Chapter 13

  Kate

  She stopped, awestruck, when she first saw her moon, the turning windmills, the pinnacles of her palace. She held her breath for a long time as the wind whipped her hair and scarf around her and carried her lab coat off to the side. It was beautiful. Amazing. She put her hands to her mouth and squealed in delight. Navi danced around her, equally excited.

  Only the sky dampened her enthusiasm. Dark thunderheads as far as she could see. It looked stormy, and all the landscape was lit with an eerie, sickly glow as light filtered down through the bruised clouds. She didn’t mind storms normally; in fact, she often enjoyed them. But there was something unsettling about these clouds, this light, that strange discordant thunder.

  Navi alighted on something in the center of the platform. Kate went to Navi and picked it up. The hexagonal medallion. She knew about this, or at least, she had known beforehand that it probably existed, albeit little more. Her symbol glowed faintly, as did Isaac’s, Jim’s, and Liz’s. Eric and Heidi hadn’t made it yet. Kate looked around at her own door and the five empty spaces where the other doors would go. She’d get them all! She would figure all that out soon enough. But there was so much else to learn!

  She skipped over to a downward ramp, which descended to one of the nearby towers. This tower’s windmill had four pearlescent seashell-shaped arms. From here she continued down and found the main hall. She laughed over the crystalline floors, the columns colored like clotted rainbows, the ornate silliness of it all. The main hall had big speakers, making it seem also like a dance floor or concert hall. She found her room. It came with a communications console and a pile of stuffed animals. She found a kitchen, a library, and a room which was a chessboard with person-sized pieces. Here she seized her medallion and concentrated on a regular-size chessboard, visualizing it on the ground at her feet. A silvery fog poured from the medallion and coalesced into the very board she had imagined. Excellent! She moved on; the chessboard lasted almost until she had left the room before dissolving back into mist.

  She found a laboratory, but it was full of mechanisms and devices which were unfamiliar to her. The sight of it set her pulse racing. So much to discover! Where to even begin? And how much time did she have? She had no idea.

  She returned to her room and checked out the computer. From here she could manage the entire palace and contact the other moons as well as Ardia. Ardia! She had dreamed of that place a lot. Skywater City! It looked so exciting, although she thought maybe it would be best to explore it in groups. Surely there was a door to get there somewhere nearby. Lots of doors around here.

  She had a brief conversation with Isaac, in which he claimed to not have seen a moon. But he had a space station? Cool! What did the others have? She would have to ask them once they were all in. Isaac would probably try to make it all into a chart. He’d figure it out, all of it.

  But for now, she needed to go exploring!

  She returned to her room before heading out. She grabbed a handful of butterfly hairclips and erratically caged her hair with four or five of them. This seemed to please Navi, who fluttered up to Kate’s head and joined the plastic butterflies. Kate could feel her, very light, at the crown of her head. She found a mirror and gazed at herself. She grinned at what she saw (no scars!), but her smile faltered a bit at the thought of her other body, wearing these same clothes, the blood perhaps dry and crusty on them already. The dark stain behind the left shoulder of her lab coat had come with her. A reminder! Careful. She had one spare, one single chance to escape death, and she had already used it up. Be careful.

  Her reflection looked determined. She nodded at it. “I w-wi-wi-w—I will,” she said. And if there were dangers outside? Well, she had Navi! And she also had the medallion.

  She grasped the cool medallion hanging from her neck and focused on a firearm–a revolver, like one of Aunt Becky’s. And there it was, coalescing from mist. It fell to the floor with a heavy clang before she could grab it. She picked it up, aimed it down the hall, and pulled the trigger. Nothing.

  Of course! Just imagining the shape of a revolver wouldn’t do the trick! She needed to get all the inner parts right as well. This could be tricky. But she had seen Aunt Becky take apart her guns for cleaning, and Kate herself had dismantled and reassembled them herself a few times, just for fun. The bolt, with plunger, the torsion spring and pin, the stops, the sear, the hammer…Kate focused on conceptualizing a revolver with all the necessary parts in place.

  It appeared in her hand, coalescing from a sudden cloud of mist. She aimed once more down the hall, gripped it with both hands and squeezed the trigger. A hollow click.

  Bullets! She forgot the bullets! Duh! She laughed and let go of the gun. It hit the stone floor as a dense revolver-shaped cloud and splashed into nothing. She could probably do a gun if she had to, or like a sword or something. But she had a better idea. She took up her bass guitar and held it aloft: Excalibur from the stone! She remembered what had happened in Eric’s apartment. Music had power here. She slung it over her shoulder and tried not to think about what had happened afterwards, in Eric’s apartment. The sensation of falling, the desperate hopelessness, the terror.

