???

“Jayla!” Someone shakes my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

The colors fade, but something feels different.

Sai-ee offers me a hand up. I’m struck with sudden, irrational anger.

No matter how combative we get, I’ve never been this genuinely angry at him. And he hasn’t even done anything.

“Back off! …Sorry, give me a minute.”

Sai-ee steps back. I wrap my arms around myself, trying to hold myself together. I’m intensely upset, my heart beating fast.

“Can I…” Lil reaches out. For some reason, I’m not angry at her. Maybe because she’s little, only fourteen and not imposing or tall at all (though she’d bite my kneecaps for saying that), but Sai-ee’s like a little brother, too…

It doesn’t make any sense. I let Lil hug me.

“What’s wrong?” Sai-ee asks.

“Ugh! Fuck off!”

He stares at me, brow furrowed. “Lil, do you have any idea…”

“Shh,” Lil tells him as I tense at his voice.

“Sorry, Sai-ee,” I say eventually. “I didn’t mean to react like that.”

“No proble—ah!!” Sai-ee clutches his head, sinking to his knees.

“Again?!” Lil yelps.

He braces himself on the ground with his hands, breathing hard. His eyes, wide and frantic, scan his surroundings.

Now it’s my turn to reach out and ask if he’s okay. I do, but he doesn’t answer. Instead he huddles up, head on the ground and hair in the mud, reaching for Lil.

Lil lets go of me and holds him and I’m annoyed once again. Why am I annoyed? I want Sai-ee to be alright, right?

He pushes himself up and says, “I think…I think it’s something magic.” His voice is okay now; his eyelashes keep fluttering, like he doesn’t want to look around him.

“Like what?” I ask.

“I don’t know. It just is. When you’re someone like me, you get that kind of feeling...it’s like a tingling aura. And I don’t know why, but I got agoraphobic. What happened to you?”

“I got really angry at you, specifically,” I say, a bit embarrassed.

“You’re always getting angry at him,” Lil points out.

“Not like this.”

Sai-ee nods. He must have been rattled by how I yelled at him.

As we stand there, clouds cover the searing evening sun, which had been at a poor angle.

“Think it’s going to rain?” I say, since I don’t know particularly what to say or do.

“It will,” Sai-ee says. “The seasons have never screwed us over before. I got faith that things’ll keep working out.”

Everything did always work out, pretty much, in this town. The prey was plentiful and the crops were healthy. Prices of goods stayed down, and people were friendly and progressive thinkers. I’d asked Sai-ee once if we were living in a bubble, but he said no, it was nice everywhere.

I wonder why I asked that, why I had expected there to be something ugly in the world. I’ve never really experienced that. My biggest issue up until now has been hard schoolwork. If I were given one wish right now, I would probably wish to solve the perpetual argument between Asania and Ry’keth over who would pay for the railroad between them, which kept said railroad unbuilt.

“You think I’ll get a weird—possessed rush, too?” Lil asks.

“It wasn’t possession,” I correct. I don’t know what it was, but it had been my own feelings.

“Great to know,” Sai-ee says.

“Shut your mouth.”

More and more clouds are covering the sky now. A second later, I feel a drop on my shoulder, then another hitting the tip of my ear.

“It’s raining,” Lil, who grew up in the rainforest and has no sense of wonder, says. “Should we go inside?”

Sai-ee takes her by the shoulders. “Lil, in Asania, you don’t say ‘it’s raining’. You say ‘praise be to the gods, it’s finally raining!’”

“Praise be to the gods, it’s finally raining,” Lil dutifully recites.

“Let’s not go in yet,” I say. “Here is where we got those weird—mental attacks, maybe here Sai-ee can sense some kind of magical disturbance.”

“I can try,” Sai-ee says doubtfully. “It’s a lot more complicated than buffing myself up, so I think I’ll need to carve some runes.”

“Then carve them,” I tell him. “You’ve got the stuff, right?”

“Not where it’s wet.”

“What happened to ‘praise be’?” Lil asks.

“You’ve turned unappreciative,” I add.

“Come on,” Sai-ee says.

We retreat under an overhang. Outside, kids are getting excited, stomping around in puddles, and people are poking their heads out of their houses. My classmate, coming out of the school building, yells, “Hell yeah!”

I don’t know why they’re excited, since it’s never hot enough to be dangerous. Why do any of us feel excited, in our risk-free lives?

“There’s still things to look forward to, and struggles,” Lil answers me when I say that out loud. “Someone who gets on your nerves, or maybe you’re hungry, or on your period and so everything feels awful.”

“Asan don’t get those.”

“Oh, lucky…”

“Stop with the gross girl talk, I’m trying to concentrate,” Sai-ee says.

Despite him working away at the runes, I notice it first. At a point in the air near where we were standing, the raindrops, indistinct and hard to make out in the now overcast day, get highlighted by bright sunlight.

“Hey. Look.”

“What is it?” Sai-ee asks irritably.

“That weird thing.”

“I have no clue what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

“I see it too,” Lil says. “Sai-ee, it’s like—a gap in the air. With something else through there.”

The crowd has mostly gone, people making their way to shelter inside or to the town square. We make our way to the gap in the air as our hair and clothes get soaked by rain.

It’s a tear in space about the size of a hand. The other side looks like this town, but it’s hot and dry, and no one is there. Buildings seem to be crumbled or have holes in them. They’re hard to make out.