Chapter 23

  Kate

  Kaitlyn Carter woke up because something was tickling her nose. She held perfectly still even after she woke up. She opened one eye veerrrry slowly to see what was on her nose, although she thought she already knew.

  It was a butterfly, but it was not Navi. It was a real butterfly, although “real” might have been a stretch, because she was pretty sure there weren’t any on Earth with perfect double-logarithmic-spirals on the wings.

  She sat up in a sea of pillows, in a big bright box of a room. Her guitar leaned against one corner, and her lab coat leaned against the guitar, and both of them were all covered in mud. She was wearing new clothes: a simple loose shirt and pants, plain shiny white. They were so soft! They felt like silk, which made sense when she thought about it. She hugged herself, enjoying the softness, then jumped over to her guitar.

  She put it on, and the lab coat, although both were so muddy that dry flakes rained around her and got the carpet dirty, and she stepped right through the big square door. The Theians were waiting for her, and they cheered a strange warbling cheer when she emerged. She beamed at them as they fluttered about. The immense dome was full of trees and greenery with fogged glass for a ceiling. Many of the Theians were up in the air playing some game that involved tossing around colorful hoops.

  They all came down to meet her, and some of them acted like they knew her, although Kate couldn’t remember much of what had happened the night before after they rescued her from the storm. She vaguely recalled one of them. His name was Mormo, and he had bright green angular patterns on his brown wings. He looked like a moth more than a butterfly, especially with his big feathery antennae, which she thought made him a male. None of them wore any clothes except for sometimes a shawl or a scarf or other accessory, but that was not a problem because Kate had been looking at naked Lepidoptera for as long as she could remember.

  Mormo and a female(?) butterfly named Polyom cleared a space around her, beseeching the excitable crowd to give her some room. For this, Kate was grateful. They backed away, with many a flash and flutter of brilliant gleaming wings and bright colors. Her heart leapt to see all of them! Was this what it was like to be in love? But after they had made space and had arrayed themselves into the most amazing crowd of spectators, both around her on the floor and up above her on perches and poles, they all stood quite still, looking at her. She counted around 30 of them, counting Mormo and Polyom, which meant that 60 compound eyes were looking at her, and also probably 60 ocelli, although some species didn’t have those and she shouldn’t make assumptions anyway, and were they really looking at her? Because it was pretty hard to tell with compound eyes, which were always kind-of looking at everything, and were they even really seeing her the way she saw them, with the same colors and everything, and oh my god, this was her chance to actually ask butterflies all the things she’d always wanted to ask them: about how they see and what the world looks like to them and how it feels to fly and whether it’s actually tiring and did they recognize each other (though these were people and had names so of course they did) but what about the pupae and caterpillars and why–

  A single white butterfly drifted down from above. The crowd stirred and murmured in response. It was Navi! And even though Navi was not cuddly like Callie, Kate still wanted to give her a hug.

  “…Sky Child?” said Mormo. His voice was soft and feathery like his antennae. It was a warm, fuzzy, muffled voice. His maxillary galeae were complex and moved strangely when he spoke. Naturally there would be surprising variations in external morphology when dealing with humanoid Lepidoptera! Duh!

  Kate coughed, prepared to speak, and coughed again. Then she cleared her throat. Then she took a deep breath. “H-h–(cough)–hi,” she said. I’m nervous, she thought to herself. Butterflies in the stomach! The thought made her want to giggle. They probably wouldn’t like that euphemism!

  Instead of returning her greeting, they kept waiting in what seemed like hushed silence. Kate took a deep breath, turned around, marched back into the room she had woken up in, and grabbed one of the brightly colored pillows. Its shape was odd, and she realized that it was made to look like a chrysalis. This made her happy because it was adorable. The pillow was yellow, with patchy pink and green overlapping shapes on it. She hugged it to herself and returned outside. The moths and butterflies were stirring, chittering and whispering to each other, but they quieted once she returned.

  “I’m K-ka-k–KaitlynCarter!”

  They cheered their high warbling cheers. She bowed. They kept cheering, so she bowed again with a silly flourish of her lab coat. They cheered at that too, and just like that, it seemed she had met their expectations. Was her name all they had wanted? No speech? She was just fine with not having to give a speech.

  They at once broke up and began conversing in a huge garble of varied speech. Some of them presented Kate with her medallion, her pink-and-green dress (washed clean), and her scarf. They asked about where she had come from, and what had happened out there the night before, and about her angel, and the wind, and the storms, and the palace, and all kinds of other questions that she could not answer. Mormo and Polyom, whose colors Kate thought she recognized from the night before, stood on either side of her like royal guards or bouncers. Mormo’s thick green and brown thorax looked somehow intense and perhaps even manly for moths. Was this the moth equivalent of Alan Sheppard?! The thought made her giggle. Polyom, on the other tarsus, was delicate and lovely, with pink and purple coloration on her wings, marked with deep iridescent blue eyespots. Unlike Mormo’s warm and feathery voice, Polyom’s voice was high and melodic, a bit like a bird chirping. Kate became sure as she saw and heard more and more of the Theians that she had been right about the sexual dimorphism she mentioned to the others earlier: the males were moth-like, and the females were butterfly-like. A peculiar biological arrangement indeed! It made her curious about breeding and hybridization, but she considered that maybe questions of those sorts could be inappropriate. Though, she herself wouldn’t be bothered to discuss such things about humans. Was there a Theian scientist she could talk to?! She continually scribbled notes in her notebook, short phrases or words like “homeothermic?!”

