The next five minutes were a whirlwind of introductions, excited chatter, and a mad dash to the bus station when someone spotted the tram in the distance. It overtook them with ease and Tuhrie ran ahead. She made it there first, unsurprising with her physique—was she an athlete?—and held the door for them.

They spent three stops catching up and chatting about their plans for tonight. All the while, Tuhrie loomed over her with her hand hooked in one of the hanging rings for standing passengers, her wing halfway covering Pijeru’s shoulder.

They didn’t say a word to each other, Pijeru could barely look in her direction, but she felt her presence and smelled her perfume. Tuhrie wore a lot of it, which would have usually annoyed her but in this case, Pijeru didn’t mind.

They filed out in the inner city, streets lined with shops and bars stacked three stories high. The day crowd still owned the city, but they had a lot planned. Ceri ran ahead to stare at wine jugs through a barred shop window.

Tuhrie slowed until she fell into step next to her. “So you went to kindergarten with Ceri?”

“Yep. We’ve known each other since, kah— Not since we hatched, but we did learn to fly together? Did you meet at Hikki?”

“Yeah. Social Studies with Mrs. Treiha. Did she tell you?”

“About the tangents?”

“Every lesson. We agreed that one of us would always ask her opinion on some random topic—out of perfect studious curiosity, of course.”

They shared a look. “Of course.”

“And she would talk half the lesson away. It was so relaxed.”

It didn’t sound like they’d learned much that way, but Pijeru didn’t want to be an ass by pointing that out. Instead, she dragged Ceri away by her arm when they caught up. “You’ll get your fix soon enough, wino.”

She resisted, pointing a finger through the bars at a particular bottle. “I already know what I want to order, if they have it.”

“Of course, you do.”

“It’s a Zigler,” she said in formal speech, imitating the sound of rain falling on grape leaves. If that had not made it obvious enough, she said it out loud, “It’s super expensive, but you have to try it. We could split a flute. Or buy a jug …? Nah. Unless …? How about we all—”

“Nope,” Weira cut her off. “I can barely drink wine as is. If I try something new today and drink anything else later, it will come right back up. Retch.”

“I’m not a wine aficionado myself,” Tuhrie said.

“You’re no fun. C’mon, Piji. Just one flute to celebrate?”

“Maybe one.”

She thought of the bill her parents had given her. She did want to save that for an emergency, because she’d lied to them a little, but she had her job lined up. Even if she hadn’t even had her first day yet, surely she could afford to spend a little …?

Today of all days. Because they were heading to the Park later, if only to listen to one of the bands perform, but they also had so much else planned.

First stop was a wine bar right around the corner. Second stop was a friend’s house party where there might be something to eat—or where they might be able to raid the fridge. If not, third stop was a bite to eat before fourth stop, the concert, and fifth stop, this new club they wanted to check out.

From there, they could see how things went. If the club was lame, the Park was fun, if there were any cool people at the house party, or if someone cool invited her to any … second locations.

Her eyes wandered to Tuhrie, who was openly looking at her. She wasn’t imagining that twinkle in her eyes, was she?

“If not wine, what else could we buy?”

“What a question,” Tuhrie said. “There’s so much better to drink than wine. Are you not much of a drinker?”

Pijeru weighed her head. So-so.

Ceri stabbed her in the back. “She drinks, but she’s a lightweight.”

“Don’t lie like that!”

“That’s manageable,” Tuhrie said casually. “Trust me, I’ll show you tonight.”

Pijeru immediately forgot about her friend’s betrayal and chirruped a carefree note. She would very much like that. As they strolled on, a page turned.

Delilah covered her ears as the world flickered. One moment, she had been wandering the streets, kicking herself for missing the tram—Pijeru and her group of friends had left without her—the next, she was in the middle of a dark room of flashing lights and jumping silhouettes while a deafening noise blared into her ears.

She caught a glimpse of Pijeru in one of the flashes, but the relief that should have followed her confusion was instantly kicked down and ground into the dirt.