  Her high spirits returned when she entered the main hall. Brightly lit with warm chandeliers, the entire floor glittered and sparkled in paint-splattered Technicolor galaxies. Sunsets and clouds adorned the arched ceiling overhead. She skipped through all this, laughing, and even tried a cartwheel partway through, although she had never been very good at cartwheels, and this was doubly the case when she had a bass guitar on her back. She fell onto the floor, but didn’t mind.

  The two enormous front doors opened for her when she approached, and she exited onto a high ramp that snaked across a dark abyss to a grassy cliff. She wasn’t prepared for the wind, and for one panicky moment she thought it might blow her right off the ramp and into the pit. But the causeway was wide and came with a delicate waist-high fence.

  From here at the entrance, she could view the beautiful mountains, scenic cliffs, and gorgeous gorges (heh heh) to her right, tapering off into the rolling hills and rocky lake-speckled plains over to the left. Lightning sparked over the plains, and distant thunder rumbled almost constantly. Ominous thunder. Weirdly ominous.

  Kate took a breath, re-clipped some of her wayward hair, and set off down the causeway. A road across the canyon wandered off over the grassy hills. Rain seemed likely, but an umbrella would be useless here in all this wind. The green and black bass weighed heavily on her shoulder, but she didn’t think it would help much against the rain either. She could just create a poncho if necessary! Bright pink.

  Her phone buzzed in the pocket of her lab coat when she had nearly reached the other side of the bridge. If it was Isaac again, she wouldn’t answer. But it was Liz!

  EE: Kate?

  Kate beamed. Liz! She texted back as she set foot on the rainbow gemlike cobblestones of the road and followed it into the green landscape.

  KC: Lizzy!

  KC: <3

  EE: Thank goodness.

  EE: Where are you?

  EE: Have you seen Jimothy?

  KC: I am on my moon!

  KC: just like you ;)

  EE: Moon?

  KC: and Jim is probably on his moon!

  EE: I don’t understand.

  KC: don’t worry about Jim, Liz. he’ll be fine

  KC: his angel is with him right?

  EE: Hazel? Yes.

  EE: Are you saying we are each in a different place?

  KC: ;)

  EE: I shall take that as a “yes.”

  EE: Are you sure Jimothy will be okay on his own? My place is icy. And he has no means of contacting us.

  KC: I wouldn’t worry about Jim

  KC: he is very special!

  EE: I know that well.

  EE: I am just concerned for his safety.

  KC: :D

  KC: you’re such a MOM Liz!

  KC: it’s so cute!

  EE: Do you at least know where he is?

  KC: he is on his own moon

  EE: You keep saying that. Are you speaking of literal satellites in orbit around a celestial body?

  KC: yup!

  EE: Are we then permanently isolated from each other?

  KC: nope!

  KC: we have doors! and we can get each other's doors so we can see each other

  EE: How?

  KC: ...i don’t know

  KC: BUT WE’LL FIND OUT TOGETHER!!!!!

  EE: Okay. I’ll ask the natives.

  KC: Jim will be fine for now. this is just the beginning of the story, after all

  EE: ?

  KC: think about stories, Liz! the main characters can’t die right at the beginning

  KC: and Jim is EXTRA safe because he’s Jim!

  EE: We are...characters?

  EE: What does that mean?

  KC: I don’t really know :\

  KC: wait did you say NATIVES?!?

  EE: The Yvethians, yes.

  EE: That is my best guess as to the spelling.

  EE: They are enthusiastic about my arrival.

  KC: ?!?!?!??!

  EE: It comforts me to know that something surprises you.

  KC: Tell me about them!

  EE: They are growing impatient with me speaking to you.

  EE: They are like humanoid animals.

  KC: !!!

  KC: are you okay Liz? you don’t sound okay <:(

  EE: Just tired.

  EE: And now relieved.

  EE: I am going to bed now, regardless of what the natives think.

  KC: Wow! Okay, you do that. I’m not tired yet.

  KC: !!! I wonder if our moons have different day/night cycles?

  KC: 8|

  EE: Good night, Kate. Try to remain calm.

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  KC: hee hee!

  KC: good night Liz!

  KC: and cuddle with Callie for me!

  Kaitlyn could not contain herself. She hopped up and down on the stone roadway in excitement. Natives? Like animals?!?!

