Felix Marchetti had no way out but through.

If he’d taken a second to stop and think, he would have collapsed into a quivering heap and died shortly thereafter. But he did not make the mistake of using his brain.

He simply wove.

His wrists were wrapped in pain. There was no light from anywhere. Some distant part of him was aware of Kai and two of the scientists, clinging to the broken wooden planks on his left, though the noises they made were gibberish to him.

There was a splinter in his thumb. He could feel it digging further into his skin every time his finger twitched. It stung.

After an interminable time in the void, with his hands moving mechanically back and forth and his eyes fixed on nothing, they reached the shipyard.

It was more of a crash landing than an arrival. The last remnants of the Rambler—half a loom, rigging collapsed like matchsticks around the ruins of the deck, three battered figures clinging to the wreckage—hit the water and started to sink.

It took Felix a precious long moment to realize he’d made it, and even longer to release his clenched hands. The flat stretch of timber he stood on was quickly swallowed by the lagoon. As his boots filled up with water, he looked up at the red lanterns, eyes burning after all that dark.

He did not even have enough energy for relief. Swimming was out of the question. Kai and the scientist looked too shell-shocked to move.

Fortunately, the shipyard was busy even at four in the morning. A few dockworkers spotted them and fished them out of the drink, with a clamor of shouting and concern and questions which none of them could answer.

SEIDR had a miniature hospital prepared for exactly this kind of catastrophe. The three of them were bundled away into white rooms with narrow beds and the acerbic smell of lemon disinfectant hanging in the air.

Felix was nearly gone; the world seemed to tremble and shake in perpetual aftershocks, while his memories spiraled toward a singularity he refused to acknowledge.

His wrists hurt when he bent them too far forward. He found himself squeezing his numb fingers, one at a time, trying to bring some sensation back.

The doctor was a bald man with a wan smile. He opened his mouth and nothing came out. Felix stared at him.

“ … pain?”

“What?”

“I said, are you experiencing any pain?”

“Yes,” Felix said.

“On a scale of one to ten, how much—”

“Ten.”

“Hm. Where?”

“Hands.” Felix flexed his fingers and twinges of pain shot down along the bones. “Where’s Harley?”

“Harley?”

“She was on the ship. She was—I was right next to her. She didn’t move. What happened?”

The doctor gave him a small pill and a cup of water and said that he’d be right back.

Felix sank back against his pillow. No matter how much he tried to hold still, every little movement sent bolts of fire up his forearms. He wished they hadn’t left him alone.

The pill didn’t seem to work, and there wasn’t enough water. His throat was burning, too. He wanted to see Kai.

And then he caught a glimpse of his hair. A few red, frizzy strands dangled in front of his face. Ignoring the burning in his palms, he reached up and felt the mess of tangles spilling down his neck and shoulders.

It was a rat’s nest scattered into a hundred unkempt knots. How had it gotten this bad?

The room became a pale blur as his eyes filled with water. Something was terribly wrong. His hair was not supposed to look like this.

Felix closed his eyes, gritting his teeth, swallowing the lump that rose up in his throat. At least he was alive, he told himself.

He could not say the same for Harley. Or Spelder. When Felix tried to think back on what happened to them, his whole being flinched away.

In place of memory, there was a shape.

As he approached it, it fragmented into a hundred things, mere slivers of recollection. The feeling of the ship being flung out from under his feet—the sudden lurch—the sound of wood ripping—the taste of blood—the wailing.

He couldn’t remember who was wailing. Maybe it had been him.

And there was that thing beneath them, too large to see and too loud to hear. For a split second it surpassed everything, before his hands took hold of the loom.

A second was enough. Now that Felix thought about it, he could almost divine a glimpse of its gaping maw—maybe an eye.

That was enough.

He started to thrash, and then to yell, until two nurses came into his room and set him up with an IV drip that knocked all conscious thought out of his head.

In the meantime, as he sputtered and screamed in half-words and halting nonsense, he considered that the worst part of it was the lack of speech to put over it.

There was no mask between perceiving the thing and comprehending it; they were one and the same, equally unfathomable.

