Of course, when we finally reach Oshun, words fail me.
Where do I start? It was beautiful, yes, and dangerous too, and colored with every shade of blue. Every part of it was alive and singing.
Isaac did not need Miriam to wake him. The sound of their arrival was enough. In a trance, he rose from his hammock and climbed steadily up toward the deck of the Albatross. As he reached the top of the stairs and the radiant light fell upon him, his body flooded with warmth. The sound of the chorus met him in a swift, rushing tune, a song like water tumbling over smooth rocks. It was sheer gladness.
When he looked up, he saw the star, and the star saw him.
His eyes filled with tears, and the breeze wiped them away. It was as if the whole of the sky, the towering clouds, the wind, even the blue underneath, had all gathered to greet him. He smiled until his face hurt. And the star sang, Welcome back.
Oshun was a hollow world, a celestial sphere wrapped around a single central star, vast and brilliant and impossibly old. When Earth was a mere twinkle in the cosmic eye, the star was beyond ancient.
I could follow it all the way back to the beginning, counting each second, but I fear I would lose myself. There’s no way to measure the time here—no years, no seasons, no days—only a trillion lifetimes of blue-white light.
Age begets wisdom, of course. Over the course of eons, the star found enough wisdom to speak. All of Oshun’s chorus formed its long and melodious voice. It hummed with impressions, mood and sentiment, relying on tone rather than articulation.
But Isaac got the gist of it. He was delighted to hear the sky again after so many years under a silent sun.
“Pretty good, eh?” Miriam asked.
Isaac jumped. He had been so wrapped up in the music that he’d forgotten the whole interspace-ship.
Now he came back to himself in a rush. He was standing on the deck of the Albatross as it floated like a dandelion seed through the clouds. They drifted into a foggy bank, wreathing the world in white mist. The star hung above them, peering through the haze and the rigging like a benevolent god.
“Try not to grin too much. This is a rescue mission, after all.” Despite her firm tone, Miriam was smiling too. Her eyes were bright. “It’s been a long seven years, I suppose.”
“Too long.” He’d forgotten the little things—the scent of the air, sharp and tangy and metallic, and the thin cobweb of stained-glass colors that seemed to hang over his eyes. The whole world was veneered with a subtle kaleidoscopic pattern which shifted as he moved. “I was afraid I would never come back.”
The ship plunged out of the clouds and into a blue valley. They were a mere speck in the center of its clear expanse, hovering between the light periwinkle above them and the deeper azure below.
“It’s around seventy-seven degrees,” said a smooth, low voice from behind them.
Isaac turned. A short man with wiry brown hair was climbing out of the hold. He gave Isaac a nod. “Don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Eli Soto.”
“Isaac Skinner.”
“My pleasure.” He turned to Miriam. “Based on the temperature and color, I’d say we’re near the top of the fourth sphere. Where did the Rambler go down?”
“Bottom of stratosphere three,” Miriam said. “It shouldn’t be too far from here.”
“Do you have a direction in mind?”
She eyed the broad sky. “Not sure. Let me talk to the weavers. We should find a favorable current.”
She swept down the stairs, and Soto followed. Isaac was left alone on the top of the Albatross.
He sat down in the shadow of the pergola. The red wood of the deck was warm to the touch, and the boards creaked in a comforting, familiar way. He stretched out his legs and felt so light and careless that he might have been dreaming.
The ship tilted up, putting the deck at an angle. Isaac grabbed the railing to keep himself steady. It was nearly the same height as his chin, sitting down. If he ducked a little he could roll right under it.
An idea leapt to the forefront of his mind; it had been waiting to ambush him for a while.
He could jump.
The possibility was so tantalizing and overwhelming that he could not fight against it. He slithered under the railing and climbed to his feet on the other side. With one hand still clenched on the wooden handrail, he leaned out over the air.
Down and down and down, there was nothing to see. A few scraps of cloud, a purple mist in the distance, and a bottomless humming blue.