  Jim would be fine, she was sure. They should all be safe at the beginning. That was the kind of thing Isaac would know more about than her, though. What would Jim’s moon be like? And what about Liz’s?

  The wind picked up even more, somehow, as she followed the path to the rolling green hills. Grassy tussocks danced around her, whipping in the gale, and bright flowers spun like pinwheels. The gale slackened when she descended a hill, and when she crested the next, it struck with enough force to set her off-balance. She turned to look at her palace when she had gone a mile or two. It looked very strange, especially in how every windmill atop the towers was different. When it was sunny, it would be sparkly and beautiful, but now with the darkness and storm and thunder it seemed almost threatening. In the other direction, colored lightning danced on the distant plains. Pink, green, blue, red, gold. She wondered if it meant anything. Maybe the different colors did different things? Maybe there was a pattern. Maybe it was a code, and the storm itself was sentient, and could only communicate through the lightning! Maybe. She pulled out a notebook and pen from a pocket of her lab coat and jotted down some notes.

  A mile further on, she began feeling hungry. It occurred to her that she had no clue about where she was going. It then struck her that this could leave no doubt that she was on a 100% legitimate adventure. Look at me, Aunt Becky!

  The road came to an ornate stone bridge which spanned a steep gully. A stream garbled down below, and the mossy sides glimmered with light. Kate stopped in the middle of the bridge to stare down into the ravine. The wind switched directions suddenly, nearly knocking her glasses off. She might have to get a strap for them in this place!

  Bluish light played in the darkness below. She saw something that looked like a butterfly flitting around down there. It looked deep. But how to get down?

  “W-wha-wh-whaddaya think, N-navi?” she said.

  Kate paced on the bridge for a few minutes. She could go back and get a rope. She could create a rope with the hexagonal medallion, but she thought it might dissolve into fog partway down if she lost concentration. She tried asking Navi to take her down there, but Navi seemed reluctant to do so. It was very hard to tell with Navi. Maybe she didn’t hear or understand?

  At length, she unslung the electric bass. It wasn’t plugged in. That didn’t matter in the Museum; would it matter here? Only one way to find out!

  She flicked the strings. Rich bass resonated in the air around her. And she could feel it, the music in the air, the sounds nearly a physical force, like a shaping power, something with authority.

  If her thing was Sky, she resolved, she should not be afraid of heights.

  She took a deep breath, squinted her eyes shut, and leaped off the side of the bridge. The thought came to her that she had been falling a lot lately.

  She calculated her acceleration and the distance she had to fall, and opened her eyes as she strummed a powerful chord. It was the same one she had played in Eric’s apartment. Here it had the same effect: the air swirled around her, a buoyant force slowed her fall, thunder boomed overhead, not quite in tune. This time she fell awkwardly on her side and rolled partway down a wet, mossy slope.

  She came to rest facedown in rich-smelling mud. She flipped herself over and giggled. Navi came dancing toward her, and now Kate saw the other butterflies here: dozens of them, glittering with their own light. A lane of dark sky twisted overhead. The thunder was muted down here, and the wind hardly reached this dark place at all. Probably the butterflies didn’t dare go up above! Too windy.

  She plucked a simple melody lying on the moss, and the butterflies responded. She saw Morpho peleides, Junonia almana, and (one of her favorites) Papilio palinurus. There were many others she didn’t know, and a few she suspected didn’t exist on Earth at all. Of course, none of these could really have existed on Earth, because real butterflies weren’t bioluminescent. The ones down here had colors that glowed in the darkness. They danced for her.

  After a few peaceful minutes of playing, Kate arose. She had mud in her hair and all down the back of her lab coat, but remarkably little on her dress. Her scarf had also escaped largely unscathed. Her glasses had smudged only a little.

  She located one sandal which had fallen off and set out to follow the stream. It would have been treacherous in the dark, had not Navi revealed a new and helpful trait by lighting up the area with a warm white glow. She fluttered ahead as though urging Kate on.

  Kate had to stop periodically to admire the butterflies and the peculiar mineral deposits along the sides of the ravine, which also seemed oddly luminescent in the gloom. She also stopped frequently to try out different notes/chords on the bass and record the results in her notebook. So much new data!

  The bottom of the ravine darkened, but Kate couldn’t tell if this was because night was falling. She didn’t know what time of day it was here! The distant thunder became more immediate, and soon she felt a few stray raindrops which made their way to the bottom of the ravine. She glanced up, but there was only darkness above Navi’s light. The butterflies had vanished. It had been cooling off as well, hadn’t it? Another sound gradually joined the thunder: water trickling down the walls of the ravine.