***

When Felix finally regained consciousness, fourteen hours later, he found himself strapped into double wrist braces.

They hurt a little, but not as much as letting his hands flop freely at his sides, so he gritted his teeth and climbed awkwardly out of the bed, leaning on his reinforced palms.

Sleep was a wonderful way to escape the worst of the memories; it dulled their edge with a dreamy, forgetful ease. Now Felix steered carefully around his own mind, avoiding the half-second of blinding terror which crouched in the center of it.

He staggered down the hallway to the bathroom, and scowled through the mirror at his haggard face and disheveled red hair. He looked as if he’d just clawed his way out of hell.

After that he went searching. The hallways were disturbingly identical, white on white, linoleum floors chipped with specks of gray and blue. Most of the rooms he peered into were empty, though one of them had the word SANK scrawled in green ink across a blank wall.

Felix didn’t get far before bumping into a nurse, who gave him a concerned look and said, “Where are you going?”

“Need to find Kai Quarrel,” he said, surprising himself with the low, dry rasp of his voice. He scowled and cleared his throat. “I have some … things to talk to him about. Where is he?”

“You shouldn’t be up.”

“You should spend less time telling me what I should be doing, and more time showing me where you’ve put Kai.”

She gave him a sharp look. “You can’t leave your room until they clear—”

“Oh, fuck off. Don’t you know who I am?”

“You’re a patient,” she said evenly.

“I’m Felix fucking Marchetti and you can’t tell me what to do. I won’t say it again. Where the hell is Kai?”

Her mouth compressed into a thin line, but she pointed wordlessly at a room just down the hall.

Kai was tucked into bed, snoring, with only his head and arms poking out from under a light sheet. His bleached blond hair spilled halo-like over the pillow.

“Wake up,” Felix snapped.

Kai’s eyes snapped open. His eyeliner was a smudged mess. “Wurrgh—Felix?”

“Yes. Are you alright?”

Kai propped himself up on his elbows. His typical gloomy expression was even more pronounced. “I don’t know.” He paused. “Could be worse. What happened to your hands?”

Felix sat down on the edge of the bed, crossing his stiff arms over each other. “They’re strained, I suppose. I was weaving for quite a long time.” Hours, at least. It felt like days.

“Yeah. I guess you were.”

They both stared blankly into space while the fear curled its cold fingers around them. There was no escape from the present.

“Shit. What happened?” Kai asked.

Felix hesitated. “You didn’t see it?”

“No. Did you?”

“I don’t know. For just a second, I thought—well, Spelder was—he should have warned me. He said something about leaving, but it didn’t seem serious. By the time he told me we had to get out, I didn’t—it was already there. And then the ship just fell apart.”

Kai shook his head slowly. “One big chomp, huh?”

“It’s not—ugh.” Felix found his fingers winding through his hair, and forced himself to uncoil the strands from his knuckles. “I didn’t have enough time.”

“You had enough time to get all of us out. That’s got to count for something.”

“I didn’t even know you were there,” Felix said. “Not at first. But I am glad that you made it. I’m glad I wasn’t alone. You held on.” He was rambling, but he couldn’t make himself shut up. Some part of him was still trapped in the dark, weaving and weaving and never getting anywhere. “I didn’t think it would be possible to cross on a fragment like that. I thought I was imagining the lagoon, even after we started sinking. Never believed we’d make it.”

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Kai made eye contact with the wall. His mouth was a flat line. “They’re all dead, aren’t they?”

“No.” Felix stood up. “No. It went for the ship, not us. For fuck’s sake, Spelder trained for this kind of thing. Surviving is his job. He should have been able to deal with it. They aren’t—they can’t be—”

“I’m just being realistic. You saw that thing, didn’t you?”

“They aren’t dead,” Felix insisted.

“Felix—”

“It’s not my fault.”

Kai sighed. “I never said it was. Have you talked to Caleb?”

“The scientist? No.”

“You should. He might have seen what happened to the others. I think he was on the deck, with Spelder, when it showed up.”

“Where is he?”

“Just down the hall. To the right.”

“I’ll stop in.” A twinge of guilt. “But I need to call Nat.”

