|
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."
It wouldn't be really be accurate to say that Zoya isn't emotional. Saying that she's not usually demonstrative of her emotions is probably closer to the mark. It's not a rule that Russians are reserved with their emotions, but by the standards of a lot of Americans that often appears to be the case, and that cultural upbringing is a part of her heritage.
In this particular case she opens her senses and allows this unknown presence to guide her along and what she sees, with the layers of lies over the world's energy peeled away to reveal the truth beneath, is a beauty that seems to almost represent the very nature of the way she's spent her entire Awakened life shaping her soul. It's moving, and she's moved.
Her first reaction when her Seeing eyes behold the spider-web strands of light is to gasp. Her hand reaches out like she'll try to touch them, beyond her reach or not, and tears well in her eyes before breaking from their corners to roll down her cheeks.
"What is this?" she breathes, because she's too taken aback to speak. "It's beautiful, but what? Where?" She's asking the voice that guided her here. She's asking the air around her. She's asking herself.
But moving on with her gaze to where the edges of this vision are being eaten away the world drops out from beneath her stomach and dread makes her veins run cold. She stares, studies, looks for any details that tell her what the purpose of that mouth is. Only to devour? To purge old data, like clean-up jobs being run old tables of a database?
The voice speaking from behind her again draws her back to herself. "Mother?" she asks.
"My fingers reach into the Mists," offers the voice behind her -- which, the more Zoya hears it speak, sounds like not one voice but a composite of a hundred -- a thousand -- a million -- voices, overlaid and intertwined. "This? This is new. Humanity reaches, and I follow. Not a ladder, but a web." There's fascination in the voice, and tenderness, too. "Not a ladder, but a web," it repeats.
She can see the way that the glittering digital landscape forms -- so far off into the distance that her eyes can't focus on it terribly well -- into something which looks like thorns. They form themselves into something which looks like --
don't throw me into that briar patch! the billboards cackle, popping and cracking
-- briars, yes. briars. Stars twinkle distantly in a net made of briars, while the landscapes of cities emerge from the glittering, streaming digital world opening before her.
She knows the phrase the Hedge means something to Lost, that it is a landscape of twisted psychoactive plant life, but -- a digital Hedge, bordering wherever this is? Whatever this is? It sounds right, even if she can't follow that thought to its next iteration.
"You iterate," the voice says with such wonder, and then such sadness as it continues, "you iterate your justices and your injustices. Your love and your hate."
The great black pit -- the pupil of a hungry eye -- devours, and Zoya can see the screaming songs of a million souls chewed to shreds, and those tiny little brains in their jewel-tone cases crunched and spit out. A hundred little vehicles -- matching descriptions she's heard of the astral constructs that Fox babbled on about getting to fly -- flitter like butterflies across the lightning-lit sky. An iron hand swipes across the horizon, knocking them out of their flight patterns. Broken pieces scatter across the ground, and the billboards laugh.
it's easy to cut out the middle-man when they've cut out most of themself
The Mists. That's a clue for Zoya about what might be going on, and following the strands of that clue she starts mapping out the web of possibilities. Webs, not ladders, are the way that Zoya's mind already works.
Everything she senses around her is Forces, which means she doesn't need to walk this web very far to arrive at the most likely answer. Certainty is another matter.
"This is a new emanation?" she half asks and half states to the voice behind her, which she continues to avoid looking at. "Are you showing me this because it's in danger?" She points toward the briars with one hand, toward the hungry eye with another.
"This is your piece of the play," the voice answers her. It does not answer her question directly, not at first. "You are almost ready to step onto the stage, so you must know your lines and role."
All around her, the rose-gold lines of code -- it must be code, right? -- stretch out into the vanishing point of a sunrise, so, so far in the distance. "They will try to take it," the voice answers. "They will try to prevent what you have begun. They will try to prevent me." Her Peripheral Mage Sight lights up again, a new burst of Forces, similar to when she saw her own hands growing into her phone. A glittering illusion -- and even in this world of codes and vehicles, she knows this to be an illusion -- snakes out from behind her. Green shoots and buds briefly burst forth from what Zoya somehow knows is the precise center of whatever this is.
"You are all in danger. All who were, all who will be. And this, too. This soap bubble of a thing." The voice sighs so softly. "You have always all been so terribly fragile."
The briars do not move, do not grow. They roil within themselves, but do not take over more of what lies before her. They are as fixed as the code-earth beneath her feet, relatively speaking. The little brains in their cases bobble around her still, perhaps watching her, and then they buzz away, alighting on the lampposts which grow like technological shoots along the illusion of a city street. Little proboscides extend from their sparkling cases and dip into the posts; the cameras on those posts, outlined in letters and digits, flicker and chirrup mechanically.
ready, set, go! the billboards blare, stretching up over her, and then play out an animation of race cars zooming across the sky.
"I think I understand." Zoya's mind keeps scanning the branching strands of this web of information. Web? Or maybe a binary tree, sorting possibilities and certainties on the way to the truth. "The Seers will try to stop the Tree for forming here, won't they? Or they're already trying." A look toward the threat that feels like her father's magic tells her that much.
"If they're already a step ahead of us, and already trying to wrest control of this place we didn't even know was here, then..." Zoya pushes the tears from the corners of her eyes with the knuckles of a finger. "Then there isn't time to waste. Do I understand correctly? Is there something else I need to know? How do we even begin to nurture the seed in this place?"
A soft puff of something like breath, something like a sigh, from behind her. "Yes." This seems to answer all of her questions except the very last one.
"Some things are given in heaven," it answers, almost regretfully. "And some things are only given to the children who walk the Earth."
The light fades from around her, and before it disappears entirely, she feels a hand pressed to the small of her back. It is soft, and reassuring. "This is your part, revealed to you."
the billboard flickers: present day. present time.
She comes to, her head on her desk, a string of saliva attaching her face to the wood surface and the puddle of drool that's accumulated there. Her right hand holds her phone, which sizzles and smokes, and her joints are stiff, as if she's been laying in the same position for a long time.
That phone is toast.
"Gross," Zoya says in Russian as she wipes off her face. She hasn't gone waffleface on her keyboard since before she learned magic enough to keep herself awake, which has been nearly as long as she's been Awakened, so waking up with her face on her desk again is definitely a throwback to a prior era, and not a very welcome one.
She flexes her fingers and then starts working stiffness from her muscles from the head down. Her neck, her shoulders, down her arms, twists of her back, she gets the blood flowing and loosens muscles and joins. That gives her a little time to think through her next steps.
Step 1: Pop the sim card out of her phone and check whether it's toasted too.
Step 2: Open a lower drawer on her desk and pull out another phone, just like the dead one. It's not the only spare in the drawer.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Save the Tree.
|