Pijeru was called into work two weeks early. Through the rain and blaring sirens, she trudged to the office she’d be working at for the next three years.

Mrs. Sakki, a supervisor she’d briefly spoken to once before, welcomed her like she’d crawled out from under a desk where she had been sleeping. She looked … unwell. Her dark green plume poked out in every which way, beak parted slightly. She rushed through their introductions, shoved a binder into her hands, and ushered her to a cramped desk where she walked her through half of her first moderator interaction—forwarding a search for a missing pet in the storm to the proper channels.

“That’s most of what we need you to do,” Sakki told her, “answering basic questions, pointing people in the right direction. Here’s a list with the most relevant channels, phone numbers, and other resources you will need.” She impatiently tapped a page. “I’ll check on you in an hour. Good luck!”

Then she abandoned her. She ‘checked on her’ two days later by whispering, “You’re doing great!,” in passing. Pijeru was too swamped to think much of it at the time.

But for that first hour when she’d awkwardly glanced around the stressed office—and her coworkers had eyed her while taking calls—the next few months of her life would be a fever dream.

It was those coworkers who saved her. Pijeru tried her best, but she was really not equipped to take on emergency calls through the whisperwinds. She ended up picking the lowest-hanging fruit when she could. The moment things got more complicated, she handed the conversation over to one of her coworkers who gestured for her to watch and learn.

After eight hours, the time she’d been asked to work, Pijeru awkwardly glanced around, but even people who had been here before she’d arrived were still going.

After ten hours, her parents tried to contact her to make sure she was safe.

After twelve hours, Pijeru perked up when a few familiar faces began to leave. One of them noticed her, gestured for her to stand, and shooed her out of the building. She learned their names while waiting for the hourly night tram in the rain.

Their conversation was muted by their exhaustion, but they said they would show her how to clock in her hours tomorrow.

Pijeru swayed in her seat with the jolts and shudders of the tram. She stared out the window at the dark streets passing by. She barely said anything while she ate her reheated dinner and her parents and grandpa quizzed her about work. She lay awake in bed and seethed.

Had she been tricked somehow? This was not what she’d signed up for! But, she shoved those feelings down. She had to do her part.

The ritual had been an overwhelming success. The seven Vim that orbited their planet were flooding it with winds. Windsingers were sprouting like weeds.

It wasn’t like windsingers were uncommon. Most people learned a song or two to manipulate one of the winds, but those were simple tones: shutting doors from a distance, cleaning a spilled drink, creating disco lights.

Some learned it as a hobby or as a minor part of their job description; that was about as common as self-defense training. Far fewer made a career of it and only in very specific ways, like whisperwind moderators.

Still, that took time. Months to years during which those people also learned the rules that surrounded their type of windsong, what was considered rude, what was illegal.

Modern windsingers weren’t even that powerful. It took years of work and dedication to hone magic into a notable weapon.

In one week, all of that had been thrown out the window.

Hospitals were overflowing with new people who had hurt themselves, or others, by accident. Firefighters rushed through the city not just to fight the floods, but also fires started by inexperienced fire or lightningwindsingers.

Everyone was cooped up inside to weather the storm. Many had discovered a new talent for whisperwindsongs, so they must have decided, why not give that a try to pass the time? But they either didn’t know how to behave themselves or flat out refused to do so.

Crackling voices cut into channels to complain about a song being played too often or to sing along, they interrupted news broadcasts and interviews to argue about politics, or ‘pranked’ whatever channel they saw fit—tuning in to scream at the top of their lungs, laughing, and then leaving. Embarrassingly few of those pranksters were children.

Neighbors hogged entire channels to chat for hours on end. People ranted about politics or the end of the world. Couples got into shouting matches halfway across the city.

It was absolute chaos. There was so much interference from the winds, even normal interactions could devolve into shouting matches so both parties could be heard over the crackles and their voices cutting out.

Pijeru got a crash course on whisperwind moderation. She learned how to deal with the rudest people she had ever met in her life, how to ‘mute’ people—using her own connection to the whisperwinds to interfere with theirs—and how to soothe the winds to clear up interference. She learned to process emergency calls, how to track speakers to log misdemeanors to residences, and how to use her skills to aid the police.