As it turned out, Felix did neither. He left Kai’s room, stalked back to his own hospital bed and collapsed face-down onto the blanket. He never wanted to stand up again.

***

Isaac Skinner awoke to the kind of frantic knocking that accompanies very good or very bad news.

He squinted at the clock—5:11AM—and crawled out of bed, shaking the fuzzy remnants of sleep from his head. After stubbing his toe twice in a row, he found his lantern and open the shutters, setting the room aglow with golden light.

When he opened the door, Miriam stood just inches away, holding a burlap sack and glowering.

“What?” Isaac said. “Is this a wizard training thing?”

“No. Listen closely.”

He snapped to attention. He’d never heard that note in her voice before—an urgent, severe undertone that carried no trace of humor.

“Spelder’s ship just got attacked by a skelfing,” she said. “Three of the crew made it back. Spelder and the rest are missing. They might be stranded in Oshun. Might be dead. We’re not sure.”

Isaac did not quite understand, still blinking the blurry drowsiness from his eyes. “What? When did this happen?”

“Hours ago. The survivors just arrived in the lagoon.”

“How—”

“Listen. I’m the only wizard with two weavers and a ship available right now. They’re sending me on a rescue and retrieval voyage. We find them, living or dead, and bring them back.”

“Now?”

“The sooner, the better.”

Isaac’s brain finally began to wake up. “Wait—you said we. Am I going with you?”

“Do you want to?”

Like a moth wants the moon. “Yes.”

“I figured. Now, this isn’t a proper voyage, so I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. We’ll be in and out as fast as we can. No detours.” She furrowed her brow. “It might be dangerous. Might even be deadly. There’s always a possibility of things going horribly wrong, no matter how short the voyage or how skilled the crew. Still interested?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you are. Take this.” She handed him the sack. “You can’t bring anything non-biological. No phones, watches, plastics.”

“What? Why?”

“The bio-organic barrier will shred them. You don’t have a pacemaker, right?”

“No.”

“Teeth fillings?”

“No.”

“Contacts? Piercings?”

“Neither.”

“Alright. Pick yourself some clothes out of the bag and get down to the shipyard. If you’re not there in twenty minutes, we’re leaving without you.”

“Is there anything I should bring?”

“Your staff and yourself. I’ll see you soon.”

She strode away.

Isaac rooted through the bag, but his movements were clumsy and out of sync. He could not quite believe it. Just like that, he was on his way back.

Now. Not in a matter of weeks, or even days, but hours. His heart began to stutter.

“I’m going back,” he chanted to himself as he dumped the bag of clothes onto his bed. “I am, I am, I am, I am.”

There were soft shirts of cotton and linen, wool coats, lined leather shoes. He assembled a drab outfit, all grays and blacks, and slipped on the formless shoes.

He kept expecting his anticipation to level out and dissolve, but it grew and grew until it was painful. He felt it pushing out against his ribcage, squeezing his lungs, making every breath shallow and frantic as it expanded.

He stared at the bed, with the duvet thrown back and a deep impression where his head once rested on the pillow. He almost expected to see himself appear under the covers, still fast asleep. This felt like a dream.

If Isaac knew Spelder or his crew, this would have been more of a nightmare than a fantasy, but the dire straits of strangers did not trouble him. This voyage seemed like a gift, not a tragedy.

He grabbed his ironwood staff from behind the door. It comforted him with its weight. This was exactly what he’d been waiting for. This was how wizards lived—always jetting off to Oshun, pulled back and forth between one world and another. This was everything he’d ever wanted.

Despite all this, as soon as he was out the door his eagerness left him in the dust, with only a sense of foreboding lagging behind to keep him company. He could not see what waited for him at the end of the track, but it was too late to stop running now.

***

The Albatross was bustling with people, loading supplies and adjusting the rigging and having conversations in low voices. Isaac walked up the slanted gangplank, feeling its ridges through his thin leather shoes.

Miriam met him on the deck. “Before we go, you ought to know the ground rules,” she said. “First and foremost, I’m the captain of this ship. If I tell you to jump, you jump. You can argue as soon as we’re back on Earth, with all the time in the world to hash things out, but in Oshun my word is law for as long as you’re on the Albatross. Savvy?”

