room. Three cloudy weights knock softly against black wood; cool air enters once, carrying the layered beat of her wings, and then the outer curtain settles. I listen until I can no longer separate her departure from all the other movement in the hollow.

Jamie rolls onto his side. “You think so much.”

“Yeah, I have to.”

“Bleh.”

He takes the section of silk he named the good side. I fold the thicker end beneath my hips and leave the corners loose, as Raine said. The silk tightens through several layers beneath me, taking the points of my weight separately and distributing them along the curve of the floor. Beside me, Jamie lies on a surface that remains nearly flat.

I notice once. Then I stop looking.

A connected bubble. A circle going inward, repeating.

One upper wing refuses every position I give it. If I lay it behind me, the painted edge catches beneath my shoulder and pulls at the root. If I bring it forward, it covers Jamie’s face. The lower right fits between my hip and the floor until I breathe too deeply. The lower left takes so long to follow each adjustment that I begin another before it finishes the first. Dried blood contracts along all four eye-marks, pulling most sharply whenever the membranes curve. The hair collects beneath my neck in an amount no head should have to account for while trying to sleep.

The cocoon would know where all of it goes. I keep my eyes on the floor.

Jamie shifts. His heel disappears beneath the upper wing I finally settled over us.

“You’re on my foot.”

“Your foot is under my wing.”

“That’s what I said.”

I lift the painted edge enough for him to pull free. “You’re so annoying.”

“That’s because the floor is harder on my side.”

“You literally picked that side.”

“Shut up.”

I close my eyes. Beneath the silk, the Sleeper begins another long fracture. Its smaller versions enter my hip, spine, shoulder, and every place the four roots meet the back. Lying still does not make it farther away. With no movement of my own to compare against it, the grinding seems to begin directly beneath the skin.

“Do you remember any moth facts from Google?” Jamie asks.

“I was never interested in them.”

“Then why did you get a moth plushie?”

I open my eyes. “It was cheap.”

“Poor bum.”

“Please go to sleep.”

He is quiet for almost ten breaths.

“I’m gonna fart.”

I sit up.

Jamie lifts his head. “Sorry.”

I look at the curtain. He shuffles behind me. “Do you want to go out there?”

“I heard that you should move around if you can’t sleep.”

“Then why not move in here?”

I look around the room. “Too claustrophobic.”

“True.” He looks pleased that this has become a shared failure. I free each wing from the silk before standing. Three lift clear. The lower left remains under a fold until pressure reaches the root; I stop, find the trapped edge with my hand, and pull the cloth away instead of forcing the wing through it. Jamie follows with much less hassle.

The barricade has already been opened enough to pass food and conversation. I do not dismantle it. I turn sideways to slide through and lift the weighted curtain. “Stay next to me.”

“I know.”

Jamie ducks beneath my arm. The cloth hangs at the same height all the way across him. I keep holding the curtain high enough for the body it refuses to admit anyway. When he reaches the main room, I follow and lower the fabric. The three weights find the floor.

The main room has changed while I was not looking. The mushrooms in this room all lean up, as if terrified of whatever is going on below. Smaller growths inside the wall reveal themselves wherever their rims catch aqua and disappear again when I pass. The shelves, tray marks, and spilled breakfast remain where morning left them.

Jamie peers under the table. “Those are bigger now.”

He was not here when they were smaller.

Connected bubble. Inwardness. Emperor will not go beyond my skin. The smaller bubble would not need its own window if it could see through mine. It fits. It fucking fits.

“Just don't touch them.” I open the curtain, and night enters as depth rather than darkness. I use the wind to muffle my sniffling.

Across the hollow, mushroom clusters peel up beneath terraces in long aqua rows. Their cups throw faint illumination against the black heartwood, catching bridges from below and leaving every surface above them unlit. Openings breathe behind green curtains at distances too great for me to hear anything beyond the Sleeper. Farther down, the lights become small enough to confuse with gaps in my sight. The heartwood continues below them until black contains black.

My head feels light, as if I’m thinking through glass.

Warm air rises along my legs. Cooler movement passes over the upper wings and changes direction where the membranes interrupt it. A few figures cross between distant levels, their wings briefly taking the light from one terrace and returning it to the next. None turns toward Lyra’s room. One person climbing along the opposite wall pauses with their face angled in our direction, then resumes on a path that carries them farther away.