  The Theians showed her a picture they had taken the evening before. It was printed on a thick, waxy sheet that was not quite like paper, and its coloration was peculiar. The picture looked faded, almost sepia-toned like an old photograph, yet some colors shone vibrantly. It took her a moment to remember that the spectrum of visible light for Lepidoptera was largely in the ultraviolet range. This picture likely did not look faded at all to them! They seemed proud of this photograph, yet Kate dearly hoped that none of her friends ever saw this picture, ever, for the Kaitlyn Carter depicted therein was covered in mud, her hair a tangled mass of dried black muck that looked more like a tentacled alien creature attacking her head from behind. Her glasses were askew, one lens cracked. She gripped her guitar awkwardly in one hand and a muddy ribbon of scarf in the other. She looked confused and cold and happy all at the same time like some wild half-drowned castaway that had washed up on shore after a storm. But at least there was no shattered-glass scar on her face. There was that.

  The Theians mothered over the bruises on her knees and the various other minor cuts and injuries she had sustained. They treated Navi with special honor, but Navi just acted like a strangely attentive butterfly. Kate had hoped the Theians could speak to Navi, but this didn’t seem to be the case.

  Then they ushered Kate into another big warm room with a lot of open space up above for flying. It had deciduous trees and a dome of fogged windows high above, just like the previous room. The perpetual storms dimmed the natural light from outside, so glowing balls hung about the trees like huge Christmas lights to add illumination. Here they ate breakfast. Breakfast for the Theians was exactly as Kate expected. The main courses were broad dishes full of overripe fruits and a variety of juices served in tall, narrow glasses that looked more like vases or hookahs. There were also bowls of pollen, sugar, and other powdery substances that could be mixed into the beverages at will. Some Theians crafted complex cocktails, shaking and pouring like professional bartenders. The Theians acquired their breakfast on the ground and then fluttered up to the mossy branches of flourishing subtropical trees to eat in small groups. Watching them fly made Kate wonder how much they weighed. It didn’t look like it could be very much! She wondered if this also was something it might be impolite to ask.

  She was the center of attention when Mormo and Polyom led her to the mat on the floor where the food waited. Activity ceased when she arrived, which made her nervous. Every one of the marvelous multi-faceted eyes was watching her. Polyom pointed out a side mat that Kate had not noticed before. It contained piles of leaves, cut grass, vegetables, nuts, and raw meat, some of it beginning to rot. Polyom watched, wringing her two pairs of tarsi in front of her as Kate inspected this collection.

  It took a moment for Kate to understand, but she laughed when she did. They didn’t know what she ate! They had just collected a variety of potential foods in hopes that some of them would please her. She laughed harder when she saw the neat stacks of different rocks, the blocks of melting ice, and the bowl of live insects.

  Her laughter caused a nervous stir, but she was quick to point out the foods she desired. She told Polyom that she didn’t eat meat or grass or rocks. Polyom nodded in sage understanding and assured Kate that they would do their best to acquiesce to any of her requests.

  Kate ate fruits and nuts for breakfast, some of them mysterious, and washed them down with plain water and one of the juices. The juice she chose was a bloody-orange in color, but it certainly was not orange juice! It had a peculiar spicy kick to it, which was not unpleasant but took some getting used to. She wanted to try them all!

  She talked to the Theians all throughout breakfast. They spoke English just fine, though their voices were sometimes difficult to understand. They were all so friendly! Many questions were asked. The Theians were a curious people. Kate learned about the problems caused by the perpetual storms and the looming threat of the storm worms which generated them. A series of derechos swept incessantly around the Cloud Moon, preventing travel, destroying crops and buildings, and just generally making things difficult. Amongst these problems, the greatest might be that their young would not metamorphose! Entire nurseries full of pupae lay dormant, and had for many years. This was a very serious problem indeed.

  Talk of the storm worms made Kate recall the previous night, how she thought she had seen vague shapes in the thunderheads, partially outlined by flashes of lightning. She had heard something beyond thunder from the storm, and it had disagreed with and overpowered her music. She could not hear that sound now, but the thunder was there: a far-off grumbling so ubiquitous that it went unnoticed by the Theians.

  But the moths and butterflies could not be held down by such grim thoughts for long. Soon they were flittering about, playing that game with the hoops and engaging with the actual butterflies that filled the room and mooched off of the fruits and juices. Kate wondered if each of these big rooms was a complete biome.

  She astonished them by summoning chopsticks from her medallion to eat the sliced and dried fruit and nuts. It was the eating-with-chopsticks that amazed them rather than the fact that Kate could pull the chopsticks right out of the air. The Theians marveled at these utensils and examined their own opposable tarsi in perplexity until Kate was rolling on the floor with laughter.

  They asked her about her home, and her guitar, and Navi, and her music. She played for them, and it was a large-scale enactment of what happened when she played for her butterflies back home at the Carter Estate. They danced! They spun through the air to the rich thrumming of her bass. Some of them joined in on their own strange instruments. She saw no wind instruments, but several had string or percussion to add to Kate’s bass. Mormo vanished at the beginning and returned shortly later with something like a four-handed concertina! He improvised the melody, and he was good, though it was a strange melody indeed, and it strained against the tuning of Kate’s bass. Was she off, or was he? Probably she, Kate decided. Who knew what the Theian tuning system was like? Another question for the notebook!