The breeze swept past him and ruffled his hair. He clung to the side of the Albatross while his whole world seemed to tilt and rise in a lofty spiral. Nothing stood between him and the fall. Only his white-knuckled grip kept him tethered to the ship. His palms began to sweat.
Some part of him wanted to forget SEIDR and everything else that came with them. His heart belonged to the world below, but his hand would not let go.
“Isaac!”
He glanced back at the ship.
Miriam was emerging from the hold, eyes blazing. “What are you doing?”
He looked down, and then up. The two options diverged so cleanly that he could not imagine picking either one.
“Choosing,” he said.
“Ah. Do you think it’ll take long?”
He hesitated. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, I suggest you make up your mind soon. We ain’t got a lot of time to waste on this.”
“Don’t rush me.” Isaac felt less decisive than ever. Miriam’s reaction had caught him off-guard. When he turned back to the sky, he felt suddenly exposed.
“Same thing happened to me, by the way,” Miriam said. She picked her way across the deck to stand beside Isaac, but made no move to stop him. “The first time I got back, I was halfway over the side before anyone could stop me. But it was so much easier to imagine going over the edge than it was to really do it.”
Isaac’s arm was getting tired. He grabbed the railing with his other hand, feeling the chill of the wind whipping past him. “How did you pick?”
“I didn’t. That’s the great thing about being a wizard, you know. You can have it both ways.” She pointed over the side. “Down there, you’ve got no more options. Just Oshun. So if you take the fall, you better be damn sure that’s all you want. If you stick with me, on the other hand, you get both.”
Like all the best lies, Miriam really believed it, and Isaac was in no state to challenge her. All he ever wanted was everything, all at once.
At last he relaxed, sagging back against the ship. He climbed over the railing to stand sheepishly on the deck. “Both is good,” he said.
“Of course it is. And you can always change your mind later.” She winked.
***
SEIDR’s hospital could not hold Felix for long. There was nothing wrong with him physically, aside from his wrists. Mentally was a different story, but Felix wasn’t fond of telling it.
He needed to get back to the lab. The sooner, the better. He could review Rufus’s new fractal work, tinker with the algorithm, and forget all about Harley and the Rambler and those damn unspeakable monsters for at least a few hours.
That was the plan, anyway.
He practically sprinted the whole way to the Reality Weaving Academy. Even so, he had barely enough time to turn on the lights and shuck his coat before Lucretia Evans was knocking on the doorway of his lab.
“Felix,” she said, drawing out the F in a long, reluctant way. She wore a black skirt and a pair of glasses with thick white frames. “How have you been?”
“How have I been? My ship was just chewed to bits, half of my crew is stuck in hell, and my hands don’t fucking work. How do you think?” Felix scanned the room, but there was no sign of his assistant. “And where the hell is Rufus?”
Lucretia crossed her arms. “Who’s Rufus?”
“Never mind. What do you want?”
She stepped into the room and lit a cigarette. “I’m here to give you an official notice from—”
“Don’t smoke in here,” Felix said, pointing at her.
She tossed the cigarette to the ground and scowled as she crushed it with her heel. “I’m here to give you—”
“And don’t leave your garbage on the floor. Don’t you have any fucking manners?”
She didn’t budge. “You’re under investigation.”
“For what?!”
“This is your official notice from HR. You have been placed under investigation for endangering an interspace-ship,” she recited.
“I never endangered anything. What are you even talking about?”
“Complaints or comments about the investigation can be addressed to your HR officer.” She tapped her chest. “That’s me.”
“That’s such bullshit. I could have been killed and you want to blame me for it? I refuse. I don’t want any part in this.”
“Your complaint has been noted.”
“Fuck you.”
“Noted.”
Felix yelled something that wasn’t quite a word so much as an expression of sheer anguish before turning and stalking to the far end of the lab. This was the absolute last thing he needed.
“Any questions?” Lucretia called.
“I do have a question, actually,” he said, strangling his temper. “Who started this investigation?”
“Excuse me?”
He walked back up to her, meeting her dead stare and wincing at the stench of cigarette smoke. “Who told you that I’d endangered a ship?”
