Now I return to Laurel Gray, who arrived at her destination a little too soon for her liking.

In the cloudscape of Oshun, sizes and distances were almost impossible to measure, and time was a loose and generous thing. Still, she could estimate. By her reckoning, she’d embarked for the center less than a week ago.

Now the star above her was large enough to cover half the sky, and brighter than anything she’d ever seen. All around it, the air was dark and shrouded by clouds, deep indigo fading into black. It was the color of night, and for Gray it evoked faint memories of standing in a garden after sunset, with her feet on the damp earth and her eyes turned upward.

But there were no pinprick stars here, scattered across the velvet dark. Oshun only had space for the one.

It was enormous.

She found a floppy wide-brimmed hat in one of the bins, and wore it whenever she set foot on the deck. It shaded her eyes, softening the overwhelming light. Still, it was barely enough.

This close to the star, the air was sweltering hot, and the breeze smelled like copper and burnt lavender. Under all the silence, there was a growing hum.

It didn’t have enough variety to be called music; if anything, it reminded her of an old air conditioner. It set Gray on edge. But she could not escape the sound, any more than she could escape the interruptions of weaver madness, or her unsettlingly blue hands, or Oshun itself, so she ignored it.

The bubbles multiplied gradually. At first there were only a few clusters on the horizon, but the higher she rose, the more she spotted. They shone like jewels against the dark, glimmering dots of red or blue or yellow. They were all going the same way.

She had not thought much about her arrival. Her vague plans revolved around steering the Clarity directly into the heart of the star, but she didn’t know if that was even possible. If the temperature kept going up at this rate, she’d fry before she ever touched fire.

Years ago, she’d read a report from SEIDR on an expedition to the first stratosphere. In all those pages, only a single line stuck in her memory.

We have reached the tipping point, neither falling nor rising, but hovering between the open sea and the pull of the furnace.

Now she understood the pull of the furnace was no metaphor, but a haphazard attempt to throw words onto a brutally wordless phenomenon.

She needed to keep going. It was a physical compulsion, and it filled her with a frantic energy—like an diver swimming toward the light-dappled surface, lungs straining for that first gasp of air.

She didn’t doubt herself until she saw the skelfing die.

***

Gray was almost too close to the star by now; she could make out the faint patterns shifting over its roiling surface, and the buzz in her ears had grown to a low, thundering roar.

She knew this was the end, because she didn’t have to weave anymore. When she stood up from the prismatic loom for the last time, pulling the gloves off her damp blue hands and shaking out her fingers, it took her a while to realize the ship was still moving up.

She climbed up the stairs to the deck. The wooden planks vibrated beneath her feet as the Clarity continued to rise—not in a slow spiral along the currents of the aether, but straight up.

Beneath her, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of bubbles. They shone with more colors than Gray could name. They were all gliding toward the center at the same pace. When she stared the effect was dizzying, like the whole sea was collapsing inward.

Ahead of her, a pair of enormous circles had almost reached the star. They were mere shadows on the face of it, despite their size. She watched them carefully, wondering what tiny alien worlds they contained, and how long they’d been drifting unchanging through the blue.

One after the other, they plunged into the fire and vanished.

All of her options were slipping like sand through her fingers; she could almost hear them whispering as they fell. And yet Gray wasn’t scared; she felt more calm than she had in years.

This was fortunate, for skelfing ate fear. And even now, one of them was swiftly approaching the Clarity, gliding like ice on water.

It was an old, old thing.

In the wastelands of Oshun’s lower stratospheres, where only a drop of starlight soaked through the clouds, the sea teemed with monsters. This particular skelfing had emerged from those primordial pools eons before the first tree spread its roots into the Earth.

A skelfing is a simple thing, beneath the skin of horror. Its chief drive is hunger. It devours anything that smells of terror, from interspace-ships to lone travellers to other skelfing.

This one had eaten its fair share of monsters, and grown larger and more terrible with each one. Five hundred million years of hunting; always hungry, never sleeping.

Gray never heard it coming. She was standing at the bow of the Clarity, noting how quickly they were moving now. The star’s pull seemed to increase with each passing second. She could see the light even through the fibers of her hat.

Only a few minutes to go, she thought, if not seconds.

Still, she was not scared. She knew there should have been something, some anticipation or horror or shock creeping over her, but it never arrived. In its absence she found only the soft, steady certainty of a fixed path. Her choice was made, and she didn’t intend to unmake it.

Her gaze swept over the towering blue-black thunderheads on the horizon. A bead of sweat ran into her eye and she scowled, blinking furiously.

