“This is why everyone goes silent when I say that I am here to study the physics of the worlds,” he said.
“Except Jill,” I said. “Yes.”
“I will not go mad,” he said.
“That’s what they all say,” I said. “I have an aunt who may be crazy, but since we never see her I can’t be sure. But it’s why even the two weeks of physwiz in your senior year of high school is the worst-attended class, year after year. There are doctors who pretty much earn their living finding excuses to give kids passes to miss it, because their parents are freaking out. They say that all you have to know is to Run and Report, and who needs to take the chance?”
“And yet you go for a walk when a cobey large enough to call out two specialist units to ensure containment has opened less than ten miles away.”
Two? I thought. That hadn’t been on the radio this morning, or the billboard updates. “You’re here too,” I pointed out.
“I am trying to behave as you would,” he said. “I am not—totally at ease. I miss my chabeled,” and he touched the base of his neck, where perhaps a protective medallion used to hang. Gwenda had some of my great-grandmother’s old medallions—carefully denatured of course. “When the restaurant rang,” Casimir continued, “I said that perhaps I would go for a walk. They said, it is a beautiful day, that is a good idea.”
I thought about the two cobey units and the deep line between Copperhill and Station and didn’t say anything. Well, there had been no public announcements about anything—your pocket phone was supposed to ping at you if there was an emergency—and that’s what authority is for, to know stuff, right?
“Also . . .” he said. And smiled at me again. How could anyone’s smile be that perfect? How could anyone’s eyes be that huge and deep? How could . . . Margaret Alastrina, hit the circuit breaker.
“I wanted to see you again,” he said.
My heart or my stomach or my blood pressure or something did something not humanly possible and I almost had to sit down. There were sparkles everywhere I looked and I didn’t think they were silverbugs. I blinked. They weren’t silverbugs but I didn’t think they were my brain exploding either. And there were more and more of them. I almost didn’t notice when Casimir reached out and took my hand because by then the wind—when had the wind started?—was wailing around us with this awful squealing edge to it, that kind of noise when you think I really can’t stand this it has to stop—I couldn’t hear anything else and it felt like being stuck with hot wires. The silverbugs—or the things that weren’t silverbugs—were joining up like pictures of fractals on the cover of an Enhanced Algebra book, only they seemed to shake themselves and every time one of these chains shook more chains splintered off and glittered away into an infinity that was stretching out in every dizzying direction—in more directions than there were directions—
Just before I totally lost my sense of up and down, my sense of beingness, of a human body with arms and legs and feet on the ground, on a ground that was there, and a brain unmelted by hot wires, I closed my eyes.
That was a little better. Up and down resolved themselves, and I was still standing on something although . . . it was quivering. More like a little raft on a sea of chaos than like the earth I thought I knew.
Cobey, I thought, distantly. The Copperhill cobey has moved along the deep line and opened up in a park in Station. The park where Casimir and I happen to be.
The wind howled. I tried to think about what I knew. But what do you still know when everything is wrong? I thought I could still feel Hix around my neck; she was doing her Elizabethan-ruff trick even more tightly, so there was a little hairy-ish band of almost-warmth against my skin. As I thought about her . . . there seemed to be more of her. One of her accordion ends was elongating, creeping—slowly, like a person feeling her way—down my sternum. Slowly it groped around my waist, sidled across my pelvis and slid down one leg. Eventually it—she—reached the ground. The moment she slipped over my foot and touched earth I was real again. I hadn’t noticed that I’d become unreal. Only that everything else had.
The wind was still doing its unhinging howl but I cautiously opened my eyes. Mistake. I closed them again. I couldn’t see anything but a kind of wild, broken craziness like the three-dimensional version of a two-year-old scribbling with a crayon. But I could feel two things that I’d forgotten when I became unreaclass="underline" Casimir’s hand holding one of my hands, and my other hand clutching my algebra book. Hix had outlined one edge of the algebra book on her way down my body and maybe that’s what made the book feel so weirdly real. Live. Like it was alive and scared to death like the rest of us. Or maybe it was exhilarated. It was hard to tell.
Margaret Alastrina, you’re talking about an algebra book.
I’m in a cobey. I think I’m supposed to die. This is better, okay?
Slowly I knelt down on the little patch of quaking earth that Hix was keeping real for me. I held onto Casimir’s hand and pulled him down too. I didn’t have any hands left. But Hix seemed to understand about Casimir and she unreeled herself even further—I felt her edging past my ankles, and I felt Casimir—I don’t know how else to explain it—become real again when she touched him. So I could let go of his hand.
I was crouching at the edge of a cliff. When I laid the algebra book down I kept it as close to me as possible; I laid it so that it was touching my knees. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to open it against the wind, but as I tried, a little place of quiet cleared itself as if by the act of opening it. . . . I was looking at an explanation of how logarithms are the opposite of exponentials. About balance.
I tore a page out and began folding. I didn’t know what I was folding, but my fingers seemed to know. Back, forward, turn, turn over, keep folding. Open out, keep folding. Turn over, keep folding. Keep the edges sharp, no matter how shaky and sweaty your fingers are, however hard the darkness at the bottom of the cliff is pulling at you. Keep the edges sharp like your life depends on it. Keep folding. I was Hands Folding Paper.
I knew when she was done—when she began to move faintly against my fingers, like she was breathing—and without looking up (don’t look over the edge of the cliff don’t look over the edge of the cliff) I flicked her into the maelstrom around me. Since I didn’t look up I couldn’t possibly have seen her stretch long silver wings and soar like an albatross over this awful sea. I tore out a second page and began folding again. And then a third page, a fourth, fifth, sixth. Seventh. I looked up when I sent the seventh after her sisters, and I saw the long, long wings I couldn’t possibly have made, and a shining silver crest erect from the top of her head down her long unexpectedly sinuous body, studded with tiny feet: very like a silverbug fractal, and nothing at all like.
I thought of Takahiro saying: It was like she was trying to get through to me. I thought of those nights when I slept better sitting up folding paper than lying down in bed.
I pulled out an eighth page and began folding. And then a ninth page.
I hadn’t realized I had a headache till it began to ease. I hadn’t realized that the hairy, whiskery, spider-footy, tickly band around my neck had extended its other end (but did gruuaa shadows only have two ends?) up around my face and wrapped itself, or herself, around my forehead like a pirate headband. Perhaps that was why when I looked up again the world I knew had begun to reshape itself around me.