“Do you want me to add retaliation to your list of offenses?”
Felix squinted at her. She was impossible to read. “Are you threatening me?”
“I would never.”
“I’m not stupid,” Felix said hotly. “Don’t I deserve to know who’s spreading lies about me?”
“No.”
“You are insufferable.” He glared at her and unwound the strands of hair he’d been wrapping around his fingers. “I can’t believe the nerve you have, walking in here and accusing me of—”
“No one is accusing you of anything yet. Hence the investigation.” She sounded bored.
“Unbelievable. I almost died for this fucking Institute.”
“Good for you.”
“Get out,” he snapped.
“Leaving.” Lucretia lingered in the doorway. “You should probably see a psychiatrist or something. You seem more neurotic than usual.”
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“Get out of my lab!”
She was gone.
***
Felix was driven by sheer panic with a thin facade of rage. He tracked down Kai in the low caves surrounding the studio river.
The rest of the Rambler’s crew was out of the picture, and Felix himself had been carefully vague about the details. That left Kai and Caleb as the only possible witnesses. One of them had to be responsible for this.
Felix knew the drill. He’d been through a litany of investigations, warnings, official reprimands and mandatory trainings. But he’d never been accused of anything as serious as endangering a ship, and he refused to lie down and let the consequences roll over him. He needed to know who started this, so he could end it.
And so he marched down to Kai’s little corner of SEIDR, a dark cranny lit by a single bare bulb. It was a nook cut out from the cave wall, deep and wide and only four feet high. Kai had covered the floor with an array of pillows and installed an old coffee table as a makeshift desk.
He’d rigged up a tattered curtain across the entrance to block out the rest of the studio. Felix yanked it aside with a clatter of metal rings.
Inside, Kai looked up from his sketches. He had dyed his hair black. “Felix?”
“We need to talk. Can you get out of there?” Felix didn’t like the low ceilings and cramped walls of Kai’s den, or the stench which always hung over it.
“I’m in the middle of something. You can come in, if you’d like.”
Felix sighed and crouched down and scrambled into the cave on his hands and knees. It smelled even worse than he remembered.
“What did you want to talk about?” Kai asked. He was drawing in a ratty sketchbook, his brows furrowed in concentration. “Is it about the Rambler?”
“More or less,” Felix hedged. “Have you talked to anyone else about it?”
“About what?”
“The—the incident. The shark. The whole mess.”
“Not really.” He drew a sharp line across the page. “At the hospital I told them it was fast, and awful, and I didn’t remember much of it.”
“Have you been to HR?”
“No.” Kai looked up at him. “Why?”
Felix reclined on a purple couch cushion. As far as he could tell, Kai was innocent, and that was a relief. He would hate to lose one of his rare friends over something this stupid. “They’re investigating me,” he said. “Claiming I somehow endangered the ship, though they won’t tell me how. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t been starting rumors or anything.”
“No. I haven’t said anything like that.” Kai twirled his pencil between his fingers. “I don’t see how you could have endangered anything. We got there and the shark showed up out of nowhere. It’s not like you had time to do anything.”
“Exactly,” Felix said. “I was trying to tell Lucretia the same thing.”
“You didn’t mention it was Lucretia.” Kai’s voice became lower. He kept his nose buried in the sketchbook, and it took Felix a second to recognize his expression.
“No,” Felix said. “Absolutely not. It’s never going to happen.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Tay was bad enough. Lucretia is out of the question.” Felix eyed Kai from across the coffee table. “And I’m sensing an unsettling trend.”
“So I have a type,” Kai muttered. “Sue me.”
“If her attitude wasn’t bad enough, she’s also trying to get me fired. So get it out of your head.”
“I thought you said they can’t fire you.”
Felix hesitated. “That’s true. I’m completely indispensable. But they can certainly make my life miserable if they’re inclined to, and I don’t want them spreading lies about me.”
“I don’t see why they would lie about this.”
“Believe it or not, Kai, there are plenty of people who don’t like me very much.”
Kai tried and failed to look surprised.