After a month, the national guard was called in to stabilize the situation.

Her grandpa watched the news at dinner and called it a violation of avashay rights.

Pijeru blew up on him.

Kyle hid in the corner while Pijeru and her grandpa paced around the house and had a shouting match. Her parents made a half-hearted attempt to break up the fight.

The news mirror in their living room showed a report of some kid [Aeromancer] and his friends who had tried their new magic out in the rain. Throwing around firebolts and minor illusions. Creating gales and updrafts to jump high …

The kid must have accidentally punched a hole in the city’s storm wards. The storm had come rushing through his street like a flash flood. The scene behind the on-site reporters depicted a ruin of broken glass and damaged buildings. Most of the kid’s friends had been rushed to a hospital in critical condition. He himself was untouched, though the police had arrested him, obviously.

And that had just been an accident. Pijeru flickered through scenes of her history, the longest lasting only a few minutes, most only a few moments. They were interspersed with blunt narration where the puppet Pijeru felt it was needed.

Vandalism, looting, and violent crime were on the rise. It was like the entire city— No, their entire species had gotten fifteen levels in [Mage] overnight.

Public services, emergency services, and law enforcement couldn’t keep up. All across the world, cities were burning. Her nation was supposed to be one of the ones handling the situation better—allegedly; there was a clear disconnect between the government addresses on the news mirrors and what Pijeru, and Kyle, were experiencing—but there was frequent talk of rising tensions with nations who had not been part of this ‘ritual.’

‘I have war experienced.’ Kyle remembered what she had said. It wouldn’t surprise him if other nations came for their heads over this mess.

She slammed her door. He flinched and closed his eyes, eager to be out of this cramped building.

A page turned. Micah attended a funeral. He thought of his grandmother, whose death had briefly reunited his scattered family. With that, he of course meant his family in Hadica. He, Prisha, his parents.

Prisha had been entangled in her very own romance story at the time, figuring out life with her classmates and helping Neil deal with his family situation.

Micah had found his stride in his alchemy, although he had been limited to what he could scrounge up in the woods and the kitchen cabinets.

His parents had been working.

In hindsight, they had probably pressured Aaron and Maya into coming home. Aaron had convinced his employer to move him to a caravan that was homeward bound. He had arrived long after the funeral but just in time for his little sister’s wedding.

Maya had not. To this day, she had not returned home. He doubted she was even in the country. She was an [Explorer] set loose on the world.

Micah craned his head back and squinted at the sky.

A chill hung in the air. A cavalry of magnificent white clouds marched over the land. A distant airplane thrummed against his ears like the death rattle of a thunderclap, cars honked faintly in the city, and a far more distant airplane, little more than a tiny dot, trailed a vanishing white line behind itself.

The morning was peaceful and bright. Pijeru’s parents attached a metal wreath to a fixture similar to a pyramid-shaped trellis overgrown with vines. A few people in the procession hummed to themselves, single notes here and there.

The day was almost too bright. An equinoctial glare seemed to infuse the world. Whenever Micah looked at a cloud or a flat surface, it forced him to squint so his eyes could adjust. The sky looked white and gray, or even yellow, in the moments in-between.

Their large, daytime moon was a wispy shadow that hung amidst the blue. Much the same, the Vim that soared through the upper atmosphere was a wispy shadow of green. It was frighteningly easy to put out of mind, despite being a feathered stingray several times the size of the moon.

The many tassels of another Vim curved over the horizon, and the ‘leaf’ of the insect poked out from between the one cloud and a highrise building.

Micah pickpocketed a cellphone from an upset woman who only became more upset when he approached. He checked the date. Two years.

“I don’t know if that’s a relief or a worry,” he mumbled. ”Life marches on, I guess. We adapt.”

A low breeze kicked up the dirt, and a trail of yellow sand slipped into the graveyard through a fence. Not everyone shied away, someone even looked at the sand fondly, but Pijeru was horrified and began to sob.

