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Take a deep breath. Hold on to something. When you open that door, it’s going to feel like you’re dying, but in the best possible way. You’ve done the homework. Studied the colorful maps, the security schedule, the camera placement. You’re rusty, but ready. You zip your jumpsuit up to the base of your neck and tighten your backpack. You’re in a crowded transit hub in the aft section of the ship. Huge transparent windows line the cavernous space.
The desert is full of bones. Sometimes, if you listen, the bones will speak. From a distance, the Bone-Gatherer may look like he is wandering, with his basket made of dried hyssop on his back and his arms and legs and head all covered in black-blue feathers that flicker like tongues of lightless fire. He may look as if he is merely roving—a nomadic traveler stretching his lanky legs, with no singular destination in mind.
I rang the Academy bell the first time, when both it and I were new-penny bright, and I rang it at the end, when it was gray-green with the centuries. I was the school’s mascot and its totem and its faithful servant. By night I cleaned the halls and read the chalkboard ghosts before consigning them to oblivion. In the library, I gently laid sleeping heads on tables and reshelved the books they’d used as pillows. It may be hubris for a soulless thing of brass to say so, but if the Academy belonged to anyone, it belonged to me.
When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was in love. Well, maybe he didn’t shatter it per se—more like twisted it into a knot. But there were too many “Vassiliev invariants” and “nugatory crossings” in the mathematics of it that Shiva didn’t understand, so he preferred to think about it in terms of breaking rather than knotting. Besides, he was named after a god of destruction, so “shattered” fit. Poetic license and all that. When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was heartbroken.
The butterfly sword of chaos is never the same twice. But then, neither is its wielder. The sword changes those who bear it, transforming, transfiguring. The temple where you found it was a ruin, roof caved in, snow-covered floor. When you took it from the statue of the smiling god in the temple, it didn’t look like a sword at all. It perched on that stone hand, a frozen butterfly, its forlorn wings outstretched.
For the last day we have together, I thought we could go back to Io, where I saw you for the first time. Her volcanoes will be reflected on your solar array once again. We will bathe in her Plasma Torus until our sensors tingle so hard we can’t take it any more. Then I will make a bouquet for you to carry on your way home: sulfur for passion, oxygen for remembrance, and sodium, for good luck.
In the eternity of star-ache where space coils around matter like a wounded animal, I hang in agony. Three supermassive black holes lurk in the corner of my hearing, each in a different corner of the galaxy cluster. Triangulation points. The calculation is redone every 4.5 microseconds, balm and torture both to my space-stretched mind. The ship’s computer tugs ceaselessly at my fragile gray matter.
When the giants came through the valley, they made footprints as long as the Santa Monica Promenade, as wide as Dodgers’ Stadium. They crushed dance studios, keto cafes, a waterpark. They left trails of steep-sided ravines with walls of stratified clay and crumbling asphalt, and this is where we now live. Sunset comes earlier down here, but it could be worse.
I understand why you became a ladybug. The ladybug is one of Earth’s jewels. Shapeshifters from all across the universe enjoy the ladybug form as a gentle introduction to our planet’s native transformative experiences. I’ve heard many a shapeshifter rhapsodize about the pleasures of tearing yourself free from the carapace of a ladybug’s instar-self not once but three times, with pupa and imago forms still to come. One visitor I assisted spent seven years as a ladybug.
The next girl through the door was Robin’s prototypical customer. She trotted in with her chin up, her posture so rigid she definitely had back problems. Her dress jacket was the color of newly hatched cardinals, and it was doubtless self-tailored, the material wearing out at the seams. Likely she was one of those academy girls who was paying their own way—so she was definitely shopping for a blade.
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