“If it wasn’t you,” Felix murmured, half to himself, “then it had to be Caleb.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” He tried to stand up and banged his head into the ceiling. “Shit. I’m leaving.”
“Let me know if you see Lu—”
“No.” Felix crawled out of Kai’s little nook and shut the curtain behind him.
Then, breathing in great gulps of fresh air, he set off down the river. All he had to do was track down the scientist and get this misunderstanding cleared up, and the rest would take care of itself.
***
The bubbles loomed up out of the blue, sudden and unexpected, interrupting the soft cloudy blurriness of Oshun’s horizon with three colossal circles.
They were as luminescent as pearls, and each one carried the soft, steady beat of a distant drum. Together, they sounded like heavy rain pitched several octaves lower.
The wreckage of the Rambler was strewn between them, chunks of flotsam drifting along invisible currents. There were no signs of life, no pieces of the ship large enough to be identifiable, and no hint of what might have happened to the people inside—only a long trail of splintered timber planks and loose barrels, spilling their contents into the broad blue emptiness.
Oshun’s chorus rose and fell in a steady rhythm, with string-like notes and a lilting melody over the scattered percussion of the bubbles. The scene was uncanny, and Isaac did not like the stillness of it. The wooden scraps drifted past like petals on a stream, too peaceful and slow-moving for the carnage they implied.
And yet it was beautiful. All of Oshun was beautiful, good and terrible alike. The three great bubbles, with their staggering size and opalescent skins, were no less stunning for their alien impassivity.
The Albatross glided toward them, and Isaac examined the debris streaming past the ship—beeswax candles, books, and scraps of dark cloth mingled with the splintered wood. He could easily imagine their own ship reduced to the same parts, shattered into a million pieces with one fell stroke.
There were no corpses and no survivors.
“They had to go somewhere,” Miriam said, leaning over the railing. “Alive or dead. Unless …”
“Unless?” Isaac prompted.
“Unless they all got eaten.” She sighed. “But that ain’t likely. Spelder should have survived, at least. We ought to check the lower bubble.”
The lower bubble was a behemoth, seven miles across, hovering some distance under the remnants of the Rambler. At Miriam’s direction, the weavers sent the Albatross spiraling down. The bubble grew until it covered the whole bottom of the world.
As they approached, Isaac stared down until he could see the distorted reflection of the ship on its bright surface. The image swirled and ran like wet paint. It was unmistakably alive.
The ship stopped just above the bubble’s surface, and Soto joined them on the main deck. “You really think they’re in there?” he asked, glancing over the side.
“They better be,” Miriam said. “Unless they sprouted wings, there’s nowhere to go but down.”
“So you’re heading in.”
“We both are. Tell the weavers to leave if we ain’t back in four hours.”
Soto gave her a crisp salute.
Miriam took Isaac to the rear of the ship, where the massive wooden anchor dangled on a thick rope. Isaac remembered submerging the anchor’s plants in the shipyard lagoon, though it felt like it might have happened weeks or months or years ago. Oshun had a way of making all other things seem equally distant and timeless.
“I suppose I ought to explain how the anchor works,” Miriam said, with one hand on the winch. As she rolled it back, the lush green cage began to descend, dangling below the ship.
“I think I figured it out, actually,” Isaac said.
“Oh?”
“The ships float,” Isaac said, tapping his foot against the wooden boards. “But we don’t. The anchor must need the plants to weigh it down, or else it would float too.”
“Well. You’re just about right.” She kept winding, and the anchor sank straight through the silvery surface of the bubble and disappeared. “In aether, dead things drift and living things fall. More or less. There are a few exceptions.”
“What’s aether?”
“This stuff in the air.” Miriam gestured with her free hand. “All of it. See how it looks different?”
He nodded. The strange overlay of patterned colors gave everything a slightly blurry appearance, as if the whole world hid behind a gauzy, iridescent veil. It had a pungent smell that tickled Isaac’s nose.
The line went slack, and Miriam let go of the winch. “Alright. Are you ready?”
“Always,” Isaac said.