It feels as if Hierophant’s story has given the terrace an emptiness people are choosing to maintain, but maybe that’s just because it’s night. The ambiguity comforts me.

Jamie steps ahead of me. My hand closes around his before he reaches anywhere near the rounded lip.

“I’m just looking.”

“No need to look.” I draw him back until a full body-length of heartwood lies between us and the drop. “Keep not doing that.”

We sit. The floor curves gently toward the edge, so I brace both heels against a raised seam in the grain. Jamie lets his legs stretch in front of him. They do not alter his balance. I keep his hand inside mine.

The mushroom cups are not all facing the same way. At first, those along the far wall seem to be pointing upward. Their stems have lengthened beneath them, bending each open face toward higher terraces. Then I find clusters above us doing the same thing: not toward the top of the hollow, but outward along the wall and away from its center. Far below, several rims catch enough light to reveal the backs of their caps. They have turned sideways and up. Every cup chooses a different direction, yet all of them expose their light to whatever lies farthest from one common place beneath the visible hollow.

The next movement of the Sleeper reaches them through the wood. Hundreds of stems flex. None turns toward it.

“They don’t like it,” I say.

“I wouldn’t either, if I was a mushroom.”

The nearest mushroom points toward us because we happen to be away from whatever it avoids. If I moved around the hollow, I could probably make its direction look like an answer meant for me. How much of my world was I wrong about? I keep hold of Jamie’s hand and look elsewhere.

Was home a bubble?

Ah—repeating thoughts. Not by sap but fear. This is tiring.

Three small trees still extend from the terrace wall around us. Before, these trees were only one more consequence to get away from: thin trunks splitting sideways from the three failed points, their branches turning through the last shape the triangle had tried to hold.

They have continued a little since then. New lengths, paler at their tips, extend almost parallel to the floor before dividing. Each division makes the same slight turn. Leaves remain folded around hard little fruits that arrived before the branches were thick enough to carry them.

The nearest fruit hangs over open air. Aqua passes along one side when the mushroom beneath it sways, revealing a spiral pressed into skin too tight for what has formed inside.

They kept it. The blood is gone. The enclosure is gone. None of that made the branches reconsider. The first wrong turn gave the next piece of wood the direction in which to grow, and that piece passed the direction onward. The tree does not have to know what I meant by a triangle. It only has to continue.

Jamie tugs once at my hand. “Can we eat those?”

“Are you trying to die?”

“You don’t know what they are. What if they don’t kill me?”

Jesus.

He leans sideways to see past me. “They look like those tiny pears that taste bad.”

“Then why do you want one?”

“I didn’t say I wanted one. I asked if we could eat them.”

The distinction seems worth having only because he found it. He settles against my arm, still watching the fruit.

He knew the mushrooms had been smaller. He has not asked why these trees grow sideways. The easiest answer arrives before I finish asking: he knows what I know because he is made from it.

Then is this me? Is this some kind of ghost? Am I hallucinating?

I ask him none of those.

The Sleeper moves again. The branch tips tremble, each smaller fork repeating the motion of the trunk at a reduced distance. The open mushrooms adjust after the movement passes. Their stems bend away, stop, and slowly return to the positions they held before. Aqua leaves one side of each cup and gathers along another.

The mushrooms respond to pressure in the wood and resume what they were doing. That might be returning. It still doesn’t mean they said anything. Apparently I have to keep learning that. So stupid.

Across my upper wings, the ‘Qimmo’ paint has dried into narrow ridges. Green follows the supports. Red runs near it. In one place, close to the root, the two lines almost meet. I remember red and green making yellow, and the two yellow birth-lines Hierophant says are still descending through the tree. I remember the only thing left with color when the forest failed: a sun I could still feel against my skin.

Mother bought yellow raincoats even when I wanted the green one. Yellow was easier to see between trees, she said. Easier to find beside a road. She made Jamie wear his until the sleeves swallowed his hands and made me tie mine around my waist when I refused to put it on. Protection and being told what to do had occupied the same fabric. I had called one love and the other annoying as if Mother could not have wanted both with the same hand.