A page turned.

Pijeru jumped up and down and screamed. She was ecstatic.

“—you hear me?” Ceri’s faint voice drifted from her cellphone. “You still there? Are you getting ax-murdered right now?”

“I’m here. I’m here!” Pijeru put her on speaker. “I can’t believe you’re getting married! Do you know when— No, how did Riue ask the question? Wait, it’s Riue, right?”

She barely got to see her childhood friend these days. She hated that she even had to ask, but the question slipped out and was quickly brushed over.

“Of course!” Ceri’s amplified voice laughed in affront. “We were sort of thinking either midsummer or winter when the winds have had a chance to calm down. We weren’t looking for anywhere fancy. It should be easier to nail down a date. I doubt we’d even manage to find somewhere on this short notice …”

“Wait, you mean this year!?”

“Yeah. With everything that’s— Well, we both thought sooner rather than later would be best.” She could hear her friend’s delight over the telephone. It slipped for a moment, but she quickly caught it again.

“Yeah … I’m so happy for you,” Pijeru said honestly. She thought of Rana. “Do I get to bring a plus one?”

“What makes you think I’m inviting you?”

“Don’t even.”

“I’m kidding. Of course, you can bring a plus one. Does that mean you can come?”

She glanced back at her kitchen calendar, though a phantom stood in the way, blocking her view. “Kah … probably? I still have a few vacation days left and my supervisor likes me. I don’t think it should be an issue. My work encourages taking time off for mental health. This counts.”

Besides, she was already looking for a new job. Pijeru was pretty sure she was not going to renew her contract. She loved her coworkers, but after three years of … everything that was happening …

I need out. She couldn’t afford to spend time between jobs, but she would make it work.

She curled up on her sofa, took her friend off speaker again, and leaned into the telephone. “Tell me everything. We haven’t seen each other for too long.”

A silver car swerved out of traffic and jerked to a stop next to the curb. Delilah had only seen a few examples of traffic, but even she knew that was reckless driving.

The door popped up, a stranger got out, and Ceri leaned on the passenger-side seat to smile at Pijeru. “Get in, loser!”

Delilah didn’t pay much attention to their reunion. She paced closer to the car and noticed an issue: there were two people already in the back. And the passenger folded the front seat forward so Pijeru could squeeze in.

“Seriously? Am I supposed to cling to the roof? I wonder … [Honeycomb Splash],” she cast the spell and nothing happened.

Huh. If this was a delusion, she might have expected that to work. Did that imply she could only experience what Pijeru showed her? Delilah touched the car, felt the metal, scuffed her boot on the asphalt, and took a deep breath.

Some of the sensations were foreign, but they were all there. The way her skin clung to the metal when she dragged her hand over the roof, the dark grit on the side of the street, the smell of cheap fire potion. Was Pijeru including all of that for her?

She could feel her mana and some of her Skills, like her [Bloodmoon Pact], but some she couldn’t feel at all, and in cases like her attention manipulation, she didn’t know if it was because she had been cut off from her Skills—how could that be?—or if it was because nobody here was paying attention to her.

The bird woman froze as she climbed into the car. “Kah. You’re—”

Delilah cupped her hands over the tinted window and leaned in, nose pressed to the glass, to see inside. Oh, it was—

“—Tuhrie!” Pijeru finally remembered her name.

“Piji?”

“Pijeru.”

This was their fabled reunion? They looked like they barely recognized one another.

“Get in already!” Ceri urged them.

Pijeru climbed in, and Delilah climbed in after her. She stood between her legs, awkwardly hunched below the ceiling, and jerked when the seat hit her back, forcing her to hold onto the backseat as she leaned over Pijeru.

Delilah hesitated. “I want out.” But the door slammed shut the moment she said it.

A small mirror hung from the ceiling between the front seats. Ceri glared into it at the car behind them and grumbled, “Yeah, yeah. We’re going already!” She turned the wheel to thread them back into traffic and cheered once they were on the road. “Shopping spree!”