“When we get down there, you stick close to me. This one sounds like it’s been sleeping for a while, so we should be alright, but if it wakes up, don’t panic and stay quiet. Savvy?”
“Savvy,” Isaac said, and his heart leapt like a fish.
“Well then. Follow me.”
Miriam grabbed her staff and stepped off the back of the ship.
Isaac ran to the side and saw her falling with the slow, dreamy pace of a swimmer in deep water. She clutched the staff in one hand and the anchor’s rope in the other, with her feet braced against the line. In moments the bubble swallowed her whole.
Isaac took a deep breath and went over the edge, clutching his staff and holding onto the rope for dear life as he plunged toward the bottom of everything.
He couldn’t quite pull off the same practiced descent as Miriam. His pace wavered and his feet kept sliding off the rope, leaving him dangling by two arms with his legs flailing wildly. He went shooting through the gleaming silver skin of the bubble, and gasped in a breath of strange, damp air.
Before he could do anything more than brace for impact, his feet slammed into the anchor. He fell back.
“Not bad,” Miriam said. “Your form could use some work, but I’ve seen worse.” She held out a hand.
Isaac took it and clambered to his feet, standing beside her on top of the anchor. As he blinked and looked around, his eyes adjusted to the new light and his heart began to pound.
This was what he’d been missing—a million tiny worlds with a million different skies.
From the inside, this bubble was the color of a tangerine, dotted with milky white clouds. The star was a dim red circle hanging just over their heads. The humid air smelled like dirt, cloying and rich. A few piercing bird calls interrupted the silence.
The massive anchor they stood on was half-sunk in deep, sticky mud. All around them was a morass of black water and little green mounds, low hills and odd branchless trees. No, not trees—now that Isaac examined them closely, they had neither branches nor leaves. They were more like trunks of moss, a dark spongy green all the way through.
Miriam threw her head back and laughed. Her hair was a tangled gray mess, her face etched with joy. “You should see your expression. What do you think?”
“I can’t believe it,” Isaac said. “This is what I’ve been waiting for the whole time. This … this is it.”
He clambered down the side of the anchor, landing with a squelch. The mud reached up to his ankles, and the water was warm and stagnant. He loved it all—the disgusting smell, the pale reedy grass, the little wormlike fish that wriggled through the puddles his footsteps left behind.
It was so strange and new and yet it felt like home. When he listened closely, the steady beat of the bubble’s tune came pulsing through the ground, vibrating in his bones.
“We should head for the center,” Miriam said, climbing down the side of the anchor. “And get to higher ground. I don’t like this muck.”
They waded through the bog to one of the higher dirt ridges that criss-crossed the landscape. As they followed it inward, the orange dome of the sky curved higher and higher. Along the way, they passed under the shadows of the odd moss-trees, long and smooth and tapering to a point.
The air was hot and still. Occasionally Isaac would catch the flash of a red-winged bird, or a swarm of insects passing over the shallow pools, but there was no other sign of movement. And yet the marsh was entirely alive, humming with the music of Oshun.
Neither of them spoke, focusing all their attention on scanning the horizon. Isaac was the first to spot a patch of bright blue in all the murk.
“Wait—do you see that?” he asked, pointing toward one of the distant mossy spikes.
It shot up out of the water, a dark pillar standing bold against the sky. A little island lay piled up around its base. There was a strange spot of blue on the shore which seemed entirely out of place.
Miriam shaded her eyes. “Huh. Well spotted.”
“I think it’s a person.” Isaac could just make out their form, lying prone in the shadow of the moss.
“Well, come on!”
Miriam set off toward the island, but Isaac quickly outpaced her. He bounded over the swamp, jumping from one dry patch to the next. Eventually the land petered out, and he started wading through shin-deep black water.
As he got closer, the figure on the island grew clearer. It was a man lying on his back, wearing a blue shirt and a large tricorn hat.
He seemed to be asleep. Or dead.
Isaac slowed down, pushing his way through a thick patch of weeds. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to get there first. He’d never seen a corpse up close.
When he was about ten feet out, the man sat up suddenly.
