A Piece of the Night - 12

I don’t remember falling asleep.

I remember going back inside. I remember Jamie arguing that his side had become worse after I refused to trade. I remember moving one lower wing out from under his knee and hearing the Sleeper divide one long break into smaller ones beneath the room. Then the night has an edge, and on the other side of it Jamie is saying:

“Myon~ myon~ myon~”

The missing join catches beneath my ribs before my eyes have opened. My hand closes on silk as my fingers find the same thick fold I put beneath my hip. The air smells of warm heartwood, dried blood, and the lack of paint. Nothing has moved me.

“Myon~ myon~ myon~”

Good God. One of his sneakers rests on the outer edge of my right upper wing. “Get off.”

Jamie rocks his heel against it. The pressure travels inward through every fork between his foot and my damn spine. “I thought we would wake up back home.”

My eyes open. He is lying on his stomach beside me, chin resting between his covered hands. Yellow sleeves cover his wrists. His hair has flattened even farther on the left side during the night. He watches my face long enough that I have to make it do something other than what it wants.

“We’ll figure something out.” I push myself onto one elbow. “Now get off. These things are sensitive, stupid.”

He lifts his foot. I pull the wing free and begin folding it against my back. Before the edge passes him, he catches one of its raised supports between both covered hands.

“I’ve changed my mind, Big Apple. Don’t go.”

I stop. “You stup—ugh. You weren’t this clingy yesterday.”

“You fell asleep too fast.”

The wing remains suspended between us. “You were awake after me?”

“Obviously.”

He has had enough unsupervised time to turn Aspy into Apple.

“For how long?”

He shrugs without releasing the support.

The mushrooms beneath the cocoon are dim enough that no change in their cups could give him a count. There is no clock, no window, no Sleeper sound now to divide the dark into movements. He could have been awake for five minutes or most of the night with nothing in this room willing to mark the difference for him.

“Were you scared?”

Jamie huffs through his nose and looks away. “A boy has nothing to think but thoughts.”

Wanna sound fancy, huh?

The accusation arrives so quickly that for a second I only stare at the side of his face, preparing to use it against him. Then the sentence finishes.

He had a piece of the night I wasn’t in.

I still don’t know what made him. It does not put his weight into the silk or make Emperor find him outside my skin. I sit up, catch him beneath both arms, and lift.

He jolts. “What are you—”

I stand and turn with him. Time to spin. His legs fly outward, one sneaker striking my thigh. The upper wings open hard enough to stir my hair while both lower wings widen around my hips, correcting for a weight no floor in Hinter admits I am carrying. We spin another half turn before my feet stop.

“Put me down!”

I do. Jamie lands with both knees bent, takes two sideways steps, and hits me in the stomach with the flat of one hand.

I smile. “Are you dizzy?”

He glares.

My smile deepens. “Are you angy?”

“You stupid!”

Thank you. Thank you for letting me have him.

My sight pulls wet at the edges. Jamie’s anger disappears so abruptly that the hand still raised against me has nowhere to go. He lowers it. “Why are you crying?”

I wipe beneath one eye. More follows. “I’m not.”

“Stop being such a crybaby! I didn’t even cry when I was alone!”

“Heh-heh, you little baby.”

“I’m not a baby!” His voice rises on the last word, angry again because alarm has failed to fix me. “Don’t spin me again! I have a reputation.”

I catch him before he can back farther away and press one palm over the flattened part of his hair. He ducks, but I follow long enough to smooth it once.

“What time is it?” I ask. “I don’t hear the Sleeper anymore.”

Jamie looks around as if time might be stuck to the wall. The mushrooms have drawn their aqua deep into the gills. Their stems no longer wrench away from the place the Sleeper moved, but they are still dark. Above the hidden cocoon, my moth keeps its tear and every older defect.

“What are we going to do?” Jamie asks.

The question waits while I wipe my face on the inside of my arm. Does this place have showers?

“Because there aren’t any games here,” he continues. “Or TV. Or your laptop.” He sits back on the floor-silk and begins counting losses on his fingers. “And you said I can’t touch the mushrooms. And you wouldn’t let me explore. And there’s no—”

His mouth pauses.

“...There’s no school.”

He gets to his feet again. “There’s no school!”

While he celebrates, I look down at the silk. Orange dust and red-green paint chips have collected in its deepest creases. I drag the side of my smallest finger through it and sweep the dust into a rough circle. HOME goes inside without being written: Mother, whatever remains of the treehouse, whether I can trust what Emperor told me about it.