Isaac nodded, staring across the lagoon toward the giant floating frog. Under the red lanterns, everything seemed dim and distant.

“Second, if you hear anything spooky, any fearsome sounds, skelfing or otherwise, you let me know. I’ll be on the lookout as well, but four ears are better than two, as they say.” She placed a warm hand on his shoulder. “That’s all. Ready for isthmus?”

“For what?”

“Oh, you’ll see. Better to explain once we’re in the thick of it.”

The last dockworkers trickled off the Albatross and gathered on the shore, along with a few other people. Isaac squinted; he recognized some of them from the Wizards Guild, but others were complete strangers. They all waved, most of them solemn, as Miriam led Isaac down the staircase in the center of the deck.

The first level of the ship was cramped and dark. Fat candles, stuck into grooved shelves, sputtered and burned and cast their light over the polished floorboards. The air smelled sooty and sour.

At the front of the ship, where its two curved walls met, a prismatic loom jutted out into the room. There were no red lights down here, so Isaac could not see the glimmer of blue fabric across it. Two weavers in red uniforms sat in front of the loom, gloved hands at the ready.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Miriam murmured. “Are you in?”

“Yes,” Isaac said, and threw all his conviction into his voice. Alas, he saved none for himself.

Miriam nodded to the weavers, and they reached for the loom. As their hands grasped the invisible threads, the ship lurched forward.

There was that impossible sound again—a ripping of the air as they sprang forward. Isaac wobbled and put one hand against the wall. As the tension crested over his head, for one fraction of a second he regretted everything.

And then the Albatross slipped through a gap in the threads of reality, folding into interspace.

Isaac stumbled, pressing one hand against his ear. It was like the air had been replaced by vacuum. There was a sensation of powerful sound, but the sound itself was completely absent. The silence was so heavy it seemed to press inward upon his head.

At the front of the narrow room, the two weavers moved with mechanically smooth consistency. Their hands folded through empty space with exaggerated slowness. The loom occasionally sparked with a bright fleck of gold, but aside from that the fabric remained completely invisible.

The candles sputtered and the whole dingy little corridor seemed to sway back and forth, as if the ship hung from a very long string.

They were not in Oshun. Isaac could tell from the squeezing sense of quiet. There was no trace of the chorus.

“Where are we?” he whispered.

“Isthmus,” Miriam said. “Would you like to see it?”

Isaac nodded automatically. He had to know.

“Come on.”

Isaac followed her back up the wooden stairs. On some level he still expected to see the familiar lagoon of the shipyard, with its giant frog and lanterns on poles and fleet of interspace-ships lined up against the dock.

Instead, he saw nothing.

The candlelight came flickering up from the open square in the deck, faintly illuminating the ship’s railings and rigging. Beyond that, there was a darkness so thin and spacious that it seemed to stretch out beyond the limits of the universe, further than his mind could possibly envision, reaching from one infinity to the next.

The sense of vastness was so intense and immediate that it hit him like a physical blow. In every direction, they were completely alone, sailing through a sea of air as black as oil.

“This is isthmus?” he said. His voice drifted out and was eaten by the dark, so it seemed even quieter than he meant to be, barely a ghost of a whisper. And still it was obscenely loud, for in that place there was no other sound—not even a hint, a murmur, a dream of it. They were the only spot of light and noise in the whole abyss.

“None other. Did you see it on your first voyage, when SEIDR rescued you?”

“No. I would have remembered.”

“Hm. Yes, you would. This place has a tendency to get under your skin if you’re not prepared for it.”

It was already under his skin, creeping up and filling him with that same hollowness. Isaac walked to the railing, placing his hands against it and pressing against it. Beyond it, there was nothing to touch in any direction. In a practical sense, this railing marked the end of the universe.

“Careful now,” Miriam said.

Isaac leaned over. His hands were locked down, keeping his feet firmly pressed against the deck. Under them, there was only more dark.

He imagined falling. It was nauseating.

Suddenly Miriam was at his elbow, gently pulling him back. “Don’t get too close to the edge,” she said. “Not when you ain’t used to it.”