The ‘music’ was loud enough that she couldn’t hear herself think. Rowan screamed in distress through their bond, and she abruptly noticed he had been teleported with her. She cupped a hand over his ears, feeling his physical cries more so than hearing them.

Bodies rammed into her. Nobody could see her, but she doubted they’d have noticed her even if they could.

Delilah took the shortest route out of the crowd and followed Pijeru up a flight of stairs to a packed rooftop terrace overlooking the city at night.

The sea of electric lights reflected off dark windows brought her up short. They had skipped hours of time and … the night had seldom looked as beautiful as this in Hadica.

Someone was talking to Pijeru. They had to practically shout to be heard over the music. Delilah thought she almost … recognized her … No, it couldn’t be. “Tuhrie?”

“Piji! Why did you have to go to Oceanside?” Tuhrie held onto the balcony to lean in as she shouted. “If you had gone to Hikki with Ciri, we would have been classmates!”

She was just teasing her. Pijeru had only known her for a few hours, but she knew that for certain. Tuhrie was a happy drunk and could hold her liquor. Even after matching her drink for drink, she held herself with confidence and spoke clearly.

Pijeru was a little shakier on her feet. Even if Tuhrie was only teasing her, what was she supposed to say to that? “It seemed like the right— at the time,” she forced out and inhaled the cool night air to settle her swirling insides. The bass of the music trembled in her plume and pounded in her veins, making it difficult.

Weira had been right. Too many new drinks in one night. Oof.

“Did you do that thing? That, twsi— Doesn’t Oceanside have that tradition where you go cliff diving after graduation?”

“Yeah, we do— did that.”

“You did that?”

Pijeru hesitated, then shook her head. “No. Someone always breaks an arm or a beak every year, without fail—”

“You chickened out?”

“With my luck? I knew it would be me!”

“No! So what if you break an arm? What’s life without some risks?” Tuhrie placed a hand on her shoulder and shook her like a motivational speaker. “We have to go to the beach together. I know this spot where you can slip a fence to get to a cliff—”

“No.”

“Yes!”

“No. Are you serious?”

“Come on. Trust me.”

“Maybe … When were you thinking? I have some free time— Kah, I might have to grab some things for my grandpa tomorrow. Probably can’t go to the beach for the next few weeks … We could meet up after the ritual?”

Tuhrie had lit up the moment Pijeru had said ‘maybe,’ but her expression sunk with every word that followed. She awkwardly smoothed her feathers. “Ah, I wasn’t thinking— We might have to raincheck that? I’m leaving in a few days.”

“Leaving? Where are you going?” Pijeru didn’t want her to go yet. Or if she was going somewhere, maybe it was somewhere she could go with her?

“Reporting for boot camp halfway across the state. It’s—”

“You’re in the army!?” Pijeru blurted out.

“No, I’m— Air force. I think they take that distinction seriously.”

“Oh.”

The tone of the conversations around theirs shifted. People began to murmur similar things as they pointed up at the sky. Pijeru was too disappointed to really react to their confusion, but she did slowly tilt her head back to see what it was.

“Is it …” Tuhrie said when she joined her and for once, her good cheer left her. “Is it supposed to be doing that?”

That emerald star in the sky had grown so large, it shone like a spotlight. Even if there had been no moon or no city lights, it would have illuminated the night—which was sort of the point. That star split into two, each trailing multi-colored tails like a broken comet.

Kyle stared through the vibrating terrace windows at the flashing lights and jumping crowd. The club looked … like a lot of fun, all things considered. He wondered if the Five Cities had anything that could match that. He kept one eye on Pijeru and Tuhrie, leaning against each other as they stared at the stars, and jumped when a second, older Pijueru flickered into existence.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m still getting the hang of this. This— isn’t at all what I had intended.” She stumbled over her words when she noticed her younger self.

Kyle thought of all the nasty things Tuhrie had said to her earlier and asked, “What happened that took you away from this?”

A curtain of deep sadness fell over her eyes. “Time. I—” She flickered back out of existence and a third Pijeru appeared instead, standing tall.

“Uh?”

“What are the winds?” she narrated unceremoniously, not even looking at him, and a page turned.