  She led them in a spirited roundelay. They played and danced and laughed, and Kate felt comfortable. This was not home. A million small oddities and inconveniences reminded her of that. But it was almost home, yet strange enough to be exciting. An adventure !

  When they had all finished, Kate invited them to her palace. They hesitated to go to the palace until Kate reminded them it was her palace, and she was inviting them.

  So they went, but Kate could not fly. The Theians carried her between several of them in a blanket, as they had the night before. This was a little fun, a little scary, and more than a little undignified, so Kate resolved to somehow remedy this problem in the future.

  They flew low under the dark, bruised sky. Distant thunder rumbled and Technicolor lightning flickered on the far horizons. And the wind! It clearly made tough work for her companions. They skimmed low over the rippling grasses and took advantage of the currents whenever they shifted favorably. They were expert flyers!

  The swarm alighted atop one of the shortest windmills that made up the spires of her palace, the blue windmill with butterfly-wing arms. Kate led them in a parade down into the main hall. From there, Kate and her few dozen new friends began an exploratory venture throughout her palace. Curiosity overcame any hesitancy the Theians had about poking through the home of the Child of Skies.

  They flew about the exterior of the palace, marveling at the windmills and the shreds of sky that streamed like ribbons into the gloom. They inspected the hexagon at the top and wondered what other Children there were. They flew in synchronicity in the many-rainbowed Great Hall. They found a door labeled “Skywater” on a nearby cliff.

  Kaitlyn Carter had more fun than she remembered having in quite some time. At first she had been nervous, even intimidated, around the Theians. They were, after all, so very beautiful, unlike herself.

  But she had her lab coat, painted in bright colors like their wings, and the Theians loved it. And she had her guitar, and the Theians loved that too. She had Navi, and the Theians loved her. But most of all, it seemed like the Theians loved her, Kaitlyn Carter, the same way that Liz did. And so, with these wondrous people who looked like tall butterflies and moths, Kate didn’t feel lonely at all. In fact, she felt happy.

  Mormo and Polyom stayed by her side, the moth and the butterfly. They stuck together, and they argued a lot, but in a calm and comfortable way. Kate wondered if they were married, or the Theian equivalent. Did they have little pupae somewhere? That would be so cute! Again, questions of genotypes and phenotypes arose in her mind, but she was still too nervous to ask about it.

  She found a special room in a tall pink tower. It took up the whole width of the tower, and it was full of models of flying machines. They hung from the ceiling, lay half-formed on workbenches, stood represented in sketches on graph paper on corkboard screens. Someone, clearly, had been fascinated with flying. Who?

  The next room up contained a single full-sized ornithopter, along with a garage-like door that opened to the outside. The machine could carry a single person, provided they were lying down on it, face-forward. It had pedals and levers and switches for controls. It looked unsafe, though finely crafted. It was made of polished wood, brass fixings, steel joints and hinges. The wings were a kind of clear, flexible plastic. Of course, they had been shaped into something like butterfly wings. They could use some painting, though.

  “I am n-no-n-not,” she told Polyom, “g-getting in that.”

  Polyom nodded in visible confusion. Neither Polyom nor Kate knew that Kate would indeed be getting in that, and more, that very same day. A match between the fear and the curiosity of Kaitlyn Carter is really no match at all.

  The discovery of the ornithopter prompted Kate to investigate the other towers. She discovered that the windmill mechanisms at the top of each provided electrical power to the castle, and in one case, running water. The water got pulled up by a bucket system from somewhere far below and dumped into a cistern that drained all through the rest of the palace, including that one part on the ground floor where it flowed like a stream through a channel in the glittering marble stones.

  In the tall central tower, just beneath the hexagonal platform with a single free-standing door, she found the snowglobes. There were seven of them: six arranged in a hexagon exactly beneath their corresponding chunk of the platform above, and a larger one in the middle. The snowglobes rested in custom-made depressions on polished stone pedestals. Each of the outer globes was like a softball in size, but the middle one was larger.

  The pedestals were labeled. In order, clockwise starting with hers:

  Theia, Cloud Moon

  Orpheus, Metal Moon

  Hyperion, Color Moon

  Sisyphus, Garden Moon

  Pyrrhus, Hollow Moon

  Icarus, Void Moon

  And finally, there in the middle: Ardia.

  Kate picked up each and scrutinized them. The snowglobe for Theia showed nothing beneath the glass but dark grey stormclouds. When she looked closely through a mist-formed magnifying glass, she saw tiny sparks of colors glinting in the clouds. The lightning.

  Orpheus was a spiky thing like a crazy bunch of purplish-black crystals fused with a mangled sea urchin. It hovered in the middle of its glass sphere. Again with the magnifying glass, Kate thought she saw the tiny little spikes drifting slowly.

  Hyperion was all white and grey on one side, and deepest black on the other. The line where the two met was blurry and moved strangely, though she couldn’t make out exactly what was going on there even with the magnifying glass. The boundary between night and day writhed in a way that gave her the shivers.

  Sisyphus was also all white, but it was the white of sparkling ice rather than blank paper. This moon had a huge mountain on one side of it, so big it distorted the shape of the whole moon! You couldn’t really call that one a sphere.

  Pyrrhus was like a galaxy of tiny lights. With her magnifying glass, Kate could make out some of them individually. A city! The whole moon a city, interrupted only by occasional bodies of dark water. This snowglobe felt strangely light.