Tuhrie and Pijeru glanced at each other. “Oh. Great,” Delilah deadpanned when a page turned and the bar wiped out the scene.

Ceri and her fiance stood together in the center of the pavilion. Their ceremonial dresses stretched out like a second pair of wings. They tied a rich, purple string around each other’s wrists and smiled before turning toward the crowd.

His parents stepped forward to wrap a scarf around her, welcoming her into the family. Her grandmother did the same for him, though he had to take a knee so she could reach him.

With a few final words, the deed was done. Husband and wife. Pijeru teared up. The evening went by in a flash.

It’s beautiful here. It was not the first time Pijeru had had the thought, and she doubted it would be the last.

The Pinespire Retreat was a small lodge thirty minutes outside of the city. Ceri didn’t have the entire place to herself, so it hadn’t been super expensive, apparently, but she’d only managed to grab it because of a prior cancellation.

The main buildings were two long complexes that cut from the fields into the edge of the woods, with lots of glass walls and rooftop conservatories to ‘experience’ the wilderness. Scattered around them were the maintenance buildings, cabins, and two pine spires—multi-story open-air pavilions that rose around wide spiral staircases.

One half of the spire shrunk toward the tip like a tree, hence the name. The ground on the other half was padded with inflatable mattresses so people could jump off.

Like summer camp for adults, she wanted to think but that was the envy speaking.

They had decorated the ceiling with a false canopy and tucked mason jars filled with electric lights away in the branches. Lesser spirits danced on the grass around the pavilion. As the summer dusk crept in, they bathed the wedding at the edge of the woods in a magical glow.

The other guests were enjoying themselves. A few had left as it was getting late, and a few couples had snuck off to the upper floors of the spire or the attractions around them.

Pijeru sighed and finished her glass of wine. She sat alone at her table.

So freaking beautiful.

“Piji!” a familiar, boisterous voice called with the slightest tinge of a drunken slur. “Why aren’t you dancing with us!?”

There was someone else who was beautiful. Pijeru remembered Tuhrie. At first, she thought she remembered her because they’d been together on that fateful night where the ritual had been completed, but after spending time with her these last few weeks, in preparation for the wedding … She remembered more. How she had felt that night.

Which sucked, because she didn’t know if that was the envy talking.

Tuhrie planted herself on a seat facing her, but Pijeru sat up and glanced away. “It’s getting pretty late …”

“What? The sun hasn’t even set yet! What, are you— Do you want to get back to your girlfriend so soon?”

“Yeah,” Pijeru awkwardly lied. “I should be getting back.”

“Did she make it home already? You should call her up! Ceri won’t mind if one more person shows up to the party.”

“Kah …” That was a good point. And Pijeru didn’t have an immediate reply against it.

Her thoughts swum from the alcohol. She guessed she could just brush Pijeru off and leave, but did she want to do that? It would be mean. The alternative would also bring down the mood …

Pijeru was too selfish, in the end. She mumbled something.

“What?” Tuhrie leaned in.

The two phantoms who sat in the chairs next to her did the same. One of them chewed on some leftovers they had stolen from the buffet as they listened. The third sat crouched in the grass outside of the spire, with the lesser spirits and a small black animal at their side.

“ … broke up with me. I lied. Rana didn’t have to cancel because of work. We broke up.”

“Oh.”

Yeah. ‘Oh.’ That was about the reaction Pijeru had expected to see and it immediately made her regret telling Tuhrie. “Please don’t tell anyone!” she urged. “I didn’t want to ruin the wedding.” And she didn’t want anyone else to look at her with pity like that.

A bunch of her old friends had shown up to the wedding with dates and news about how their lives were going—not all of the news was great, of course. The world was ending. But she hadn’t met anyone else who had just quit their job and gotten dumped because of it.

“What? No, no, that’s …” Tuhrie mumbled and perked up. “So you broke up?”

“I quit my job. Rana said that was the ‘last straw,’” Pijeru said with some force as if to vent her frustrations. She immediately deflated. “I didn’t even know there were other straws …”

Tuhrie wrapped an arm around her and squeezed her in a sideways hug. Her wing fell over her shoulder and there was that strong smell of her perfume again. “Aww, Piji. You haven’t even told anyone yet?”