I make a second circle. LYRA begins smaller. The name occupies a body’s worth of questions inside a mark no wider than my palm: where she went, if she’s dead, what she thought she was giving somewhere to go, and what she knew.

The circle is too small. I widen it until its edge nearly touches HOME.

The third circle takes the most room and refuses one name. FAIRIES belongs there, except I no longer know who taught me the word. The RED THING belongs there, connected to WHAT TOOK MY TIME. I leave the center blank and give all three phrases to the boundary.

Jamie stops celebrating when he notices what I am doing. He crouches across from me. “Is that a clue board?”

“What do you think?”

“Meanie.”

Raine probably knows more about Lyra than anyone else I can ask. That is exactly why I cannot begin by asking her to list everything Lyra said, touched, feared, or planned while I sit in the body that does all of those things the same way.

Hierophant… ugh. But he made the problem public. A reborn Hermit can ask what Hermit used to know. I can question people about Lyra’s life and let them mistake the questions for whatever rebirth is supposed to have removed.

He said I would want to learn.

Fuck him. But if it’s morning, or before whatever First Light is, then they might start pressuring me.

I picture the fault-lines of Hierophant’s face arranged around that enormous smile and raise my middle finger toward the wall.

“Who are you flipping off?” Jamie asks.

I look at him. “You don’t know?”

“How would I know who’s inside the wall?”

My finger stays raised. I thought he knew what I knew. Hm.

Thirty-seven.

I lower my hand. “What number am I thinking?”

Jamie’s eyebrows draw together. “What? Ten?”

“Nothing.”

He knows Aspy. He knew about the mushrooms. He wasn’t surprised about the things I knew, but… only up to then? No, it’s stranger. The difference reaches backward. He recognized me through this face as soon as he appeared. Later, after looking longer, he asked whether I was really me. The first answer came with him. The doubt had to develop afterward.

I do not know whether that makes him more independent or only better at continuing. I know it gives me no reason to ask thirty-seven again.

“What do you think we should do, Jamie?”

He raises one eyebrow. “Figure out the mysteries.”

“Wow.”

“What?”

“Nothing. That’s just… very specific and smart.”

He frowns. I look down at the three circles.

Emperor did not fully show me what was inside my memory gaps. It let me feel them from the edges. Hierophant can ‘extend’ to the Rooci, or something.

And if the Hermit thing is inwardness, maybe that’s why he can’t see me. Was it the inverted triangle? The blood?

Ah whatever, the Council Titles seem more like tools than jobs. If each is like a different way for a person to meet the same world, then learning more may give me more than Lyra’s history anyway.

Oh—shit. Hierophant is extension. Could I… extend into a memory gap?

I close my eyes before Jamie can ask why I have gone quiet. I recall the edges: Jamie standing in the doorway with both hands disappearing into his sleeves, then the treehouse. And the new moment with my palm against the blue triangle on a tree. Their boundaries are clear. I hold them apart and think of Hierophant.

A line that keeps going where barriers say it should stop. A limb to grasp at what’s beyond me.

Go, then.

The doorway recedes. A hallway appears beyond it. My foot crosses the apartment threshold and finds a step I do not remember taking. Another follows. The building supplies an exit; the exit supplies a street; the street begins placing trees ahead of me.

For one second, I almost believe it.

Then I look harder. Every step arrives only when I ask where the next one went. The trees have fronts because I am approaching them and nothing behind them until I try to turn. Leaves move after I remember there should be wind. Jamie remains somewhere behind me because I already know he followed.

I think I’m just extending the answer I expect across it.

The thought breaks the route. Hallway, blue triangle, and treehouse collapse without taking anything from me. Jamie returns to the doorway. My hand returns to the marked trunk. The two scenes meet along the same impossible edge.

I open my eyes. Emperor did not need me to make the world do anything. It just… worked. This contains that; that becomes small inside something larger. Hierophant feels different. A line may need somewhere outside my head to continue.

My fingertip lowers toward the dust between the circles. Do I have to make the shape physically? If dust is not enough, there are already cuts in the heartwood. I could deepen one. Give the line a surface. But where would I point it? Shit. Need more information.

I raise both eyebrows back at Jamie.

“Let’s figure out the mysteries.” After I get better tools.

“Yeah!”