  Icarus was even lighter than Pyrrhus. In fact, it weighed nothing at all, except for the glass enclosing it, because nothing was inside! It was just darkness. Not the darkness of an object that is black, but the darkness of nothingness. So it was true! Isaac didn’t even have a moon at all. “Void Moon.” Was he not supposed to?

  She handled Ardia carefully with both hands, feeling its weight. Much bigger than the moons! It actually looked like Earth. Blue oceans separated green and brown continents, with white ice at one end. It had some oddities, including: tiny patches of black, like ink flicked onto the planet; a purple area that looked strangely fuzzy under her magnifying glass; a vibrant patch of auroras at one pole in spiral formation around some center; oddly angular lakes.

  She left the globes and ascended to the snowflake platform. She checked her door. It still opened only onto the windy sky beyond. Kate sat in the middle of the platform, joined by Mormo and Polyom, who reverently laid themselves down on the crystalline snowflake. Kate had observed this behavior; Theians did not sit. Instead, they rested laterally on all six limbs like regular Lepidoptera. Mormo was less than three feet high in this position with his moth wings parallel to the floor, but Polyom’s pretty blue and pink-swirled wings were as tall as she normally was when standing upright.

  They didn’t speak, though Mormo’s fronds and Polyom’s antennae twitched in the wind, and Polyom flexed her wings carefully. Navi came dancing around them, and soon other Theians joined them. Kate had learned some of their names already. It was not difficult when they were all so unique in appearance. None of them resembled any actual butterflies or moths that Kate knew of, with the exception of one big moth who was unmistakably a hyalophora cecropia. She knew this one’s name; it was Saturn. He didn’t talk much. Flitch was a small butterfly with a high fluting voice who talked all the time, and she had startling fluorescent wings of orange and green. She was always by the side of the composed Thlytri like an excitable child beside an older and wiser sibling. Thlytri’s wings were solid sky-blue. Thlytri in turn clung to a large moth, the biggest individual present, whose name was difficult to pronounce but sounded like “Shlushluth.” Shlushluth was pure summer-cloud white, his fuzzy body peppered with small spots of deep purple in fascinating constellations, and he had explored Kate’s palace more curiously than any, trailing Thlytri and Flitch behind him. Were Thlytri and Shlushluth lovers? These Theians and more, two dozen more, gathered bit-by-bit at the height of her palace to watch the storm with her. And every one was marvelous.

  Kate was sure it was a mistake of the sort that Sherlock Holmes would not abide to assume that these creatures had human-like personalities and relationships. Maybe she was misreading everything. She knew nothing of them or their culture. But it certainly seemed to her that these Theians spoke and acted and treated each other just like a big group of assorted humans would. Not that she, Kate, had much experience with big groups of humans, or really any humans except her five friends and Aunt Becky, who surely didn’t count.

  Either way, she was happy there. With them, in the wind and storm, watching the flickering firework-lightning in the far distance, she felt accepted , automatically and wordlessly.

  “Sky Child,” said Mormo when most of the Theians had assembled. He spoke loudly to be heard over the wind. “Tell us of the others.”

  “Y-you can c-call me Kate,” she said. “Do y-you–do you mean my f-friends?”

  Mormo nodded from his prone-like position. His feathery antennae twitched against the wind, and the others all stirred. (Kate noticed that Thlytri stirred a bit closer to the big white moth until they were touching. Her wings even caressed him lightly now when she flexed them! How cute!) “The Time Child,” said Mormo, his soft voice nearly lost in a sudden howl of wind that whipped Kate’s hair across her face. “The Child of Lights. The others.”

  Kate smiled. They were pretty much children, though probably most of her friends wouldn’t think like that. So she told them: about brave Liz, and her many talents and her loyal and cuddly cat. About cool Eric, calm and brave, and about how much he loved his sister. About creative Isaac and his love of stories and music and games. About special Jimothy, the painter, innocent and pure and powerful. And about dangerous Heidi–dangerous only to those who would hurt her friends! Kate pointed out each triangular section on the platform as she went through them.

  The Theians murmured amongst themselves while she spoke. They seemed very patient with her stutter. Maybe they didn’t know that it was abnormal.

  Then they asked about her and where she had come from, and she told them about her crazy Aunt Becky and her big lonely house, and her music and butterflies and snowglobes and chess and Whiskey and her lab and all the other things she could think of.

  Then Kate returned their curiosity. Mormo spoke the most. He was the leader, or at least no one ever disagreed with him, or interrupted him. The Theians lived simple lives. They spent most of their time growing and collecting food, or caring for their larvae and pupae. They had technology but seldom used it, nor was contact with Ardia or the other moons common. The Theians lived in scattered small communities devoid of any centralized government. Yet they all faced the same problem: the eternal storm, the storm worms therein, and the consequent inability of their young to metamorphose. Too much wind, too much dark, too much thunder. Butterflies are not fit for flying about in storms.

  Mormo and Polyom were “under the same sky,” (married?!) and together ran the overcrowded nursery. They had to throw out dead chrysalises regularly, which horrified Kate but didn’t appear to disturb them when they spoke of it.

  Kate wanted to know more. She asked them, “B-b-but what do y-y-do you want?”

  “Our hopes?” said Mormo.

  “Our dreams?” said Polyom.

