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“Ah,” Daniel said. He dropped to a squat, which let him look me in the eye. “So you have no real idea what’s going on. No idea why you’re here.”
I shook my head.
“And you are frightened, nervous, but also excited, I see.” He frowned and tilted his head sideways. “You are Messenger’s student, not mine, but I will tell you by way of reassurance that it will all become clear to you. In time.”
Messenger stiffened a bit at this reassurance. I think he wanted me uncertain.
“We had a visit,” Messenger said significantly.
“Oh?”
“Oriax,” Messenger said.
The two of them exchanged hard looks at that. I would have expected a leer, a wink, a raised eyebrow, but there was none of that. No sense that they were referring to what had to be the most beautiful young woman either of them had ever or would ever encounter.
“That’s very quick,” Daniel said. “Very quick. Who do you think she’s after?”
“She came to us while we were on the Samantha Early matter.”
“Oriax is not known for her directness,” Daniel said. “So it’s most likely something else. Someone else. Though, of course, she could be counting on us believing that.”
“Can I ask a question?” I said. My voice sounded squeaky in my own ears.
Messenger turned to look at me, and Daniel’s face went blank. He pulled back, making it clear that I was to speak only to Messenger.
“You will have a great many questions,” Messenger said coldly. “But you will learn by observing. Later you will learn by doing. At this moment you will learn by remaining silent.”
If I expected to find some sympathy from Daniel, I was mistaken. Messenger had shot me down, and Daniel had merely waited for it to be over.
But I was tired of being frightened and kept in the dark. I was going to ask my question. And later, when I had other questions, I would ask those, too.
“What is Oriax?” I asked.
The question surprised Messenger. One eyebrow rose fractionally. “Not who? You ask ‘what’?”
“She’s not human,” I said, surprising myself with my certainty. It had only just then come to me. The way they spoke of Oriax revealed if not fear from the two males, at least wariness. They saw something in her that I had not, which meant they knew more than I, and what they knew was that Oriax was not merely a beautiful woman with unusually small feet.
“She’s quick,” Daniel said to Messenger.
“Yes,” Messenger admitted. Coming from him, it did not sound like a compliment. “The time will come when you understand Oriax and her kind. That day will be terrible for you, and worse for someone else.”
Daniel was gone. No poof, no flash of light, no explosion, just, suddenly, gone. And the car was moving again. Liam and Emma were crying again and talking about the “poor doggie.”
“We love each other, why is that so damn hard?” Liam moaned. “Why can’t we just be together?”
“Wait, is this the right way?” Emma looked around, turned to look back, looked right through me, right through me as if I were not there.
And I understood her concern, for a mist was creeping over the road. It was the color of yellowed teeth. It was the same mist that had seemed to creep across my body. It moved at a speed that was all out-of-sync with the rushing speed of the car. The mist was leisurely but relentless. And as it caressed the vehicle, it was not parted or blown aside by the passage of that now frail-seeming machine.
The car was running. I could hear the engine; I could hear and feel the vibration of tires on pavement. But there could be no sense of speed because the mist blocked all evidence of passing landscape.
Finally Liam took his foot off the gas pedal and the car grew quieter, rolling now rather than being propelled. Slower and slower, tires making a hollow sound.
Without warning, Messenger and I were no longer in the backseat but stood beneath a blasted mockery of a tree, a tree that looked as if it had never borne a leaf.
The mist did not touch us but surrounded us at a distance, hemming us in, leaving a gloomy, unreal space no more than fifty feet across. The mist was also above us, blocking any hint of sky. I felt the tickling of panic. Somehow amid all the evidence of overturned laws of physics, all the unnatural flouting of the unseen but omnipresent laws that define our world, it was this, this creeping, sentient mist that most impressed upon my strained senses and raw emotions that I was in a place that was fundamentally at odds with reality. When the basic rules, up and down, fast and slow, before and now and after, were so casually suspended and upended, how was I to ever feel a moment’s safety? Daniel had said I would understand, eventually. But why should I trust him any more than these proofs of the instability of space and time?
The car with Emma and Liam nosed into that strange and unnatural circle and came to rest.