When she opened her eyes again, the skelfing was there.

It was faster than the Clarity, and much faster than Gray. Her brain stuttered as she tried to make sense of it.

At first it seemed like a long, whip-thin shadow, twisting through the dark. It stretched up from beneath the ship, reaching toward the star and keeping pace with Gray. She thought it looked almost like a snake—or perhaps a tongue—or the ridge of a sinuous spine—or a tail.

She preferred certainty to ignorance, so she ran to the railing and leaned over the edge.

This was a mistake, but I can hardly blame her. The word skelfing hadn’t even entered her mind until the split second after she looked.

What did she see?

You know I can’t say it. I shouldn’t have to. I wish I’d never looked, myself.

Gray looked down and her eyes stopped working, because there was nothing to see but the unspeakable thing, the worst thing.

It must be a terrible way to go.

Still, Gray wasn’t scared. Don’t ask me how.

She skated right past it, ever-so-narrowly pulling herself from the pit with her fixed, hopeless trajectory. As her mind babbled what is it what is it what is it what is it what is it, she discovered that all comparisons failed, and nothing she thought or wanted or imagined could capture even a fraction of the skelfing.

So she made her own answer.

“You’re a dragon,” she said with unfounded confidence, as her brain sought imaginary patterns and papered them over the truth. “Nothing else.”

Perhaps there was some kinship between her and the monster; after all, they were both approaching the same end. Perhaps she was merely lucky. Either way, all at once, she was free.

Her legs buckled, her hands unlocked from the railing, and she fell backward. The deck of the Clarity caught her, panting, hands soaked with sweat.

The skelfing shot past her in one long stream of lackening—glimpses and fragments that melted like snowflakes as soon as they landed. Scales became eyes preserved in amber turned into flaking keratinous claws dissolved into smoke.

The sheer size of it was staggering. In a curious flash of embarrassment, she realized the first shadow creeping up beside the Clarity, the strange line she tried to identify, was as small and insignificant to the skelfing as one of Gray’s fingernails was to Gray.

The ringing in her ears settled back into the constant hum of the star. Despite herself, she looked all the way up.

Past the brim of her hat, the sky was burning white. Both the Clarity and the skelfing were barreling toward it, fast enough that Gray could feel the wind pushing down against her. The star pierced her eyes and muted her vision with red and green blotches, fuzzy around the edges.

She squinted. Through the blur of her eyelashes, the skelfing outpaced her ship. Its shadow cut across the Clarity. For a single brief moment, it eclipsed the star. Its silhouette was drawn in white fire.

The star swallowed it whole.

Gray didn’t want to follow it. She started running before she stopped screaming. In a mad dash she went scrambling down the steps into the hold. She had no time to find her gloves—no time for anything. Moments from incineration, all she wanted was another chance.

She reached for the prismatic loom. As her left hand touched the fabric of reality, pain lanced through her right eye.

“Not now,” she breathed, knowing it was pointless, hoping very much it wouldn’t hurt.

***

Things were different this time.

Oshun’s star warped everything in its vicinity, and Gray was almost close enough to touch it. As weaver madness blotted out her vision, the star reached out and tweaked her sight.

Instead of the pure darkness she’d expected, Gray saw a circle.

It was blinding white, sharp and perfect. It grew until she could see nothing else. She tried to estimate how much time had already passed, how much time she had left before the ship met the star, but there was no way to tell. Perhaps she’d already burned away, and this was what came after—an eternity of featureless white light.

Gray didn’t feel dead, but she didn’t feel particularly alive, either. There was a curious disconnect between her senses, as if each one had been rewired to work independently. She was slightly removed from everything but her endless stream of thoughts.

It wasn’t too bad. Perhaps a little boring.

Gradually a faint sensation of pressure and weight built up against the soles of her feet. That was surprising enough on its own.

She looked down and saw a vague, smeared reflection on an impossibly glossy floor.

At once, she realized she was standing on a flat plane of white. It was nearly invisible, stretching out in every direction to meet the white sky. Not a puff of wind or trace of sound disturbed its utter stillness.

The idea crossed her mind that she was dreaming, but she’d never had a dream like this before. She didn’t remember falling asleep, either. One moment she was alive and panicked, slipping into delirium, and the next moment she was here.

Across an unknown span of the pale, empty world, she saw a figure approaching. It was only a murky shadow at first, veiled by mist. Almost a ghost.