  Kate nodded furiously. You could tell all about someone from what they really wanted. Jim had told her that, and it was true! Jim wanted everyone to be safe and happy and kind. Eric wanted to be a hero. Heidi wanted friends, and then she wanted to protect those friends. Isaac wanted to be close to God or something. Liz wanted something beautiful and complicated that Kate didn’t understand, and Kate wasn’t sure what she wanted herself.

  “We want,” said Polyom after a moment, “children.”

  “Family,” agreed Mormo. One of his feathery antennae twitched toward Polyom, and for a moment her own touched his.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Peace,” offered a lavender-dusted moth.

  “To be free of fear,” said Shlushluth.

  There was a long moment of silence, and then Flitch said, “sunlight.” Everyone stirred in agreement. “The sun,” others said. “The stars. The sky. Rainbows.” This was the answer, the one which encapsulated everything else. The way they said it made it sound like such a thing included family, peace, children.

  “The sky,” said Mormo. “We would see it again.”

  And they told her about Absolem. Polyom whispered the name fearfully, yet even so the sky above heard it and responded with a crashing thunder that shook the snowflake-platform. One moth was so startled that he flashed his wings reflexively, revealing fierce crimson eye-spots that glared up at the clouds. The Theians all huddled together and turned their many-faceted gazes above. “Surely we are safe here,” muttered Mormo, not sounding very sure at all. The way he said it made her want to pat him. She had been resisting the urge to pat him anyway since he was clearly very soft and fuzzy, but she still didn’t know what kinds of things were appropriate.

  “Absolem,” Polyom continued in a voice that cut through the wind far better than did Mormo’s, “is a Great One. He sleeps.” He sleeps, echoed some of the crowd. Yes, he sleeps.

  “His chrysalis is like diamond,” offered a nearby butterfly with blue-edged wings of black velvet whose name Kate did not know.

  “It shines like light on water,” said a swallowtail with spiral patterns.

  “Though he sleeps, yet he speaks,” said an older moth.

  “He waits.”

  “He’s beautiful!”

  “Frightening.”

  “Huge!”

  They continued while Kate listened intently. So! A giant crystal cocoon? Most of the Theians present seem to have made a pilgrimage to this Absolem, and a few claimed to have heard him speak even in his hibernation.

  Absolem was, of course, the name of the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Kate had recognized the name at once. That Absolem had been quite unhelpful to the lost and curious heroine. But perhaps this one would be different.

  Kate realized that she had already made up her mind. She would go and see this Absolem herself, and without delay! Surely a creature such as that could get her all sorted out.

  A soft leg gently touched hers. It was Mormo’s. “Would you go, Sky Child?” he asked. “See Absolem. Perhaps, speak with him. He may offer wisdom, even to such as you.” The others who heard whispered their assent. Distant thunder growled louder.

  Kaitlyn Carter jumped up with such sudden haste that she would have fallen over were it not for a fortuitous gust of wind that nudged her upright. “Y-ye-y-I’ll do it!” she declared. “L-let’s go!”

  Navi at once guided her down a walkway and over to the winged flying machine. In the end, and only after much weighing of options and encouragement from the Theians, she decided to give it a try. It was not, after all, like flying in an airplane. It was single-person. She would have full control, and if she crashed, it would be her fault. This comforted her, although she knew that she was much more likely to crash in this thing than in an airplane flown by certified pilots.

  She inspected it thoroughly. The driving airfoils were, of course, oscillating rather than rotary. It appeared to possess no internal source of power at all. Was it a glider? Was the wind strong enough for that? It was very light, despite its size. The whole thing was as long as she was and each of the four wings was broader still, yet she could easily pick it up by herself.

  Theians crowded around while she investigated the flying device. Some of them pulled the latch and opened the garage-door to the outside, revealing their frightful elevation. It opened onto a long drop down into the bottomless canyon adjacent to the palace. Some butterflies compared their own wings to the dull, colorless wings of the machine.

  Experimentally, Kate put on the safety visor. It fit comfortably over her glasses and still allowed a wide range of vision. Experimentally, she laid down in the machine. She fit inside it as though it had been made for her, which made her a little uncomfortable when she considered its limited provision of space in the chest area. Her feet dangled off the back end, her head rested in a forward-facing position, and her arms were free to reach down and seize the controls. She played with the controls for a moment and figured out how they shifted the balance and altered the angle of the wings on either side. It seemed simple enough. Basic aerodynamics!

  She gathered a few hair clips from her lab coat’s pockets and reached up to clip her hair back so it would stay out of her face. In doing so, she snagged a lever with her arm. This made her grunt in pain, and it also audibly unlatched something, somewhere. She didn’t pay this much heed until the entire flying machine began sliding forward on its track toward the open door and the limitless stormy sky beyond.

  Kate yelped in alarm. “N-n-n-no, wait!”

  But it did not wait. One Theian made a feeble attempt to stop the thing from sliding, but Kate had already seen that the Theians were not very strong. Most of the surrounding crowd seemed to believe she was launching on purpose! They cheered, and their cheering was joined by Kate’s shriek of terror as the flying machine reached the opening and just slid right out.

  Her own scream rang loudly off of the visor she wore, but she paid it no mind. The world turned in front of her, tilting down and down, until Kate stared at the unseen depths of the canyon alongside the palace. She felt dizzy, sick, cold, and terribly hot all at once. Two thoughts crowded together in her mind, shouting at each other:

  What the hell was I thinking! Getting in this machine was a bad idea, such a bad idea; why am I so stupid?

  And

  I think it is falling. My thing is falling, I’m going to be falling a lot. Shit!