The last thing from my world was Mother’s hand.

The first thing Hierophant sees here is a newborn child, connected to something below.

Maybe yellow is not the wanting. Maybe it is what happens after a want has something to attach to.

Maybe whatever brought me here is still attached to me from somewhere far below.

Is it you, Mother?

Could you tell me if something was copying you? It was playing in your skin, right?

Why was I brought to the treehouse? The only place where the clouds parted. Why is the sky blue? Why did the clouds return me there when I asked where I went? They are all still the same question.

Who am I kidding? Triangles drawn on trees. Clouds parted to make a circle. Colors I barely understood.

Home was never safe. Not in the way I thought.

The thought fits the sun. It fits those red nails. It fits Mother placing us inside colors she could find. It fits the raincoat beside me too well.

It’s still not the same as finding her.

Jamie has drawn his covered hand partly from mine. Yellow gathers in the folds between his wrist and elbow without taking any aqua from the room. He catches me looking and lifts the sleeve toward his face.

Is that why you’re wearing yellow?

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring at my arm.”

“I’m thinking.”

“About my arm?”

I could tell him to take the coat off. I could make him stand at the other end of the terrace and try again to find where he ends in the world. I could ask a question he would not know how to answer and decide that surprise means truth. By the time I finished, I could turn anything he did into evidence either way.

Whether he ends at my skin, or at the edge of home, am I supposed to care?

“Your sleeves are too long,” I say.

“They’re supposed to be like this.” He pulls his fingers all the way inside and closes the end of the sleeve into a soft fist. “See?”

I take it. Cloth fills my palm until his fingers push outward from within and find mine. His hand is warm. The small ridge of one knuckle catches beside my thumb. I hold the hand. The difference between his weight and mine, between his body and the terrace holding it, never reaches me. My skin, staying warm inside the failure, in his shape. I hold the hand.

Jamie’s thumb shifts against my palm. “You’re squeezing.”

“You deserve it.” I loosen my fingers. He does not take his hand back.

We sit through another movement. Without my explanations laid over it, the sound does not become less strange. The scale of it remains impossible to place. It enters the terrace beneath both legs and leaves through the wall behind us, one structure carrying the motion of another, wood receiving wood’s old direction and giving it to whatever comes next.

The black blood does the same. Raine’s continued the reach she had already begun. Hierophant cut his only after teaching it where to hide.

The blood reaches the end of the body and has nothing but its memory of the veins. Wood forces itself through wood. A spiral can go inward. A bubble reminding itself with its borders.

What does that mean?

I turn toward Jamie. He is not looking into the hollow. He is looking at my mouth.

The final vibration still lives low in my throat. My tongue has just left the backs of my teeth after the word veins. I feel the breath I used thinning against my lower lip.

“Did I say that?”

“Yeah.”

“Out loud?”

He raises the detective eyebrow. “No, I heard your thoughts with my secret powers.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you trying to sound fancy?”

“I wasn’t trying to sound like anything.”

“That sounded pretty fancy.”

I look at the sideways branches. Their smallest tips continue a decision made before they grew. “I wish I knew what it meant.”

“You don’t look cool.”

I am offended enough that the feeling arrives cleanly. “You don’t even know what veins are.”

“They’re in your hand.”

He says it as if finding the veins settles what the sentence means. I turn my palm toward the mushroom light. Fine lines show beneath skin that belonged to somebody before I arrived. Jamie draws one hidden finger along the deepest without touching it.

A split from the Sleeper travels downward—or upward. The way it enters my feet tells me only which side of this surface I occupy. The Rooci are supposed to be above Hinter. Mother came through a floor beneath me and I woke up hovering against a ceiling in another world. Hierophant’s birth-lines pass down through the roof. The blue opening in my sky looked overhead. The hatch in Lyra’s dream opened below her. But I feel as if I can place either world above the other depending on which floor I trust.

“So was this world above or below ours?” I ask.

Jamie considers the hollow as though one of its terraces might have a label. “Does it matter?”

I turn slowly toward him. He smirks. “You said that earlier, to that Raine girl.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

I look back into the dark.

“...Copycat.”