Gray flexed her fingers. With every passing second she felt a little more solid and present. She looked down again and saw she had no fingers.

No hands, either. No body to speak of. Only a cloudy, nebulous reflection in the floor.

She was starting to get nervous.

The figure had nearly reached her. Now it seemed a good deal more substantial than Gray, though she still couldn’t make out the face. The way the mist hung over it, distorting and concealing, reminded her a little of the skelfing. It had the same slippery patchwork feeling, a series of brief impressions that never merged into a coherent whole.

“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was oddly weightless, too light and airy to be real.

“Don’t you recognize me?” the shade asked.

And just like that, she did.

It was Evelyn—short, chipped-tooth Evelyn, with her hair tied back, smiling self-consciously. She was wearing a pair of reading glasses, and the old pink blouse that had once belonged to Gray. It was impossible, impossible, impossible for her to be here.

“You’re not my sister.”

“No, I’m not,” Evelyn agreed. “I wanted to borrow the shape of someone familiar. It makes this easier.”

Gray frowned, and then wondered whether she still had a face. Probably not. “Makes what easier?”

“This conversation.” Evelyn’s voice was warm. She looked exactly the same as the last time Gray saw her. “You’re going to die in seventeen seconds, so I decided to intervene.”

Gray had no idea what to say. There were too many questions and not enough time. She cocked her head. “Intervene?”

“I pulled you toward a space outside of time,” Evelyn said. “More or less. Seventeen seconds is not quite infinity, but for my purposes it’s close enough.”

“What are your purposes?”

Evelyn pointed.

Gray turned around. She tried not to think too much about how that worked. She could still feel her nonexistent feet against the floor.

Behind her, the plain white space was interrupted by a single square, a hole cut through the cloth of the world. Gray leaned forward.

Through it, she saw the Clarity. Even more surprisingly, she saw herself.

She was slumped over the ship’s prismatic loom. Her left eye was closed, but her right eye was open. Gray could see it staring blindly forward, as sightless and bright as a jewel.

Around her, the candles were frozen, their flames static and unmoving. Through the gap in the ceiling, starlight poured into the hold. Even now, Gray could almost feel the heat radiating from above.

“You can’t weave,” Evelyn said softly in her imaginary ear. “You can’t move. You’re still lost in seeing, delirious.”

“I’m going to crash into the star,” Gray said, and felt the sting of true fear. She didn’t like that. “Why did you bring me here?”

“I want to tell you how to escape.”

Gray swiveled back toward Evelyn.

Her face was wrong, somehow—not the features, but the expression. The real Evelyn Gray had never looked so beatific.

“How?” Gray demanded.

“Your right eye is the source of the madness,” Evelyn said, cupping a hand over her own eye. “You can’t stop it, but you can slow it down. You can survive.”

“Tell me how.”

“It won’t be easy.” Evelyn wasn’t smiling anymore. “It will hurt.”

“I don’t care.”

“When I release you,” Evelyn said, “you’ll return to seeing the dark space, the earliest moment. If you’d like you can stay there. You won’t suffer. You won’t even know you’re dying.”

Gray clenched her fists until her nails dug into the skin. It was painful enough to be real. “Or?”

“You can take out your eye,” Evelyn said calmly.

Somehow Gray had already been expecting that.

It seemed like a natural solution. Not that she liked the idea of being blinded here, now, in the shadow of the star. But she couldn’t name a single alternative.

“After that, you must start weaving immediately,” Evelyn said. “There won’t be any time to spare. You’re too close already.”

Gray looked back through the little window to the Clarity, where her body lay sprawled over the loom. “But I can’t move like this. I’m delirious.”

“You can. It will be difficult, but you are capable. You must do it as soon as I let you go.” Evelyn pressed her lips together. “Or you can give up. It’s your choice.”

Gray hesitated.

She pictured snapping back to herself, reaching up, and plucking the eyeball out of her skull. And then she shuddered, so viscerally repelled that it made her want to vomit.

Even if she survived—managed to steer past the star and back into Oshun, bleeding and hurting and desperate—there was no bright future awaiting her. She had a handful of dwindling supplies, a single ship, and a broken head. Her fingertips were bound to unravel eventually.

She didn’t know if an eye was worth a few more days of misery. She didn’t like to sacrifice anything unless she knew it was worth it. All her calculations told her this was a losing proposition, and by God, she hated to lose.

On the other hand, she was already losing. Weaver madness was winning; so far it had taken her friends, her family, her job, and her home. She didn’t want it to steal her life as well.