“Where do they come from?”

Micah stood in an alien forest beneath a thick tree. The moon poked out between the clouds, and the rain trickled down the canopy. Insects and other critters screamed into the night.

A small, feathered creature huddled in a nook in the tree, hugging its shoulders, wings covering it like a blanket. It scuttled forward, and it looked to the avashay what a monkey might have been to a human. It stared past the edge at its reflection in a puddle in the dirt.

“Those two questions, my people have asked ever since the first hatchling pondered its reflection in the rain,” the static Pijeru narrated as another page turned. “Every myth and religion would give you a different answer.”

They stood in a room much like their workshop at school. The walls were covered with different posters in a foreign script and lined with locked closets full of lab equipment. A classroom for … chemistry? Physics? Biology?

A young Pijeru sat with her friends and listened to a muted lecture.

“More and more, these questions began to haunt us throughout the modern age. As it was observed, the winds were finite. Their concentration varied in different locations throughout the world, but our world itself had a finite amount to offer its inhabitants who had, over the course of billions of years of evolution, become reliant on them.”

The scene flickered and Pijeru sat in the same classroom, but the lights were dimmed and she and her classmates watched one of those boxes of moving pictures. It depicted cells rapidly multiplying and mutating under a lens spell.

It flickered again and they stood in another classroom, filled with maps and flags. Pijeru looked a few years older.

“Between the thirty-fourth century and the thirty-sixth, our population exploded from mere millions to two billion people. Past a certain point, birth rates plummeted. Disease and disorders became common among the population. The average life expectancy had increased by two decades, then slowly trickled down, year by year.

“Gone were the legends who could dominate the winds and win wars single-hand. Gone were the spirits who frequented our myths and artifacts. Gone were the days we could fly. Not just glide from high places, but fly unfettered by the winds and the frailty of our bones.

“That is not even to mention the toll it took on nature.”

They stood in an unfamiliar house. A much younger Pijeru and a child he didn’t recognize fidgeted in their seats as an elderly man lectured them. He was the same man Micah had seen sitting on that bench earlier, a few years less on his shoulders.

He noticed movement in the corner of his eye and spotted the adults talking in the kitchen.

“My grandpa used to tell me stories of when he was a kid. Not a day would go by, he would say, that the Whisperwind did not mention another species had gone extinct. Nobody could stop it. Nations crumbled around him as the problem became obvious.

“So, in our modern age, we began to search for the origin of the winds for a solution. We didn’t find one. We found three.”

They stood in an open field beneath a blue sky. The sun was blinding, but this Pijeru didn’t react as she pointed up.

“The winds come from above. From myth and religion to common sense, science fiction to science fact. The winds deplete into outer space as well, but only at a trickle. A study managed to match recorded generations of powerful windsingers to recorded cosmic events. It was only a theory until one day, when my parents were young, one such event was observed in modern times: a minor burst of cosmic winds slammed into our planet and clung to it, enriching it, and helping our planet recover like a blessing from the Gods.

“The winds come from the spirit worlds.”

Pijeru smiled and they stood amidst overgrown ruins on an asphalt street. The architecture and layout differed from the city she’d lived in, but the vacant buildings, reclaimed by nature, were just as impressive.

This had been a city to match Hadica once. What had happened to it?

Another Pijeru was there, older and wearing a military uniform. She stood near the back of her squad and carried three blocky packs with her, on her back, her hip, and in one hand. Thick wires connected them like licorice.

They faced a giant … scar. That was his first impression of what he saw. It was a cluster of fiery veins that cut through reality like the cracks of the spatial tunnel they had witnessed, but these cracks were filled with molten glass and overlapped in three dimensions—maybe more. Their pulsing light warped the air like the end of a hot road. It was hard to look at them directly for too long.

The ends of the cuts unraveled, too, like loose threads that decayed into rivers of essences so thick, they were visible to the naked eye.

A single fire spirit stood between the scar and the wary squad of soldiers—a stag made of flames, miniature suns dangling from its antlers like cobwebs.

