Sunshine

Old Mr. Temperature Control, I thought. What do you know about too hot and too cold? No, I still wasn’t thinking about any of that. Delete that thought.

“Or if you pick up something a little too heavy for you, does it hurt? It is only a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself.”

I liked that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and press on the understood…

I was raving, if only to myself. I took a deep breath. Okay. My new light-web was to Con no worse than hauling an overfull sheet of cinnamon rolls out of the oven and making a run for the countertop before I dropped them was to me.

I looked into his face, dully lit by the last of the twilight, and realized, with a shock, that I had no doubt: the shadows there lay quietly too.

“Ready?” he said.

I smiled involuntarily. Are you joking? “Yes,” I said.

“I have taken what you showed me and…measured it, by the ways I know. I believe that between us we shall…attain our goal.”

Our goal, I thought. I didn’t translate this into practical terms.

“We do not travel in your nowheresville, but I fear the way we are going is nonetheless…unpleasant. I will need your assistance. It will not be easy both to travel that way and to guard our presence from too-early detection.”

I closed my eyes—hurling myself into this, to stop myself from thinking about it—took a firmer grip on his hand, and began to search for the alignment. This was very different from the fuzzy non-telephone line I had used to talk to Con; for that I could just go to the edge of whatever it was that was out there, and grope. This was more like walking through a snake pit with a forked stick, hoping you could sneak up behind the snake you wanted and nail it with the stick before it nailed you. Meanwhile hoping that none of the other snakes saw you first.

I glanced apologetically at the ever-so-slightly-like-the-back-of-a-snake pattern glinting faint gold against—in—my skin. I said one of my gran’s words: it was only a little word, a little word of thanks and of settling, settling down, settling in, but I thought the light-web might like it. Then I closed my eyes again.

There.

This may have been the light-web too, or it may have been that I’d now done my compass needle maneuver several times and was getting the hang of it, or it may have been Con. Some of it was Con; I could feel the faint scritchy buzz of connection through our palms. There seemed to be a variety of paths laid out before us: there was the totally evisceratingly worst, the slightly less worst but worst enough, the still really bad, the only basic deadly dire, and probably a few others. I was looking at the Catherine-wheel glitter of the way that had blown out SOF HQ and at the looming thing that was our destination as Con arranged us on the boundary of one of the other, the quite-awful-enough-thanks ways. The looming thing and its guardians didn’t look so much like an aquarium this time—or if it did, those fish were sick—more like the special effects in one of those postholocaust movies. Any moment now the ghastly mutants would come lurching on screen and wave their deviant limbs at us.

I wished it was a movie.

“Come,” said Con, and we stepped forward together.

By the time we’d walked off the edge of the balcony we were firmly—if that’s quite the word I want—into Other-space. Vampires probably can bound lightly down from third stories, but I didn’t want to try it. As it was I was immediately having a precarious time keeping my feet; there didn’t seem to be any up or down—although this is a good thing when you’ve just walked off a balcony—or sideways or backward or forward for that matter, other than the fact that we had backs and fronts and our faces were on one side of us rather than another. This path, whatever it was, was a lot worse than Con’s short way home the other night. At least I had feet, which was an improvement on nowheresville.

Hey, not only did I have feet, I got to keep my clothes on.