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Zoya has a lot of busy days, and always has. Sometimes she works until she wears herself thin, because there are leads to track down and things to do. Today, she's been working a lot.
First there was an incident on Instagram that required some moderation, then Fox came in to her office and gave her a piece of concrete about the size of her fist and said hey, babe, there's a bunch of information on the Mark IIs in here, so you need to take a look at that. Then one little task after another until -- when did it become so late? Suddenly it's 4 AM, and time seems to swim around her. Maybe she needs some sleep.
It's that moment, the one where she realizes how late it is, suddenly, that she hears something like the crackling of fire. She knows immediately it isn't, and in the moment that she knows it isn't fire, lightning crackles up her fingertips and into the smartphone she's holding at the same time as pale pink shoots sprout from her fingertips and dive underneath the screen of her phone, pushing in between glass and metal. Her keen peripheral Mage Sight lights up instantly, and she feels the warmth of Forces wrapping around her like a familiar cloak.
How tired is she, exactly?
Maybe it's a sign of how much she needs sleep that one of the first thoughts that comes to her after that is maybe I'm already dreaming. This does seem like something that might happen in a dream, right? She's had weirder. She's had more horrifying. She's had dreams that were both weirder and more horrifying.
There are certain instincts that tend to get learned over time, though.
One of those is that if something weird is happening and it might be a danger, put up a shield, and in this cases it's a Forces one that protects her in an instant."
The second is to take a closer look, so up comes the Forces mage sight.
For most Awakened -- especially those outside of Philadelphia at this point -- unraveling a Mystery with more than the most basic of Opacity might take more than a handful of seconds. She pulls up her shield, she focuses her sight, and immediately she sees the digits flowing past her, the way her fingers seem to be diving into the phone, growing into it, cracking apart the device.
A woman's voice whispers next to her, companionably:
present day
present time
and then she sees
She sees the digits curling into herself more intimately than even her Legacy allows, and she sees the warmth of the Forces wrapping around her like an embrace. She feels the wash of power coming from it -- normally she'd be able to tell whether the Awakened who created the effect was more or less powerful than her, examine their Nimbus...
but this is pure.
She hasn't felt anything nearly this immense, or nearly this clean and uninhibited, since the day she signed her name to her Tower. It's like touching the Aether directly, but refined. Defined.
Split in half.
Just Forces. Only Forces. And she knows this is more than anything an Awakened could create. This is like stepping into the sun.
It's like light pouring into the back of her skull, the touch of lightning to the back of her brain, rattling down her spine. It is not, in many ways, unlike an orgasm completely divorced from sexuality.
The woman's voice repeats:
present day
present time
And then:
Come with me, Pheme.
A soft hand presses to the small of her back.
There are a lot of things Zoya could do at this point, but ultimately all of them boil down to two options. Go with the voice. Or don't. Maybe it's hubris, maybe it's sleep deprivation, but what Zoya ends up deciding in the moment is to satisfy her curiosity about this odd situation and let the feeling of a hand on her back guide her.
It might be a bad idea, but the last time she had a "bad idea" anything like this it was the most important thing she ever did in her life. Signing her name on a watchtower, not really knowing what it meant.
She doesn't know what this means, but she knows it's important. She goes.
"Who are you?" she asks, though.
The world falls away around her, or perhaps the world wraps her up in its arms. She cannot see the source of the hand on her back, but she feels its warmth, feels gentle fingers guiding her forward.
Digital trails open in front of her: shimmering silver and peach and gold, pink and teal and royal blue. They don't follow neat and orderly lines, which somehow just... seems to match her expectations in a way she can't quite explain. Like cobwebs, the lines of light reach out pure and clean in front of her, off into infinity directly ahead of her.
To the left -- way, way off in the distance -- the binary lines become tangled with one another, forming sharp, jagged protrusions. Something like teeth, perhaps, chewing up the world, or vines with their sharp thorns tangling up the neat and orderly way the rest of the web she walks upon -- yes, a web, each line of digits and letters stretches underneath her feet like the warp and weft of a great chaotic fabric.
To the right, those lines flow into a great and open mouth.
(it's an eye, the pupil of an eye, and the eye drinks in all of the light, and it gets darker and darker)
billboards appear ahead of her, screens lighting up before her, a hundred hungry eyes blinking at the corners of each.
tiny human brains bobble in bubbles, floating around her in crystalline cases, kept like jewels.
the billboards flash all around her, the words changing: you wake from your dreams so we can sell them again
they change in front of her: Name, age, qualifications, race, faith, career aspirations and the data flows up to the billboards, the data runs into the eye, the cameras on the street corners crackle and snap and the electricity runs from the little bubbles full of brains which float around her like butterflies.
The voice behind her -- and she feels something like certainty that she, like Orpheus, cannot turn around. If she looks, this will be over -- says one word:
"Mother."
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