  She felt a chill, and for the first time she experienced some concern regarding her situation. If it got cold and dark, and if it rained…

  She turned to Navi. Navi had never actually teleported in her presence. Kate didn’t know for sure that she could do what Callie could, what she had seen Charlie do. “Y-y-you can t-telep-port me, r-r-ight?” The butterfly danced in the air with something that may have been anxiety. Kate held out a finger, and Navi’s almost-weightless body settled upon it. Navi flexed her wings a few times. Kate was sure Navi was trying to communicate. “I c-ca- I can’t unders-s-stand you, Navi!”

  Maybe Navi couldn’t teleport her. Maybe she was too small.

  Maybe Kate would die in a flash flood. That would be a stupid way to die. But she had read somewhere that a weirdly large number of people drown in deserts in this exact situation, by flash flood whilst in narrow canyons. And now she wasn’t at all so sure about what she had told Liz earlier. Here in the dark and cold and wet, Kate didn’t know whether they were safe. Maybe they could die right after getting here. Maybe it was that kind of story after all.

  The creek in the bottom of the ravine had risen noticeably, and it continued to inch its way up the embanking rocks even as Kate watched it.

  “L-le-l-let’sgo!” she shouted to Navi. She slung the bass over her back and dashed as fast as she dared over the moss and stone of the ravine bottom. She slipped and fell a few times, and each time the water was higher. It came up to her ankles; she slipped off her sandals and kept running. Then the water spanned the bottom of the ravine; she ran along the sides to avoid the deepest part, which now ran with a force strong enough to knock her off her feet.

  Water cascaded in sheets from above, lit beautifully here and there by the glimmering veins of luminous ore. Navi’s light caused the rain to glitter like a shower of light around Kate. Although she well understood the danger, Kate smiled. Too cool! Too beautiful. And dangerous! (Look at me, Aunt Becky!)

  The water rushed in torrents into the ravine and had nowhere to go but down to wherever the ravine led. Soon it threatened to drag Kate away. She found a likely rock shelf and tried to pull herself up onto the slick stone. She almost succeeded.

  The water caught her, and her world became one of darkness, chaos, and a struggle for air. She tried reaching for her bass, but somehow got tangled in the straps.

  She lost all sense of direction. Her only thought was the necessity of protecting her head against being struck upon a rock, but soon she knew only the urgent need to breathe–

  –and then she was falling. Somehow, falling. Again. She had enough presence of mind to find this amusing. Maybe this was “her thing,” as Isaac would say.

  The water dissipated around her as she fell, and she took a huge gulp of wet, black air as she twisted desperately to reach the bass. She only turned uselessly in the air.

  She struck something soft and inclined. (Perfect! The two best qualities in a surface to fall upon!) The impact knocked the breath right out of her with a squeak, and she tumbled down the slope to the sound of booming thunder.

  She at last came to rest, sliding to a slow stop on the slick slope. Facedown in the mud. She heaved herself over onto her back, found this painful due to the bass, and then with some effort untangled herself from its straps and set it next to her. Her left shoulder throbbed with pain, perhaps dislocated. She thought she had twisted an ankle as well. It could have been worse, though. Much worse. Water ran past her down the grassy slope, pushing against her hair, shoulders, arms.

  She wiped the mud from her face. The rain poured down at an angle thanks to the wind. Her glasses, of course, had disappeared. She could only see the colored flashes of light as the chromatic lightning lit the clouds above.

  It was still beautiful. Despite everything, this was still really cool. She touched the slope she lay on. Mud and grass. Water trickled down around her. The mud was in her fingernails, in her ears, her hair, the taste of it in her mouth. But something in the flashes of light above caught her eye. She saw only blurred shapes with her impaired vision, but it looked like each flash of lightning illuminated a dark form–not the clouds themselves, but something within them. Something that shifted positions from flash to flash.

  She sat up slowly, carefully, and looked around, seeing only darkness and a flitting speck of light up the slope to her right. “N-n-na-navi?” she called out, her words overwhelmed by thunder.

  Kate gritted her teeth, picked up the bass with her good arm, her right one, and used it to help her to her feet. She hadn’t gone far when light flashed and Navi flitted in front of her. Something glinted as it fell to the grass. Kate stooped and picked up her glasses. One lens had been knocked out; the other was covered in mud. Navi had teleported them here.