“Only my parents and—”

“No wonder you've been so gloomy then! You need to get this out of your system. Forget about her! It’s all the more reason to come dance with us. Do something fun.”

Pijeru smiled. She really had wished she could bring Rana to the wedding with her. It was beautiful and she wanted it all for herself. Tuhrie … Tuhrie was a delightful surprise.

It took her a few more moments to convince her but, inevitably, she dragged her out of her seat and toward the dance floor. One of the phantoms stood up behind her but headed for the spiral staircase.

“You know,” she mused along the way, “you tried to convince me to go cliff diving with you once, too.”

“Ohh, right! I remember. Because of your graduation ceremony, wasn’t it? We totally have to do that someday.”

Her heart fluttered in her chest. A phantom dropped onto the inflatable mattress just outside the spire. The mattress puffed up, slamming into their bare skin, and their laughter hitched like a voice crack as they bounced.

Pijeru took a leap of faith. “How about tomorrow?”

“Come on. This was your idea, you go first!”

“You invited me here. And this is your school tradition.”

“You said you did this before. Show me how to do it!”

“What, afraid you’ll hit the rocks?”

“Yes! Of course!? Who wouldn’t be?”

Tuhrie laughed. “You have wings, don’t you? Use them.”

“I thought the idea was to dive?”

“You can still do that afterward? Just glide out a bit and do a bomber’s dive?”

Pijeru stared.

“No?” Tuhrie asked. “A whale dive? Uhh, I don't know it by any other names—”

“I know what it is. I just can’t do it.”

“What? Of course you can!”

“I’m sorry I can’t do maneuvers like a freaking fighter pilot.”

“Piji.”

“Tuhrie.”

“Come on. You can do this!”

“Oh, fuck this,” Kyle groaned. He pointed two angry fingers at them as he marched by. “Fuck you.”

How long were these two love birds going to beat around the bush? His patience could only wear so thin.

He picked up speed. The chill wind rolled his hair into knots and brought the smell of the sea—fish, and salt, and wet weeds. The edge of the cliff loomed ahead. The freaking ocean stretched out below it, waves crashing and foaming on the rocks, water that blurred the horizon.

“Cliff dive!” Kyle roared and jumped.

The drop was much longer than the pine spire. Suddenly, the wind was rushing up past him. His climbing shirt billowed. His clothes fluttered madly against his skin. His stomach dropped but the feeling bothered his smile none.

He crashed into the water and slipped into its depths. A numbing pain shot up his legs like someone had slapped him everywhere at once. His clothes soaked. Streams of bubbles rolled over his face and something wet and stringy caught on his hand.

When he opened his eyes, he immediately regretted it. Not only was it too dark and frothy to see, the water stung his eyes.

“Mm!” he groaned and began to swim upward. Saltwater. He’d known about that but he had never imagined—

Ack! Some of it even got in his mouth when he breached the surface to breathe.

“Bah! Puah!” Kyle tried to spit it out but a wave crashed into his mouth. That only made it worse.

The waves bobbed him up and down and yanked him toward the cliff.

That unnatural glare still hung in the air, casting the world in a stark yellow hue. He welcomed the shade.

Someone screamed above him. He glanced up and cursed.

“Oh, shoot—” Kyle swam toward the cliff. Pijeru, followed almost immediately by Tuhrie, hit the water behind him. He needn’t have panicked. They were much further out and despite their wings, they dropped like stones and slipped into the water with barely a splash.

Even when they surfaced, hooting and laughing, a bubble of calm surrounded them.

Kyle squinted. He wasn’t sure but … Yep. Nope. That was a spell. ‘Waterwindsong’? One of the two had been holding out on them. Then again, there hadn’t been a lot of water to go around during their fight.

There hadn’t been a lot of ocean to go around in Redwood. Fuck, it was huge. He’d seen paintings and pictures, of course. Even magical ones that moved at that party. But to see it with his own eyes, to swim in it …

I want to jump again.