My wings answer with one warm, shallow buzz. Cold remains along the center of my spine.

We keep looking at each other.

“How?” Jamie asks.

“Uh. I’m thinking.”

“You said it like you knew.”

I was just trying to make you happy, idiot.

Raine promised breakfast before First Light. Is that when all the mushrooms go back to normal? Maybe it’ll be easier to tell out there.

“Let’s look outside,” I say.

It sounds like a first step because I make it one. I leave the three circles in the silk and shift the barricade. Jamie stays beside my leg through the main room. The mushrooms beneath the low table have not opened, but the darkness inside their cups has thinned. I lift the outer curtain.

Fool is on the terrace.

He jerks upright at the same time I stop. The blindfold turns past me, returns, and fixes on my face. Four wings flare behind him, every dark dot briefly separated as the membranes draw taut.

“Oh,” he says. “Right. I can’t smell you.”

Jamie leans around my hip. “Blindfold kid.”

I put one hand against his shoulder to keep him from stepping out first. “Why are you here?”

Fool’s wings settle without fully folding. He looks about fourteen until he becomes still; then the blindfold and the way his weight never quite commits to the terrace make age less useful. “I have three reasons.”

Uh-oh. “Okay, what are they?”

“Well, you were reborn.”

“...Yeah?”

“I wanted to figure out what that meant.”

“So you were curious?”

He turns toward the three sideways trees. In the dimness, their spiral-marked fruit hangs hard and small between folded leaves. “I also wanted to see the branches have their First Light.”

I squint. “Will something happen to them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah—so you wanted to come and see.”

He smiles. “Exactly.”

If you aren’t lying, then I like you, Fool. “Okay, and what’s your third reason?”

“I wanted-sh to feel what First Light did to this terrace. It’s closer to the Sleeper than mine.”

The altered ending catches in my head. -sh. The one I used when I couldn’t claim I was-m in Lyra’s body. Why would Fool be conflicted on his own wanting? He gives it no more attention than First Light. One of his upper wings makes a small wavering motion while he attends to the branches.

I pause. “Wait, why didn’t you knock or something though?”

“Knock? On what? The wood?”

Ugh, no doors. I look back at the curtain I just opened. “Why didn’t you come inside, or I don’t know, make yourself known?”

“I didn’t know if you were still closed or not.”

“Well… do you want to come inside? I have some questions for you too.”

“No.” He lowers himself onto the black heartwood. “I need to touch the terrace for First Light.”

He lies flat on his back and spreads all four wings. The dark dots do not form any picture I can name. They continue in uneven rows along membranes thick enough that the grain disappears beneath them.

Jamie looks up at me. I look at Fool occupying most of the available floor.

“Could you move one?” I ask.

Fool folds the nearest lower wing inward by a hand-width. I sit cross-legged beside him and draw Jamie into my lap before he can choose the edge. His raincoat gathers between us. Two of my wings rest open behind my shoulders; the lower pair curve around his legs.

Fool angles the blindfold toward me. “You seem smaller·sut.”

I look down at my hands. “What do you mean?”

His upper wings give the same small wavering movement. After several seconds, both lift from the wood in a shrug. “Wish I knew.”

“Are you using Emperor on me?”

“Emperor doesn’t pass my skin.”

The answer kills my next question before I can ask it. I look at Jamie. He is picking at one loose scale on the edge of my lower wing. I stop his finger with mine. Whatever happened to Fool lasted long enough that he speaks of it as an ordinary limit.

I do not ask him what made it close.

“Uh, yeah,” I say.

The line of Fool’s mouth loosens slightly. His wings return to the wood. His covered attention remains on me. I endure it until the contradiction becomes annoying.

“Can you see through that?”

“Eh. Not really.”

“Then why wear it?”

“Things get harder when I can see.”

“Huh? What things?” Is he like Hierophant?

His upper wings lift and settle. “Just things.”

I sigh. Jamie taps my arm. “Stop that. You kept doing that in your sleep.”

I tap the top of his head. “Shut up.”

Fool’s wings draw in.

“Sorry. Not you.” I move my hand away from Jamie’s hair. “I was just thinking.”

Fool turns the blindfold toward the space beside my chest. He listens long enough that Jamie stops rubbing his head and looks back.

“...Is someone-n with you·sut?”