Isaac wanted to be as far away from the void as possible. He took a few steps down the stairs, putting him waist-deep in the brightness of the ship’s hold. When he looked up at the pergola, his eyes could not focus on the black patches between the strips of wood and rigging. They were too impossibly distant. “Is it dangerous up here?”

“Not while you’re on the ship. It’s empty. A bit ominous, but that’s about it. If you fall in, that’s a different story.”

“What happens if you fall?”

“You get forgotten. Completely. No one will remember anything about you, and not for lack of trying. They won’t be able to hold onto the details in their head. It’ll just slide right out. Your name will become a meaningless sound. It’s a nasty thing.”

Isaac felt sick. “Does that happened a lot?”

She smiled a ghastly smile. “We’ve got no way of knowing.”

“Oh.” He did not look up again. His gaze was fixed on the staircase under his feet. The patterns of wood grain formed tiny whorls and parallel curves, glowing red-brown in the fluttering candlelight. They seemed comforting and sturdy against the insubstantial darkness which enveloped them. At last, he asked, “What is this place?”

“Come on. I’ll explain it down there.”

They ventured belowdecks. Isaac was glad to be back in the warm timber embrace of the Albatross. He felt more solid. Less forgettable.

Miriam sat on the last stair and Isaac joined her. His eyes locked onto the weavers, entranced by their fluid, rhythmic motion. They never once paused or slowed, their hands flashing and twisting through the prismatic loom in easy repetition.

“So,” Miriam said. “Isthmus.”

“Aren’t we going to distract them?” Isaac said quietly, tilting his head toward the weavers.

“Give them some credit. They’re used to working through distractions. They’d be some pretty lousy weavers if a bit of conversation threw them off.” Miriam set her staff down on the floor and laced her fingers together. “Anyway. In simple terms, we’re in the space between layers of the fabric.”

“What do you mean, layers? I thought there was just a single piece of it. One fabric of reality.”

“It’s got two sides, and they’re not quite pressed against each other. One side for Oshun, one side for Earth. They’re separated by this abyss. It’s like the tiniest section of space, the most miniature gap measurable on any scale. That’s how the dimensions remain distinct. Separate. They need a buffer, no matter how small.”

“This place doesn’t feel small. It feels endless.”

“It is endless. Naturally speaking, there’s no way out. But we’re in the business of bending reality, and that includes space. You could travel in a straight line in any direction and be here forever. But we’re not going in a straight line.” She winked.

“How long does it take to cross?”

“Depends on the weavers. I’ve got a solid crew, so it should be twelve hours at the most.”

“About ten now,” one of the weavers called back from the loom.

Isaac was greatly troubled by that. He didn’t want to be here for hours. The isthmus was eerie, and it unsettled him to know that an endless void lay on the other side of the thin planks of wood which held him aloft.

He felt tiny.

“You should get some sleep,” Miriam said abruptly. “You ought to be well-rested for when we arrive.”

“I don’t think I can fall asleep. Not here.”

“That’s what they all say. Climb into a hammock and give it a shot. You just might surprise yourself.”

She led him to a narrow room, dark and lined with hammocks along its curved walls. Someone was already asleep in one of them.

“Pick whichever one you like,” Miriam whispered. “Except Soto’s, of course. I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

Isaac found a hammock near the door and climbed into it. He discovered a wool blanket at the bottom and wrapped himself in its soft folds, more cold and tired than he’d realized.

When he looked up, Miriam was gone. The only light came from a yellow line under the door. The hammock swayed gently back and forth with the ship. He was asleep almost immediately.

Much like isthmus itself, the endless misty space of his dreams marked a gap between one crisp, tangible reality and the next. While he drifted through his mind, the Albatross soared through amorphous space, until at last it ran out of abyss and emerged into the waking world of the star.

I must save Oshun, of course, for I could write pages and pages of Oshun, entire volumes, a series that would span my lifetime, a tale that would end me a million times over to complete. There is not enough ink in the universe for all the words I could spill about the sea under the star.

Suffice it to say, Oshun soon arrived, and Isaac woke to find himself home.