Wait. Jump?

“The pit trap!” Kyle slapped his hands down on the water. That was what had been bothering him all this time. Hadn’t there been a bag of loot hanging from one of the spikes? His classmates might have collected it already when they had gone to fetch the cart. He’d have to check for himself once he got out of here … later.

Kyle wasn’t so eager to leave. “No wonder why you bird people like jumping off things. It’s good times.”

He didn’t know how long this memory would last so he hurried, turning left to swim toward the beach with long strokes. If he made it there in time, he could jump off the cliff a second time! Maybe he could do a flip …?

Then again, the cliff was probably tall enough to break bones if you landed wrong and his tattoo was still dead— Wait, could he even get hurt in these memories?

Only one way to find out.

He glanced back to make sure he wasn’t missing anything important and startled. A giant black void had bisected their cliff, annihilating the scene. Pijeru and Tuhrie horsed around in front of it.

Kyle cursed and hurried. He huffed and puffed to swim as fast as he could but, try as he might, it wasn’t enough. He’d nearly reached the edge of the beach when the wall swept over him.

“So are you crashing at another friend’s place tonight?” Pijeru asked.

“Same friend, maybe? I don’t have curfew since I got back but the last train I could take leaves at eight.”

“That early?” They walked along the beach. The waves crashed against their feet and wiped out their footprints behind them.

Pijeru had wrapped a towel around her shoulders so she could dry off before they headed up to the promenade. Tuhrie was just being considerate.

“Sort of. There’s another one that leaves at nine but I have two interchanges and I don’t trust the Railway. They suck at punctuality. If one train has a five-minute delay, the next won’t wait. They’ll strand you in the middle of nowhere for an hour. If both have delays—”

“You’d be stranded for the night?” Pijeru asked.

“Well, no.” Her frustration faltered and she awkwardly scratched her beak. “I’d call a taxi. Or hike it. From the second stop, it’d only take me an hour or so. But it still sucks.”

“Oh. Yeah, that sounds bad.” Pijeru didn’t have a lot of experience with taking the train—the city trams sometimes went every five minutes—but Tuhrie’s commute from where she was stationed to their home city was apparently two hours long. And she still made the trip.

She’d recently returned home from a two-year posting as part of a posturing force in one of their neighboring countries. Tensions had finally calmed down a bit and the Air Force didn’t know where to send her next. She was using this brief respite to reconnect with old friends as a serial couch-surfer.

“Oh, did they finally tell you where you’re headed next?”

“Rumor mill says it’ll be Sierfwi.”

Pijeru perked up. “That sounds exciting?”

Sierfwi was one of the nations where spirits had historically interacted with their world. And ever since the … the ritual … more and more of them arrived with every passing year.

She resisted the urge to glance up, instead distracting herself by seeking out bright spots over the sand.

Two of the phantoms were there again. One built a small castle in the sand, the other was interested in the same beings as Pijeru again. They crouched in the water and tried to speak to them. Lesser spirits.

They were pale things, like streaks or circles of bleached watercolor, most of them the size of flies.

For the first time in a long time, they had come all this way to visit their country, because the winds were thick enough for them to like it here.

Pijeru wished she could meet an adult spirit for once. Stars, she wished she could travel to another country!

“Eh.” Tuhrie shrugged. “It will just be more of the same. Posturing.”

“Oh.” Her mood dipped. “Against who?” She wouldn’t be surprised if someone wanted to invade for local access to the spirit world—so many countries hated them and their allies for what they’d done—but she hadn’t heard anything about that on the news.

Tuhrie made a face.

Why? Had that been a stupid question to ask?

“The spirits,” she said.

“The spirits …?”

“The spirits are muscling in. They want land and legal immunities. Oh, and travel rights and those legal immunities wherever they go.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad. If I were to go somewhere, I’d also want to make sure I will have basic rights there?”

“Yeah, but their ‘basic rights’ are a lot different from our own, Piji. Fire spirits want to set stuff on fire. Storm spirits want to cause storms. Earth spirits terraform wherever they go—that’s just the simple nature ones. The spirits ‘of Vim’”—she glanced up in contempt—“are the type to lure children into the spirit world where they’ll never be seen or heard from again.”

