I Suppose You're Not Going Anywhere

Kathi-5 crouched, tapped the gray rectangle with her staff, and it stood up.

I knew the room before it had finished. A desk buried in rift charts, the stylus rack, a lamp with a green shade, and at the wall the shelf of reference books I had worked through on far too many evenings. Sikorska’s office. Sikorska sat at the desk with a book open in her hands and her cropped head bent over it.

She did not look up.

“You have permission to speak,” said Kathi-5.

Nothing. Turned a page.

“She does this,” Kathi-5 told me, quite cheerfully. “She pretends I don’t exist.”

In one stride, she stepped over the missing wall. She waved a hand in front of Sikorska’s face and got nothing for it. She took the book out of her hands and set it on the desk, and Sikorska’s fingers stayed curled around the shape of it. Kathi-5 whistled, a thin little sound, and three of the black things dropped out of the sky and began to circle Sikorska’s head.

Sikorska did not flinch. Her eyes did move. They followed the black shapes round, one by one, sharp and quick and perfectly awake, and then they came across the open side of the room and found mine.

She looked at me for a long time. I had seen that look over the edge of a closing rift, and over an exam script. Behind her, Kathi-5 had picked the book up again and was tearing the pages out of it, one at a time.

“Please help her,” Sikorska said. Her voice was dry and low and exactly as I remembered it. “Her weakness is that she doesn’t understand—”

“YOU SPEAK TO HER?” Kathi-5’s scream tore across the field, and the black things shot up and away. “YOU SPEAK TO HER AND NOT TO ME?”

The room went flat. As if it had been a sheet of paper, it folded into the ground, and when I looked again she was standing on top of it in her slippers, breathing hard, and the cracks in the sky above her had widened.

I stood there with my mouth open. Understand what? I turned the half sentence over, and it would not settle on anything.

Kathi-5 smoothed her robe. She was smiling again by the time she turned to me, and I was beginning to find that worse than the scream.

“You said you were looking forward to meeting me,” I said. My voice came out thin. “What did you mean?”

“Oh, yes.” She came across the dirt toward me, and she stopped well short, and tilted her head. “I want to know why you were the first of us to cross into another timeline in person. You never explained the details to minus one. You will explain them to me.” It was not a request.

“You already pulled Mori across,” I said. “Surely you can do that.”

“I can’t.” She said it flatly. “I threw him into the gap, in a fight, before he ever came to you. Afterward minus one told me about minus four’s trick, the seam, and I used it to bring him home. That’s all. But you crossed yourself.” Her eyes went over me, top to toe, bright and hungry. “That’s special.”

Minus four was Kathi-1, whose white seams had cleared the lab.

Something cold went down my back that had nothing to do with her eyes. My knees had been unlocking for a while, quietly, and I had been ignoring them. They went now. With my staff for a crutch I came down on one knee on the paving, and the world swung around, and Kou came out of my collar and hung in front of my face.

“Kathi,” he said. “Are you all right?”

Kathi-5 flinched. It was small, a flicker at her mouth, and she looked up at the sky.

“Minus one said you could hardly stand after the last crossing,” she said. “I’ll need to account for that.”

Along the horizon, where the ground ended, something gave way with a soft sound, like a seam letting go, and a strip of nothing showed there and did not close. She did not turn her head. “That does that,” she said. “It will be finished soon enough.”

I held on to my staff. There was water running down my face, and I would like it noted that this was exhaustion and nothing else. Kathi-1 had not come through. Mori was a drawing in the dirt by her slipper. I knelt in front of a girl with my face, looking down at me, and I did not have one idea.

Kou’s wing brushed my ear. “I’ve got an idea,” he breathed. “But we need a moment alone.”

I wiped my face with the back of my hand and made my voice work. “Can we talk about this after I’ve rested?” I said. “Do you have a bed? Or a chair?”

Kathi-5 looked at me. Then she shrugged. She swung her staff, and a room came up out of the ground beside us, whole and three-sided. It was her dorm room, which had been mine: the narrow bed, the desk, the window, my blanket thrown across the foot.

“I suppose you’re not going anywhere,” she said.

I tried to stand up and didn’t make it. Kathi-5 sighed and did not come near me. She lifted a hand instead, and the floor left my feet, and I went through the air in a stiff little arc and landed on the bed with my staff across my chest. Kou flew in after me.

“Sleep, then,” said Kathi-5.

The staff flicked, and the light went out of the world.

It was not the dark of a room at night. It was the dark of the inside of a box. The room was there under my hands, the blanket, the wall, the edge of the desk, and I could feel in my stomach that it had been folded away with us inside it. Kou went to the window and then the door and came back. “Neither of them will open,” he said.

I lay down by feel. Then I lit a small light, only a bead of it on the end of my finger, and with the dead crystal against my shoulder I reached for a window the width of my hand, toward whatever was past her world. It came up milky, as the last one had, and I had barely anything left to hold it with. I could see nothing through it, and it shuddered, and was gone.

I lay and listened to my heart.

“So,” I said, to the ceiling. “About that plan of yours?”

Kou landed on my chest. He told me, in a whisper so low I had to hold my breath to catch it. It began with a window, and somewhere around the middle of the second sentence the dark stopped being dark and became only warm, and the rest went by me.