Micah scowled at it, and the nearest soldiers scowled in his general direction.

“This should have been obvious. Spirits have told us this themselves so often, but only a handful of nations can actually interact with spirits in any meaningful manner. A combination of religious obfuscation, general superstition, difficulties in communication, and an unhealthy amount of scientific skepticism kept the general population from believing it.

“But, as they say, when the wind drops … We looked to the spirits for a solution to our problems. A series of studies concluded that, yes, the winds do flow into our world from other planes of existence … in some places where the barriers are thinnest.

“This discovery was not very useful to us: the quantities that trickled into our world were minuscule, and the spirits were not inclined to help. Rather, when our winds began to deplete, they lost interest in our planet and left to seek out other ones.”

The stag turned away and walked through the scar with a burst of heat. The soldier who had been speaking to it tossed their beak up and swiped an arm in muted frustration.

If Micah was following her correctly, this discovery should have been made long before Pijeru had ever been born. Why was an older version of her treating with a fire spirit?

And why did this soldier Pijeru look older even than the one he had met, who spoke to him now?

“The third and final origin changed everything: the winds come from below. The crust of our planet is, or was, soaked in them like a sponge.

“Where single generations of powerful windsingers had been matched to cosmic events throughout history, entire nations have been reshaped by natural disasters. A city might fall to a tidal wave only to rise again under a warlord. ‘The strongest voices will survive the harshest storms, the weak giving way to their song’—or so it was believed. No, it was the natural disasters themselves that released floods of winds that fueled these people.

“The solution was obvious: we dug. We found winds, and we found them lacking. Because we found so much else as well. Fossil fuels, rare metals, even evidence of another civilization and species that had existed before ours.”

Micah walked through a factory not too different from the ones of Hadica. Workers fitted giant metal cubes suspended from straps into horseless carriages.

He flickered to a more modern factory, to a city street being torn up and replaced with a new one, to a pier where a metal ship was rolled into the water—scene to scene, watching their civilization rapidly expand with each new advance in technology.

“It took ten thousand years for our population to expand to the point where we could exhaust our planet’s winds. Two billion people. From there, it took us two centuries to exhaust our planet’s natural resources. Suddenly, we were right back where we had started. Except, our population had doubled again, to four billion people, and in addition to the winds, we were now reliant on our new technology to mine ever more—and both the natural resources needed to build that technology and the winds themselves were running out. Our world would surely end in less than four generations.

“So what did we do this time? We didn’t look down. We looked up. Following the cryptic hints of spirits and clues we’d found in the ruins of our precursor civilization, we asked the question nobody had been able to answer all this time: ‘Where do those bursts of cosmic winds come from anyway?’”

Another page flickered and they were back at the party, standing on a terrace that overlooked the city lights. An emerald star split in the sky.

“The Vim,” Micah said.

Pijeru folded her arms on the railing stared down into the lively streets. “We sent probes into outer space. We built labs. We sought audiences with the eldest spirits who would treat with us. Our best scientists crunched the numbers with what little data they had.”

She pointed, trailing a finger through the night sky without looking up. “If just one of them strafed by our planet, they could saturate us with enough winds to usher in a golden age that would last a dozen lifetimes. Magic for everyone! At the very least, they would extend our deadline by a few more generations. Either way, we would have time to seek out other solutions. Maybe even other planets like the spirits did.

“So we performed the ritual. The World Enders sang into the void: ‘If you love stories, we have thousands of years worth of stories to tell! More than anyone could consume in one lifetime!’ That was the plan. To grab the attention of one of them.”

Above, that emerald star split again. Three brilliant green comets loomed in the night sky, unraveling into vague shapes like auroras come to life—a stingray with the head of a bird. A caped, humanoid figure made of spoked wheels. A curious insect peeking out from behind a leaf, its beady eyes and wings the only parts of it that were visible. Each was twice the size of the moon and rising.

Two more emerald stars winked into existence behind their siblings. The seventh and last one alighted like the jewel of a crown. It flickered between red and green.

“We invited seven. It would be four years until I met Tuhrie again.”