  For a single, horrible second, Kaitlyn Carter was paralyzed. She knew, in some outside-herself way, that she needed to think, she needed to do something, but she could manage neither.

  A white butterfly flashed into view as she fell. It disappeared as Kate and the flying machine fell past into the darkness of the canyon. But a new thought came into her mind, as if passed like a baton from that tiny white swallowtail (ornithoptera!). The thought was: what would Rebecca Carter do?

  The answer, of course, was that she would laugh scornfully at the threat of imminent demise, and she would kick back a double-shot of bourbon, and she would fly the damn thing even if she didn’t know how.

  Kate, her fists in a white-knuckled death grip around the control handles, heaved back on them. The wings of the machine flexed, caught the air. The craft began to level out in unsteady jerks. But Kate saw with dread, as she gasped for air in-between screams, that it was too late. She had already descended into the canyon, and although no longer in a nosedive, she now bore directly for the far canyon wall. That sheer cliff, with its tastefully striated layers of red, grey, and yellow, dominated her field of view.

  If only she could go up–up! But she instinctively knew that her little craft did not have the capacity for such a rapid climb. There was no space, no time.

  Yet as soon as she thought this, just as she began to switch from a desperate desire to ascend into a grim preparation for impact, the flying machine shuddered as a powerful updraft caught it. The wings of the machine jerked, and this new force bore Kate aloft at such speed that she screamed again and pulled the control sticks back toward her reflexively. This resulted in a backflip as the unexpected current of air sweeping up the cliff face shot her into the windy skies.

  What would Aunt Becky do!? Kate thought desperately as she struggled to gain some sort of control during the wild loop-the-loop, her eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  One of Aunt Becky’s stories was about her stealing a biplane from poachers, and this back when she had never flown anything before. According to Aunt Becky, she had learned “on the fly.” According to Aunt Becky, she had done this mainly through instinct, since she was drugged up on pain medication at the time. She said she didn’t remember about half of the flight she had made to a local city. She had landed on a highway, mistaking it for a runway, and had then tried to taxi into a gas station because the biplane was low on fuel. Kate thought it might have been more than just morphine, assuming the story was true at all. But that didn’t matter! Instinct!

  She tried hard to fly on instinct.

  But nothing happened. She drew a blank.

  What did “instinct” even mean, anyway? Did she just not have it? Change of plans! Logic. Logic she had, and with this she would fly!

  Kate opened her eyes and applied herself fully to the problem of stabilizing her aircraft. She was starting “in challenge mode” as Isaac would say, thanks to the crazy wind, but she knew she could do it!

  She remembered the ways in which small adjustments of the handles she gripped had altered the angles of the wings and shifted the balance of the aircraft. She thought about the surface area and shape of the four butterfly-like wings on her craft. She recalled all that she had studied and personally observed with regards to how real butterflies managed to stay aloft. She considered the proportional differences between real butterflies, and Theians, and her aircraft. She factored in the reliance of her craft upon wind currents, and the oscillating wings’ remarkable adaptability to the changing currents.

  She factored balance, and gravity, and momentum. Thrust, lift, drag, the conservational laws of fluid dynamics, and the meaning behind all the equations that flashed through her mind from the studies and books she had read on flight subsequent to her father’s disappearance.

  It fell into place, and as things often were with Kaitlyn Carter, she didn’t understand exactly how or why. It was like solving a differential equation. It all came together so suddenly, and so completely, that it seemed like she had always known the answer and had simply remembered. In an instant, it became obvious.

  She leveled out the flying machine with a careful application of the controls; the horizons turned right-way-up. She paused for a moment, suspended, felt the upward pressure of the air buoying her up into the stormy sky counteracted by the equal pull of gravity. Then she angled down and forward. Not flying; falling with style!

  The aircraft rocked and teetered with changes in the wind currents, but she was quick to adjust, to stay upright. She saw the canyon below, the distant green hills, the many-colored arms of her rooftop windmills churning the darkness into tiny sparks of pure sky . Away, far away, lightning glinted like sparkling ruby, sapphire, amethyst, emerald, topaz.

  She yelped as she dropped a few feet and countered by diving a bit to the side so that her wings could catch another updraft that swept up nearby. Part of her wondered how she had known that another updraft was coming just then, but most of her was distracted by the Theians. They swooped down from the heights of her palace, and for a moment they looked more like diving falcons than moths and butterflies. Their wings snapped open, caught them like tiny parachutes, and with a few bright flickers hoisted them into the air. Kate watched in awe as a dozen, two dozen, began to dance in a wide arc around her and the machine she struggled incessantly to keep adrift in the currents.

  She dropped again and understood that momentum was necessary to maintain altitude. Basic aerodynamics, after all! But it was easy to forget when basking in the powerful updrafts from the canyon.

  Mormo and Polyom came close, together with a few others. Mormo’s wing’s flashed like green lightning with every stroke. Polyom’s pale wings, laced with swirls of blue and pink, looked like a lovely accident with watercolors. They might have been trying to speak to her, but Kate couldn’t hear them. She flexed her feet and realized that she had lost a sandal. Also, she was feeling a bit sick, probably from all the rocking and unpredictable movement. And she was getting hungry already!

  But they led her away, off into the storm. To Absolem!

