Sunshine

It was another gray day, but Aimil had pulled the combox table around so that the chair backed up against the window, which she had opened. What daylight there was fell on me as I sat there, and there was a little wind that stroked my hair.

“Where do you want to start?” said Aimil. “With the bingo! one from the other day, or do you want to start fresh?”

I hadn’t thought about it. Good beginning. It was so hard to screw myself to do anything, the details got a bit lost…

Who—or what—was I looking for? Con? Or Bo? Since I was doing it alone with Aimil I wasn’t trying to make Pat and Jesse happy. So what was going to make me happy? Define happy.

But if I found something on the other side of the real globe that Pat and Jesse would get all tangled up in negotiations with their local SOF equivalents over, it might get them out of my hair.

Finding Bo wasn’t going to make me happy, but I didn’t want to look for Con with anyone else around, even Aimil. Which left Bo or the Unknown. The Unknown, at the moment, was unknown. Bo, on the other hand, was after me. Bo, then.

“Let’s start with bingo.”

Aimil brought up the file, highlighted the cosmail I wanted, and stepped back. I squinted at the screen. I could see the winking bar of highlighting, and the button was under my finger. I pressed.

It was like hands around my throat, a crushing, splintering weight on my breast; there was also a horrible, horrible pressure against my eyes, my poor dark-dazzled eyes…I was lost in the dark, I no longer knew which way was up and which down, I was vertiginous, I was going to be sick…

No.

I steadied myself. I found an…alignment. Somewhere. Somewhere, reaching in the dark…I was…no, I wasn’t standing. There didn’t seem to be anything to stand on, and I wasn’t sure there was any of me to stand with. If my feet had disappeared, then perhaps it wasn’t surprising that my eyes—no, my sight—had disappeared too. This wasn’t just darkness: this was what came after. This was the beyond-dark. And I could only see in the dark. My eyes were still there—or perhaps they were now my non-eyes—I couldn’t see with them and blinking no longer seemed relevant, but the pressure was there. And why was it so difficult to breathe? Especially since at the same time breathing seemed as irrelevant as blinking. Why did I want to breathe?

Where was I? I was—stretched—along some intangible line; a compass needle. Compass needles don’t mind the dark. Although I doubted I was pointing toward anything like a north that I’d recognize back in the real world. Maybe I’d found where Aimil’s cosmail had come from. But where was here? And was there some clue I could take back with me to the world I knew?

If I could get back there.

I experimented with moving. Moving didn’t seem to be an option. I was too much like nothing, here, in this nonplace, in the beyond-dark. Right, okay, next time I come I’ll organize my question better going in…

Next time, presupposing I get out of this time alive.

I was grateful for the pressure against my eyes, the difficulty breathing; it made me feel I still existed…somehow. Somewhere.

I was a magic handler, a stuff changer, a Blaise by blood, and lately, by practice. Not much practice but growing all the time.

I remembered another sense of alignment, when I had changed my little knife to a key. I reached for that sense. No, I reached for my knife. It shouldn’t have been there, and I had no fingers to feel for it, but I was suddenly aware of it. I couldn’t see it, but I knew that it was a light even in this darkness. And by its invisible light I could…see. See. Feel. Hear. Smell. Live…

I heard a rustle, like leaves in a breeze. And for a moment I stood on four slender furred legs and I could feel and hear and smell as no human could.

And then I was back again, sitting in Aimil’s living room, and her hand was reaching through my powerless fingers and pressing the button. The screen went dark. “That was not good,” she said.

“What—happened?” I was amazed at the sense of my body sitting in the chair, of gravity, of sight (light; twinkly shadows), of fingers on a keyboard, feet against a floor. Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways. Had I—? What had I—?

The leaves laid sun-dapples on my brown back as I stood at the edge of the woods with the golden field before me. I raised my black nose to the wind, cupped my big ears forward and back to listen.

Yeek. My human fingers closed on my knife. I was still in Aimil’s living room.

“You were gone,” said Aimil. “Not long—ten seconds or so—just long enough for me to take two steps and reach for the button. But your body didn’t have you in it.” She sat down, suddenly, on the floor. “Do you know where you went?” She bowed her head between her knees, and then tipped her face back and looked up at me. “Do you know?”