Let's Play Dare-Off

The flat building turned out to be a very good ride. Level and humming, it lifted as soon as we were both on it, and went out across the patched ground with the daylight passing under us. Kathi-5 sat at the front with her feet tucked up, and Kou and I sat at the back, a sofa’s length of roof away from her.

She had brought the cage. From a hook of black air it hung at the back of the roof, a real cage again, and Mori sat in it with his wings folded and his silver eyes on her.

“Don’t worry,” she said, not turning around. “I taught him not to talk unless he’s spoken to.”

Mori watched her for a while. Then he looked at me, and his claws closed on the bars. He said nothing. I looked away first.

“String gravity sliding,” I said briskly. “The foundation is a curvature term, which I call the Wenzel constant.”

“You what?”

“After my old teacher. It’s always being removed. Anyway.”

I explained. On purpose, I got the second equation wrong, and Kathi-5 corrected it before I had finished the sentence and then closed her mouth hard. I got the fourth wrong, too. She corrected that one with her mouth already open, and by the sixth she was sitting sideways on the roof with her slippers on the edge and one finger drawing the terms in the air, and I was only half listening to myself.

Whenever she went quiet, I asked a question.

“What was this?” We were passing a square of bare earth with a gray outline on it. “Before, I mean.”

“The north courtyard. Why?”

“And the forest? Where did it go?”

“Folded. Most of it.” She waved a hand toward the horizon, where the ground ended and the sky began without a join, and a strip of it hung loose. “Do you want the equation, or do you want a tour?”

“Both.” I smiled. “What’s outside Vesperine? What’s the world like?”

“Outside is outside.” But she told me, a little at a time, in the clipped voice she used for something she was proud of. She had closed a dome over the Academy, a wall of hardened air, with nothing in or out that she hadn’t allowed, and beyond it the world was a smear of pieces that no longer met. She had moved everyone else off the grounds first, every student and teacher, out past where the wall would stand, and kept only Sikorska. Then she had pulled two rooms in through the wall, her mother’s and her father’s, so that she would never need to open it again. The black things went out through the seams and came back with what minus one asked for, and it was always the same, a lamp or a clock or a book with a gilt spine, and Kathi-5 never asked why.

I thought about the cabinets in Kathi-4’s corridor, and did not say anything.

The crystal had warmed to a dull amber overnight, enough for coins and not much more. Behind her back, with the tip of my staff, I opened a window no bigger than a coin. Kou sent a pulse, one high note, past her world to whatever lay beyond. Kathi-5’s head came up. She looked at the place on the air where the note had been, and then at me, and went on with the equation.

She let me. She let me three times, and each one cost me a little more than the last, and each time she looked a little prouder. I took it for confidence in her own walls.

“The note comes back from the same place every time,” Kou murmured, at my shoulder. “We’ve gone a mile and it hasn’t moved. Somebody’s there.”

“Good.”

“And Kathi.” He shifted his claws. “If it comes to the part. Don’t use the voice you use for tricks.”

“I don’t have a voice for tricks.”

“You do,” said Kou.

Kathi-5 had one finger on the sixth term, and behind us the cage swung a little on its hook.

“Why is he a traitor?”

She did not look round. “He went to Sikorska.” It came out fast. “Behind my back. He told her I was going to break everything, and that someone had to stop me, and that it wasn’t what I wanted, as if he knew what I wanted, as if anyone—” Her finger stopped. “So I put him somewhere he couldn’t.”

“In a rift.”

“In the gap, between the timelines, where they live. I didn’t know where he’d come out. I thought he’d stay in there with them.” She nodded at the black shapes turning overhead. “He wasn’t supposed to come back.”

That first morning, Mori had wanted to tell Sikorska. I had talked him out of it.

Behind me, the cage was quiet. Mori had turned his face to the bars.

“And if you stopped?” I asked, as a point of mathematics. “Now, I mean.”

“Then all of it was for nothing.” She said it the way one gives the answer to a sum. “I would rather the whole lot came down.”

Kou’s claws went through my collar and stayed. I did not reply. I asked about the boundary conditions, and she answered a beat too eagerly.

I had been steering her toward the trees for some time, one question at a time. We came to the edge of the forest at last. It was not much of a forest. The trees had been pressed against the wall of the dome, all leaning the same way, and the air in front of them shimmered.

The building slowed at the trees, and I stepped off onto the ground. Kathi-5 stepped down after me with a sigh, tugging her robe straight. Kou came after me, and the cage stayed where it was.

“Kou,” I said. “Let’s do our usual dare-off. Same rules.”

On the roof, in the cage, Mori’s head came up.

Kou didn’t look at me. He looked, for a moment, at the leaning trees.

“You’re going to end up alone, Kathi,” he said. “Actually alone. Not funny-story alone.”

He said it exactly as he had the first time.

“You mean I’ll finally have room to work without anyone interrupting,” I said.

“STOP THIS!”

Kathi-5 had her hands over her ears. Her face was white, and her mouth was open, and above us the cracks in the sky shivered and spread. “We were talking about string gravity sliding!”

On the roof, Mori’s head was still up, and he was looking at Kathi-5, not at me.

“Didn’t you love playing dare-off with Mori?” I said.

She did not ask what a dare-off was.

“Unremarkable zero,” said Kathi-5, “is a traitor, and doesn’t figure into this.”

On the roof, Mori’s wings came open and shut again.

I turned to Kou, and took him out of the air against my chest. “I love Kou,” I said, to Kathi-5, and hugged him.

He squeaked. It was not a sound I had heard from him before.

Kathi-5 took a step back. “Wh-what does that have to do with anything?”

Kou wriggled out and shot across the dirt toward her with his wings spread, and she backed away from him in a hurry, straight into my arms.

I held on. “I love you, Kathi!” I said, loudly, in my best voice.

She screamed.

Her hands came up between us, open, and stayed there. She did not push. She was thin under the robe, and shaking, and she smelled of dust and old paper.

“I love you,” I said again, into her shoulder. It came out low and cracked.

Kou had landed on my shoulder. His pulse went off in my ear, and the note came back from very close.

With one arm still around her I swung my staff, and the window opened beside us, narrow at first, then wider. It did not shiver. It steadied around that second sentence, and on the other side of it people were sitting on a blanket in the sun. Someone had a basket. Someone looked up.

Kou flew in, and I pushed. It was not a clean lean; I shoved, and it should have broken under me, and it held, because something on the far side took half the weight. The crystal went dark in my hand. It hurt all the way down, and Kathi-5 and I went through together into the light.