  They flew low back in the direction from which they had come, then angled off along a tall granite cliff, over a scattering of wrinkled blue lakes among fields of yellow-green grains, above a forest of thin, thrashing trees that bowed down to the distant hills. The wind did not stop; it never stopped. In fact, she was fairly sure that the Theians had led her into a current, a river of air that swept them away. This enabled her to fly, but it also meant that she had to battle constantly against its capricious whims. She had difficulty controlling her machine at the start. Twice she nearly crashed, once into the ground and once into a granite cliff. Each time, a shift in the winds aided her at the last second. It was enough to make her wonder whether Navi was responsible. Regardless, she did not crash. She improved. She learned, and she could learn just about anything!

  In fact, she was so busy learning that for a while she forgot to be afraid of flying. And when she remembered that she was supposed to be afraid…nothing happened. It made her smile, then laugh, then execute a barrel roll that made her squeal in exhilaration.

  Her moon was beautiful! It would be more beautiful in the sunlight, she thought, but even so. The colors! And the shape of the land, which was almost-but-not-quite realistic. She swooped and glided with ease over fantastic hills, gullies and glades, fjords with colored cliffs, forests that were no doubt enchanted and deep cold lakes with lights glinting at the bottoms of them. But most amazing of all were the Theians that flew in a chaotic spread around her. They didn’t fly straight, and seemed content to take their time. They flitted about, going from one to another, sometimes chasing each other around. Kate grinned when she saw the white moth pursuing Thlytri in an erratic path through the air. Yet still they traveled swiftly within the air current.

  For a time, the experience of flight filled Kaitlyn so completely that other concerns faded away. The thrill of riding the air, the stomach-dropping sensation of a swooping descent, the sense of control balanced against chaos, of overcoming the chaos…it was amazing. She laughed and laughed, her voice sore from her initial screaming. The Theians laughed with her. Or she thought they did, but their laughter sounded like the warbling cries of strange birds, low and throaty for the men and fluting like pipes for the women.

  They flew through a field of windmills, many windmills of all shapes and sizes that stalked in a scattered arrangement over meadows of ruffled yellow grass. The arms of these windmills were mostly plain canvas or plastic, not cut and colored into fantastic shapes like her palace. They also did not process the wind into brilliant ribbons of condensed sky. However, they were wandering around on huge mechanical legs, which was certainly not something the windmills at her palace did. Kate and the Theians dodged around the churning arms, and even took a moment to playfully circle one of the roving windmills, which proved to Kate that she was becoming pretty okay at flying the device.

  It had been designed for her, and it was comfortable, but at length she felt the need to land and get out of it. For one thing, she needed to use the bathroom. For another, it put a kink in her neck to keep looking forward all the time. And she was hungry.

  But they were close. She knew it; she could feel it. It was in the sky. It was in the storms. The thunderheads grew fiercer; the day grew darker. Thunder and lightning, which had always been distant wherever they flew, grew nearer. The Theians dropped low to the ground, and Kate imitated them. Her companions stopped laughing, stopped speaking. The sound of thunder began to overcome even the sound of wind.

  And there was something else, something more than thunder. It chilled Kate, freezing away all the fun and joy she had gained from the flight. It made her feel small; it made her wish she were only the size of an actual butterfly, that she might escape the notice of whatever was up there in the muttering thunderheads.

  The Theians grouped closely together as they fluttered low against the treetop canopy of a dense jungle, a sea of a million shades of green that undulated up and down in the wind. A jungle, it seemed, but of something flimsier than trees. The Theians then dove into an almost-unseen crack in the green, a chasm that cut through the jungle. They swept down into the darkness, thankful to be out of the direct sight of the uncaring storms above.

  They kept descending, down and down into the earth. It became dark, but only for a moment. They angled downward and there was still wind here, whistling mournfully through what she took to be a deep, narrow space. They descended into a starry mass of light. Veins of glittering crystals lined the blackness on either side of her, shimmering off the wings of the silent Theians around her. They went down, down, down. How far? Kate could not tell. Miles? That seemed ridiculous. Yet the sounds of the storm on the surface died away, and the air became thick.

  They approached a platform of flat crystal. It glimmered with inner light and sparkled with hidden rainbows in its depths. An archway led beyond into a bright place, so bright that Kate could discern nothing more about it while her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The light from the arch illuminated only a small part of the dark abyss around them, rocky and cold. Even the wind was less here.

  The Theians landed gracefully on the glittering crystal, tired after such a flight. Kate’s landing was more of a controlled crash. She skidded across the platform and came forcefully to rest against the far wall with the bright arch. She crawled from the flying machine, and only then realized how stiff and sore it had made her. Her arms ached from controlling the machine, she had a kink in her neck, she was still missing a sandal, and now she really needed to go to the bathroom.

  “We have arrived,” Polyom said, a bit unnecessarily, as she approached Kate. Other Theians came with her to make sure the rough landing had not hurt her. “You flew well,” Polyom added, which Kate thought was probably an exaggeration.

  She made her most immediate need known to Polyom, and soon it was taken care of in a nearby side-hallway. She rediscovered the fact that she could create anything she could think of with the medallion, and appreciated the fact that everything was fully biodegradable in the sense that it dissolved into mist when she stopped thinking about it.

  She found on her way back to the Theians that someone had texted her during her flight. It was Heidi!

  HS: Hey Kate.

  HS: Just wanted to see how you were doing.

  HS: Is your moon dangerous?

  HS: Mine is.

  HS: I’m not bragging or anything.

  HS: I was just worried.

  HS: Sorry.

  HS: I’ll stop bothering you now.