  “N-navi!” Kate took an awkward swipe at the luminous butterfly with the guitar. The effort set her off-balance and caused her to sit down painfully on the soaking slope. She slid a few feet before stopping herself. Navi had teleported her glasses; why hadn’t she saved Kate?

  Maybe it was size-dependent? She would have to experiment on this later. Safely, of course. She then recalled her resolve to be safe, in the mirror back in her palace. She hung her head in admonishment. Yeah, yeah…

  She reached for her notebook and found only a sodden lump of paper, the text illegible. She dropped it with a grimace. The ink on the sleeves of her lab coat was also running. That was okay; she knew the equations by heart.

  She felt something foreign around her neck and remembered the medallion. She gripped it and imagined replacement glasses into existence. They didn’t function, of course. She didn’t know the exact specifications of the lenses. Damn it!

  She looked up again into the storm. Was something in the clouds? It seemed less clear now. But…sometimes it seemed like there was another noise besides the thunder, something deeper. The thought made her shiver. She didn’t need any help shivering. Although it wasn’t that cold, the wind sapped away any warmth she might produce with her own body heat. Apart from the lightning, hypothermia would soon be an issue. Especially if she sat around in the rain and mud. But with her twisted ankle…

  The light around her suddenly winked out. Navi had vanished.

  Kate sighed and dragged the bass across her lap. For a moment, she felt very cold and sad and alone. But she reminded herself of her father, saying “the sun is rising somewhere.” Yes! There was a beautiful sunrise somewhere right now, even if she couldn’t see it. The sky was always pretty, even if she couldn’t see it. This thought warmed her. With her left shoulder hurt, she couldn’t really play the frets of the bass. That still left six notes. She tried plucking one. Its sound came out muddled and garbled, which struck Kate as weird since it wasn’t actually producing noise in the normal, i.e. physically possible, way.

  She played anyway, plucking out a simple rhythmic melody. This altered the storm. Some of the lightning above corresponded to the notes, to the rhythms. But it didn’t feel right. When she played in the Museum, it felt as though the environment willingly, even eagerly responded to the music. But here she was an intruder. Her music was invasive, plucking some small amount of control away from something else, something to which control rightfully belonged.

  There was another sound behind the thunder, and it shook the earth, and it made Kate feel very small and cold in that wet darkness. It made her stop playing.

  She looked around with the single smeared lens of her glasses. To her left, a distant glow. Could it be her palace?

  She looked the other way and was startled to see lights approaching. Colored lights, bobbing as they came. They fanned out and approached. Navi appeared in front of Kate so suddenly that she jerked back in surprise.

  The lights came near, flying low through the rain. Kate gasped in surprise and delight. People! Or…huge butterflies? Both at once? They carried colored lanterns, they wore colorful cloaks against the wind and rain, and they all had enormous butterfly wings coming out of their backs. Their compound eyes were solid, bright colors. Their six-legged lepidopteran bodies were roughly humanoid, covered in fine hairs that glistened in the rain, colorful and marked with swirling tattoos or birthmarks.

  Kaitlyn Carter gawked at them as they gathered around. One stepped forward. “Are you,” it asked, “the Child of Skies?” Its voice was high and lilting, like a whistling song, and Kate could barely hear it over the thunder.

  “I-i-i…” Was she? She looked at Navi for help, but no help was there to be found.

  Another one spoke: “It doesn’t matter now! Look at her.” This one stepped forward and offered its cloak to Kate, who accepted it gratefully and wrapped it around her. It completely blocked the wind, and Kate hadn’t noticed until just then how much of an effect that had. It made her realize that she was shivering, her teeth chattering.

  “Of course,” said the first. “Inexcusable.” It stooped closer and examined Kaitlyn with compound turquoise eyes. It reached out a delicate, strangely jointed hand and lightly touched the medallion hanging on Kate’s chest. “But it is you,” it whispered. Those nearby, having heard, reacted by stepping back and gazing up at the sky as though anxious, their wings fluttering.

  “Bring her,” said the one who had spoken. It turned and sprang into the air with a flicker of its brilliant blue-green wings. Several of them crowded around Kate and carefully, after some experimentation, managed to carry her between two of them. She felt herself lifting off, but could see little apart from the storm above. Apparently, these people weren’t concerned with the threat of lightning.

  Who were they? Why were they so beautiful? What did Child of Skies mean? Was there really something living in the storm? Did they get her bass too? Did Navi bring them?

  All these questions and more paraded through her mind, but foremost was a simple childish glee at finding butterfly people here on her moon. She grinned and huddled down within the borrowed cloak as her new friends took her someplace warm and bright.