Pijeru gave her a sidelong glance. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe her. All you had to do was glance at the sky or open your ears to the whisperwinds to know how … alien … the Vim were. The world was ending. Full stop. And yet …

I guess I don’t want to believe you.

“That’s what they’re demanding. ‘Or else.’ They aren’t these magical innocent beings from fairy tales. Even these lesser spirits—”

Tuhrie bent her knees and held out a hand. A blue dot alighted on it, nearly invisible where it hovered in front of the waves. It didn’t have a face or eyes, but it radiated curiosity as it looked at her face, then inspected her feathers.

Pijeru stopped and stared. She might as well have plucked the moon out of the sky.

“—they can cause problems like you wouldn’t believe,” Tuhrie mused, oblivious to her reaction.

Pijeru couldn’t count the number of times she’d tried to do what Tuhrie had just done. Every time she spotted a lesser spirit while she waited for the tram, or sat outside on her balcony, at her parents’ house, during her break …

She had tried to coax them closer with promises, offered treats, songs, words— She had even researched old folklore and myths! So how …?

“Little pests. They’re classified as an invasive species, you know?”

Tuhrie had looked like an athlete when they had first met. Now, she was a soldier. She was so easygoing, she’d sleep on the couch of a friend she hadn’t seen in seven years like the time had never gone by, but she could sometimes be … gruff without meaning to. The same held true for her words. Those words should have been threatening or spiteful, but there was none of that meaning to be found in her posture or tone.

Maybe the spirit could sense that? Even when Tuhrie gestured, rather than wink out of existence, it gently took off and descended toward the sand.

Pijeru reached out—

The spirit vanished.

Oh. Is it me?

“Don’t mind them. My SO always jokes they’re all little spies for the enemy. They could cause so many problems if only they had the power for it. The big ones do. They’re threatening war like any other nation would.”

“That’s so sad.”

“Yeah … Sorry. But like, I doubt it will come to that. They’re still talking it out. We’re just heading over to Siefwi to stand in the background while they do that.”

She swung her arms out a little to make her wings fall straight and crossed her arms, beak tilted up.

Pijeru chuckled. “I’m sure the spirits will think twice when they see you standing like that.”

“Nah. Actually, I’ll probably be sitting. Behind a gun. In the door of my heli. Whistling a tune while I wave at them.”

Could bullets hurt spirits? Pijeru doubted it, but she didn’t want to think about that topic at all. Well, she did like the mental image of Tuhrie sitting in a helicopter, but she didn’t have to imagine that when she was walking next to her on the beach—and when she’d seen photos.

No, Pijeru just had other things occupying her thoughts. She looked up.

Clingevim stretched across the sky. That was one of their names for them. One among dozens that mostly came from ancient sea gods, because it always seemed to stick close to the water.

Every nation, every news station, every demographic and city seemed to have a different name for each of the Vim that orbited their planet. They were picked from myth, or they were stupid nicknames people came up with in conversation, or that focus groups tried to coin for merchandise. Their government just listed them by the order in which they’d arrived—Entity One, Two, Three and so on. Clingevim would be Entity Number Seven on that list.

They shared certain similarities to Entity One, that feathered stingray, and Entity Three—that being hidden behind a leaf. Their head was pointed, like a bird or fish, and their body was broad but shrouded within a voluminous green cloak that split at the hems. Their many tassels trailed around the horizon. If you gazed upon them through a telescope at night, you could see waves crashing and foaming, storm clouds, grassy hills, and alien birds nesting on islands at sea. It seemed as if someone had dragged a pair of scissors through a world to cut into strips for their cloak.

All they glimpsed of their true form within it were twinkling stars and a single pair of hands which they occasionally used to snuggle up, to brush their fingers through the clouds, or to reach down and save ships caught out in a storm at sea. Storms that only existed because of their presence …

Pijeru hated them.

Pijeru was terrified of them.

