The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4)(89)

She inserted the drive, closed her eyes, and began to count.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. S—

Everything hit all at once.

There was light. She had stood on dozens of planets, and on moons, too, in marketplaces and transit stations and parks and spaceports, all basking beneath alien suns. But in each of those situations, her view was confined to the window of her mech suit, a metal-framed border that stood between her and every vista the galaxy had to offer. The only places she’d ever been without her suit were ships and shuttles, and these, too, were made of metal, of walls, of end points. Here, in this illusion Roveg had built, there was no separation between herself and the world, nothing cutting her field of vision in half. Everything was impossibly, unimaginably, overwhelmingly bright.

There was the openness. Again, this was an experience she thought she knew from standing planetside and seeing the ground stretch flat in all directions. But without her suit propping her up, without it protecting her from her surroundings, the sheer size of this place made her feel so, so small.

There was the sensation that swept across her skin, which immediately registered in her mind as danger. There was an air leak somewhere, she thought. There was a busted valve, a damaged seal, a hatch or bulkhead about to pop. It took her several moments to reassess the feeling, slowly, like an explorer. Like a scientist. The pressure hadn’t changed. She could breathe just fine. The air wasn’t leaking. It was simply moving. With a small, trembling cry, she realised what that meant.

She was feeling the wind.

‘Speaker?’ Tracker said. Hearing this was uncomfortably dissonant, because Speaker knew her sister was seated right in front of her, but they were no longer in the same place. Her voice came from nowhere.

Speaker found her words, with effort. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, her voice quavering. ‘I’m okay.’ I’m okay, she repeated to herself, though she wasn’t entirely sure of that – not because the sim was hurting her, but because it was just so much.

Roveg had built a world for her, and she’d entered it on the shore of a lake. She was kneeling directly on the sand – creamy white and sugar-soft. The water had an amethyst tint, and lapped tenderly against time-polished stones. A forest ringed the lake, its trees heavy with flowers. A paddle boat just her size was tethered to a post, and bobbed in the purplish ripples. Some kind of tiny golden arthropod meandered just ahead of the waves, darting here and there with comic quickness. And all around her, all through the sand and up to the trees, stood practical posts made of smooth white wood, each carved with notches an Akarak could swing from.

She did not climb the posts. She did not go toward the boat. She remained kneeling, and dug her hands into the sand. She clenched her fingers, then stretched them out, then pushed them in deeper. She tried to think of something to compare the feeling to. A bowl of cooking starch. A bag of hydroponic soil. The ash you cleaned out of an engine filter every few weeks. No, none of those things came close to what the sand felt like. All of them were small, contained, packaged. Everything she thought she understood about touch, about the sensations of the worlds she visited, about what a world was … all of it was wrong. Completely wrong.

She’d never been anywhere before.

Speaker reached up and tore the slap patch from her neck. Reality returned with a jolt, and she shivered from head to toe, even though her ship was warm and dry. Her ship. Her bed. Her sister. All existing within the compact scale she’d always known. It was terrible to look at now, and yet, it was all she wanted. It was familiar. It was safe.

‘Hey, hey,’ Tracker said. She held Speaker’s wrists gently in her hands. ‘Hey, whoa, what’s—’

Without a word, Speaker fell against her sister and began to keen like an injured child. The cries ripped themselves from her throat, reflexive and untethered, each a warbling wail. Tracker did what any twin would do in response: she held the other half of her soul tight, saying nothing, holding fast, giving the pain space to pour itself out. Speaker didn’t know why she was acting like this, but she couldn’t stop it, either. She keened and keened until her throat felt raw.

‘I’ve never,’ she gasped at last, ‘I’ve never – we’ve – we don’t – we don’t understand—’ She clutched at Tracker as though she were falling. ‘We don’t understand what it would be like.’

Tracker nuzzled her, stroked her head, rubbed beak against beak. ‘Oh, my heart, my heart, my heart,’ she said, speaking the words like a lullaby. ‘What happened?’

Speaker pulled back a bit, tried to breathe, tried to think. After a moment, she reached over, picked up the slap patches, and offered the box to Tracker. ‘You need to see it,’ she said.

Tracker stared at her, but did not protest as she had when Roveg’s crate had first been opened. They were in a different space now, the two of them – that place of wordless understanding only siblings shared, a place brought into being when one cracked herself fully open. Speaker needed Tracker to see what she’d seen, and so, Tracker would go look. She put on a patch. She closed her eyes. She breathed normally … until she didn’t anymore. Her breathing stopped, then sped up, then caught, then shook – not in the way that made Speaker wake her up in the night, but in the same way that Speaker’s had before she’d cried out.

Speaker held Tracker’s hands tightly, feeling her sister’s pulse race against her palms.