“N—”

Wingbeats rise beyond the terrace before I can answer. Green appears past the lip first. Raine rises with the breakfast tray held level in both hands, her four wings beating around it without sending enough air across the surface to spill anything. Fool draws one dotted wing off the landing space. She steps down, turns—and stops.

Her gaze finds me already outside. It moves to Fool lying across the heartwood, then to my arms closed around the place Jamie occupies. Her nostrils widen with one small breath before she can prevent it. Nothing reaches her.

One corner of her mouth pulls inward. She smooths it before lowering the tray. “I’ll place breakfast inside.”

She looks at the opening beside my knee rather than my face. I move both lower wings clear. Fool folds another wing against himself. Raine passes between us and lifts the outer curtain with her shoulder, carrying the tray into the main room.

I break the quiet. “So when is this thing supposed to start?”

Fool smiles. “In three.”

“Two.”

“One.”

Nothing happens.

I start the count this time. “In three.”

“Two.”

“One.”

Nothing happens.

Jamie farts.

Warmth rises through the terrace in a broad, slow pressure. I shoot up and look past the edge. Far below, one row of mushroom cups brightens. Aqua reaches the rims and leaves them swaying as the next row above opens into greater light. The change climbs the hollow by levels. Black terraces acquire edges, lose them when the mushrooms tilt, then return them to the level above.

By the time the wave reaches us, heat has entered through both soles. A fine jitter climbs my calves. It passes the knees, reaches my hips, and divides among four roots. Every wing lifts.

Fool has kept his spread flat against the heartwood. Aqua enters the membranes from beneath and becomes visible along his veins before it reaches the dark dots. His whole body shivers at once. He giggles.

Jamie drops to both knees beside him. “They’re like light-up shoes!” He puts one hand above the nearest glowing vein without touching it. “I want wings.”

The reaction belongs to him so exactly that for a moment I only watch his face change with the moving light.

Something tightens along the sideways trees. The spiral on the nearest fruit deepens. Its skin draws inward along the mark, then swells beneath it. One by one, the other fruits pulse and grow, not by much—each gains less than the width of my fingernail—but every branch bends under weight it did not carry a breath ago.

I point. “Are those edible?”

Jamie turns toward me. His betrayal is complete.

Fool rolls to his feet. Before I decide whether that is an admission, he steps to the nearest sideways trunk, plucks two fruits, and holds one out to me.

I accept it. The skin is warm and too firm, the spiral raised beneath my thumb. I’d never take a bite of it, I’m just curious. Who knows what kind of germs it might have? Or what if it’s poisonous? Or is the word venomous? No, it’s definitely—

Fool bites his. His teeth break the skin with a dry little crack. He chews once.

Everything around his mouth pulls toward the center. His chin tucks. Both shoulders rise. The upper wings lift straight from his back while the lower pair clamp along his legs, and even the blindfold wrinkles where his face tries to contract beneath it.

He keeps chewing because the alternative is apparently admitting the fruit has defeated him.

The outer curtain moves. Raine steps onto the terrace. Her eyes find Fool’s face, drop to the missing bite, and move to the untouched fruit in my hand.

I hide it behind my back.

Both upper wings close partly around my shoulders. The lower pair follow, making a layered orange wall around an object Raine had already seen.

“Do not eat fruit grown from an unfinished Council working,” Raine says.

Nobody answers.

She looks at Fool. “Why did you eat it?”

“She asked if it was edible.”

I avoid their gazes. “No I didn’t.”

He stares at what remains in his hand as though the fruit has broken an agreement he never told it they had.

“Do you feel different?” Raine asks.

Fool’s wings make one small, uneven lift. “My mouth is tingly.”

“Anywhere else?”

“No.”

“Tell someone as soon as that changes.”

He nods.

Raine holds one palm out without looking at me. I sigh before bringing my wings apart and placing my fruit in it. Fool adds his bitten one. She sets both near the wall.

That idiot made me look silly. “Is there anyone who can explain this stuff who’s…” I glance across the hollow, half-expecting Hierophant’s pupil-less eyes to rise over another terrace. “Not Hierophant?”

Raine’s attention remains on the fruit. The upper edges of her wings ease apart while she considers.

“High Priestess might.”

I wait for the sensation to hit me—but nothing comes. “Why don’t I feel anything? Is her title like Fool’s?”

Raine’s thumb moves across the place where my fruit warmed her palm. “No. You felt it yesterday.”

“Huh?”

“When you folded Hierophant’s circle into a triangle.”