Pijeru envied them.

What can you see? From up there?

“And,” Tuhrie nudged her, “do you have any idea where you’re headed next?”

“Something to do with the whisperwind,” Pijeru mumbled and blinked, focusing on her again. “Tswi, I mean, I’ve been applying to a bunch of different channels, and talk shows, and news stations … though that last one might be too close to what I was doing before.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“It’d be worse,” she said honestly, “because I wouldn’t be able to help.” She still wanted to be able to help people if she could. She just couldn’t deal with an unending queue of troubled voices anymore.

Except, she wasn’t really good at anything other than whisperwindsongs. Even after the ritual, she’d learned to manipulate a few new winds, but she wasn’t as good at any of them as she was at the whisperwinds.

Pijeru could mute even the most obnoxiously powerful whisperwindsingers across an entire city if she had to, attacking their connection from three different angles before she pulled the rug out from under them. People had begun to hand difficult cases over to her and now, she had become the one to tell her coworkers to watch and learn. And even though she enjoyed it, that only made her job more stressful, not less.

She sighed, her eyes drifting up again.

“I wonder where I’d have to work to get a chance to talk to one of them.”

Tuhrie scoffed. “You could do that from here. Or a church, if you will. Can you believe people have started praying to them?”

“Yes,” she confessed.

“I doubt they can’t hear us, but maybe you could look for a government job? Or work at a university or something? They’re bound to be trying more rituals to get their attention.”

Pijeru had tried to speak to the Vim on her own, of course. They didn’t answer.

She doubted she could work her way up in academics, or a government job, to the point where she could represent her people and try to communicate with them. Rather, she doubted she could do that in time.

Our world is ending, she admitted to herself. Then, a moment later, Fuck.

She stared at Tuhrie. “Tswi. I’ll go wherever the wind takes me, I guess.”

Tuhrie whistled a tune and a breeze picked up around them, picking up sand and sprays of seafoam. “Oh,” she said smugly and placed a hand on Pijeru’s hip, “look at that. The wind.”

Pijeru checked the signs at the door to make sure she was in the right place. Then, that they were even open. There was a light on inside the small office. The glass door was unlocked and she spotted someone moving around in the back.

The winged logo painted onto the window kind of gave it away. Her nerves fluttered as she pulled open the door and stepped inside.

Three phantoms followed her into the cramped space, briefly overlapping one another before they fanned out to inspect their environment.

One stayed close to her. They glanced at the small table of brochures next to the waiting area, then the cork-board full of flyers.

Another walked up to the counter and leaned over it to look into the back and then at the computer screen below. A small animal hopped off their shoulder and skittered over the desk.

The third took a seat and waited, leaning their head against the wall as if they were exhausted while they watched the scene unfold.

Pijeru didn’t react. Not that she didn’t notice them—of course, she’d noticed the three … figures that haunted her during random moments of her life, these last few years. Usually, those were important moments in her life.

Was this an important moment? Well, she could figure that answer out on her own.

The phantoms looked like odd, hairless monkeys that walked on two legs, and they wore clothes like armored mountain climbers. One had pale skin, another brown, and the third was somewhere in-between.

Aliens? Ghosts of the precursor civilization? Was she being contacted? Haunted?

She had no idea, but she didn’t react in any case. Because … that just wasn’t what she was supposed to do at this moment. It wasn’t what she … had done …?

Have I done this before? She was pretty sure this was the first time she’d been in this building.

She almost frowned. Almost. Because thoughts like that made her head hurt, but the headache didn’t reach her expression either.

A poster caught her attention. A young man stood beneath a jet and looked up into the sky. A banner with a recruitment line slashed through the picture. The space below it was filled with tiny lines of text.

The phantoms joined her in staring at the poster.

“ … explore the world …” Pijeru read to herself. Or was it for their benefit?

She heard someone shuffle out of the back. “Can I help you, miss?” the man asked from behind the counter.

Pijeru dragged herself away from the poster to greet the recruitment officer. “I did some research and though you could help me out. I was interested in maybe pursuing a career as a signaler?”