Isaac stopped with equal parts shock and relief. “Hello!” he said, waving. “We’re here to rescue you.”
“Oh, Christ.” The man stared at him, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. His nose had been replaced by a wooden carving, fastened by a string around his head. His voice was high and nasal. “I didn’t think anyone was coming. Who the hell are you?”
“My name’s Isaac Skinner,” Isaac said, slogging his way through the last stretch of water to reach the island. “Have we met?” The man seemed vaguely familiar.
“I saw you in the Guild. Graham Spelder. Captain of the … the Rambler. Well, I was.” The man tried for a smile, but it came out like more of a grimace. His lower lip was bleeding. “When there was still a Rambler. Shit.”
Isaac climbed up onto the shore and saw Spelder lying with one leg twisted under him. “Are you hurt?”
“Pretty sure I broke my leg. I landed all wrong. Is that Miriam?”
Miriam climbed out of the water behind Isaac, huffing and puffing and scraping the mud off her shoes. “Spelder! I should have known we’d find you lounging around down here. Are you alright?”
“I can’t walk,” he said. “It’s been a pain in the ass. But I got off easy compared to the others. Osmund is dead.”
Miriam frowned. “I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Did anyone else make it out?”
“Harley got off without a scrape. Landed pretty close to me. We talked for a bit. She’s out there somewhere, looking for something to eat.” Spelder jerked his chin toward the brown hills off to the right, and then looked at his hands. “I don’t know about the rest. Never saw what happened to Kai, or—”
“Kai survived,” Miriam said, folding her arms. “Felix managed to weave a patch of the broken ship across the isthmus, with Kai and Caleb on board. They’re all fine.”
“You’re telling me Felix made it back to SEIDR?”
“You never mentioned he was on the Rambler,” Isaac said, glancing at Miriam quizzically.
“He should have died,” Spelder said, balling his hands into fists. “It’s all his fucking fault.”
Miriam crossed his arms, scowling. “What do you mean by that?”
“Exactly what I said. I told him we had to leave, and you know what he said? You know what that fucking bastard told me?” Spelder’s voice became louder and louder. “His hands were tired. I told him to turn the ship around and get back to SEIDR before we all died and he was whining about his fucking hands. He was complaining right up until the damn shark got us. I could strangle him.”
There was a strange pulse from beneath Isaac’s feet, and the ground seemed to shake a little as the drumming from below skipped a beat.
“Spelder,” Miriam said. “Calm down.”
“I’m calm. Don’t worry. I can be as calm as you like. But I just might murder that fucking weaver next time I see him. No promises, alright?” Spelder flashed a smile.
“We can worry about that later,” Miriam said decisively. “But for now, we need to get you and Harley out of—ah. Do either of you hear that?”
Isaac and Spelder both tilted their heads. Far beyond the steady music of the bubble under their feet, there was a distant, wild, windy fluttering, like trees rustling in a gale.
“Sounds like we’ve got a storm on our hands,” Miriam said. “I don’t want to leave the ship exposed up there when it breaks. We need to get out of here.”
“When it rains, it pours,” Spelder said, his mouth twitching. “I’ll start crawling.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll help you back to the Albatross. But I can’t leave Harley stranded.”
“Which way did you say she went?” Isaac asked.
Spelder pointed off to the right. “She was going for higher ground.”
“If you help get Spelder back to the anchor, I can find Harley,” Isaac said, taking a few steps toward the hills. The faint sound of the storm made him restless. He was itching to move, to act, to do anything but talk. Knowing Felix had been involved made it all seem worse, somehow, and he wanted to help make it better.
Miriam’s eyebrows rose. “Alright. Go ahead. If you can’t find her by—”
“I’ll find her,” Isaac said, and he waded back into the water.
As he crossed the shallow pond and emerged into the marshes on the other side, he could not fight the electric feeling building up in his chest. Nothing could stop him from relishing the path he’d taken now. As soon as he was back on solid ground, he started to run.
The universe clicked into place. He belonged here, plunging into another new world with a storm at his back.
He would give up anything for this. And he did.