  Kate felt a strange pain when she read this. Oh, Heidi! What kind of awful place was her moon, anyway? Kate thought back to the snowglobe of Orpheus, the Metal Moon. It had looked scary and weird.

  She would have a long chat with Heidi, after talking to Absolem.

  She rejoined the Theians, who perched reverently in clustered groups on the luminous crystal floor, their usual restlessness and chatter absent. They were sharing a drink that some of the Theians had brought with them. Kate wished she had thought of that. She hoped it was a hot drink, because the wind down here was cold, and she was shivering as well as thirsty. Her breath would probably have misted into the air had it any time to do so before being swept away by the wind.

  She located Thlytri with the sky-blue wings and saw that she was huddled very close to Shlushluth-or-whatever-his-name-was. That made her smile, but it also made her a little sad. She’d never had anyone to huddle close to like that. Not really. Not a person, anyway. Certainly not Aunt Becky!

  Mormo was suddenly beside her. He moved so quietly that he startled her. “You are cold,” he told her. “Here.” He offered a leathery pouch like a waterskin. Kate took it. It was warm, and liquid sloshed within. She had seen the Theians extracting its contents with their proboscises. For herself she materialized a tin cup and poured some in. The liquid was dark and hot; it steamed and warmed her hands. She hesitated only for a moment before taking a big swallow of it. It was like hot chocolate, but thicker and richer, and the chocolate flavor was mixed with something like honey. It tasted amazing, and it flooded her with new life and energy. Undoubtedly it contained so much sugar, though she supposed the Theians needed that for their flying. Steam from the drink fogged her glasses for a moment.

  “Mormo,” she said, “is it ok-k-okay if I h-hu-h-hug you?” She had seen the Theians touch each other, but nothing like an actual hug. She supposed it was because their anatomy made it difficult. And sure enough, she had to explain to a puzzled Mormo what a hug was, while other curious Theians clustered around to listen. They blocked the wind, for which Kate was grateful.

  “M-my p-people hug each other t-t-to show affection,” she told them, miming the action in the air. She dropped the mug; it was mist when it hit the ground.

  Mormo wanted to try, so he and Kate hugged each other. It was awkward; hugging a Theian was nothing like hugging a person. But Mormo was surprisingly strong, and she hugged him tight for a moment. He wasn’t as fluffy as she’d thought, but she felt better. Her hands, when she pulled them back, were covered in the fine scaly dust of Mormo’s wings. The dust on her left hand was bright green. She felt a sudden absurd urge to taste it, but that would probably be weird.

  “Are you comforted, Sky Child?” Mormo asked.

  Kate nodded, embarrassed all of a sudden. She looked past the Theians toward the arch. Surely there was no wind in there, or less. “L-let’s go!” she said.

  She led the way, wishing she had brought her guitar. Some music would be good here. If she were to play music here, would rainbows dance in the crystals? Would the lights move and change? She thought they would.

  A peculiar ringing sounded through the air, through her bones, into a sharp but not painful sensation behind her eyes. It chimed slowly as she entered, perhaps playing a song too slow for her to understand. The brightness through the arch resolved into a high-ceilinged crystalline galleria, like a cathedral or perhaps a palace like her own. The light came from everywhere. It shifted as though living rainbows were trapped in glass cages. It was like walking through a three-dimensional kaleidoscope.

  It was cold but windless. The chiming grew louder, the colors swirled, and Kate lost her sense of scale, of place. She and her beautiful friends walked through a maelstrom, a blizzard of light.

  And then it stopped. All was still, and all was quiet. The cessation shocked Kate more than anything yet. She gasped involuntarily, and her gasp echoed in a vast chamber. Something was before her, hung from a high ceiling, strung up to the ceiling and walls by rigid crystalline webbing. It was a chrysalis, one the size of a grain bin. Only within the chrysalis now did the light move. It pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat; the light flexed and turned, refracted out through the many-faceted exterior of the chrysalis.

  “Absolem,” whispered Kate, and her voice carried unnaturally in the silence.

  Child, came the reply. It rung in her mind. Its voice was like a great multitude of voices singing in manifold harmony, so far away as to be barely audible. She felt herself straining mentally to hear it, just as she would focus on her sense of hearing to detect a very faint noise.

  Kate didn’t know whether to respond. Everyone else remained still and silent, so she did too.

  …storm… whispered the voice, grand and torpid, like nearly-imagined church bells tolling in a distant town, reaching her through miles of twilight fog.

  “H-he-h-hel-h-g-greetings,” said Kate.

  Light churned within the chrysalis. Sleep…

  “Y-yo-you’re asleep?”

  …change…

  Kate waited. Was it telling her to change? Change what?

  …become…

  “Oh!” she said. “y-you’re going to me-metam-m-morphose! I think you’ll be the m-most beautiful bu-b-butterfly!” Or moth, possibly, in which case she was looking at a cocoon, not a chrysalis, though it was impossible to know which.

  …dream…

  On second thought, the idea of what this creature might look like as a fully-grown butterfly was a bit frightening. Also, if it was trying to tell her something important, she was not getting it.

  “I d-don’t understand!” she told it.

  It rumbled faintly, like a murmur of distant thunder. Kate had a vision, breathtakingly beautiful, of a towering iridescent thunderhead, majestic, rolling through distant skies.

  But that was all. Absolem dreamed again, leaving Kate and the Theians small and shivering on the hard crystal floor.