She scowled, or imagined scowling—it was all the same in this timeless place. Evelyn waited patiently, watching her without a trace of concern.

“When I was in the asylum,” Gray said at last, “they told me that it was impossible to move through delirium. All I could do was wait for it to end.”

Evelyn shook her head. “Have you never done something impossible before?”

***

The first time Gray went diving alone, she brought back a pearl.

SEIDR’s caves were remarkably beautiful; she liked them even better when she was underwater, with only the beam of her headlamp cutting through the blue dark. It felt like her own private world.

Cave diving was extremely dangerous, so she took all the usual precautions. She’d memorized the map, and followed the green fluorescent markers left by other divers. She wore sleek flippers that wouldn’t get caught on the rocks, a waterproof watch with a compass, and a pair of reflective goggles.

Diving in SEIDR was significantly easier thanks to the many air pockets trapped inside the ruins. The flood left hundreds of half-submerged rooms and isolated bubbles. Some were only large enough for a few deep breaths; others could hold dozens of people.

SEIDR’s old museum was near the bottom of the Institute, so Gray followed a deep vertical shaft all the way down. The stone was dotted with brown reeds, swaying ever-so-slightly in the current. Tiny leaves drifted past her face.

As she descended, the water grew colder, and the shadows crept up the walls. When the last light from above had disappeared completely, Gray switched off her headlamp.

She was plunged into perfect darkness. No trace of sunlight reached this far into the Earth. She could feel the water surrounding her as she floated, moving softly against her skin. There was nothing else. For all Gray knew, she might have been the only soul in the universe.

She switched the light back on after a few seconds, though it felt like an eternity. The cone illuminated swirling particles of dust and a single fish the size of her thumb.

When she reached the rocky bottom, her lungs were just starting to burn. She surfaced in an empty stairwell and spent a few minutes catching her breath and rechecking the map. It told her what she already knew: the museum was just ahead.

SEIDR’s old museum had been devastated by the flood, and picked clean by the divers. Gray swept past the entrance and down the right wing in a single breath.

At the end of the hallway, she found a bright green marker pointing to a craggy niche in the ceiling. A tiny pocket of air lay trapped against the stone. It looked so odd from beneath, gleaming like quicksilver, reflecting her distorted face and enormous, mirrored goggles.

She kicked until her head emerged from the water and took a few gulps of cold, stagnant air. Her map said this was the only bubble of air inside the museum; wherever she went from here, she would have to do it quickly.

Her job was to bring something back. Other divers had already cleared out the entry hall; nothing remained of the exhibits closest to the front. The lower floors of the museum had more to offer, but they were harder to reach. The deeper she went, the greater the risk.

There were plenty of divers who went searching through the ruins and never came back. Gray didn’t intend to be one of them.

Still, she wanted to find something good. Something no one else had ever found before. She started the timer on her watch and slipped back into the water.

There was a hole in the museum floor under the old bone artifacts display. Gray used it as a shortcut into the lower levels. She swam at a steady pace, strung out parallel to the ceiling. Cabinets and shattered glass cases lined the walls; green algae carpeted the floor. Under the dim blue glow, the whole room looked frozen in time.

Gray was distantly aware of the pressure in her chest, the growing need to inhale. She could hold her breath for four minutes in a pinch. That left two for going down and two for coming back. According to her watch, she was already at twenty-seven seconds.

She turned the corner and glided down a staircase, disturbing a school of glimmering fish. They scattered, darting into crevices and shadows.

As she coasted, kicking gently, she pulled out the map again. The art gallery was just ahead. Beyond that, someone had crossed out the original blueprints and written, Partially collapsed. Don’t take the left hallway.

She swam down the gallery, past empty frames and rusted iron sculptures. At the far end of the room, both of the walls peeled away in chunks. She cut between two massive blocks of rubble and found herself at an intersection.

A clear hallway branched off to the right. The left hallway was completely blocked by debris, but there was a narrow gap in the floor. According to the map, the old museum storeroom was directly beneath her.

Gray dithered. There had to be some interesting artifacts left in the storeroom, but she wasn’t sure if diving through the floor counted as taking the left hallway.

Her watch read one minute and three seconds. She had to choose quickly.

With a sudden burst of determination, she propelled herself down, skimming along the floor and sliding through the gap.

The storeroom was disorienting, filled with rows of identical filing cabinets. She sailed above them, mere inches from the ceiling, watching their shadows spin around her. Searching through the cabinets didn’t appeal to her; for all she knew, they were full of ancient, waterlogged paperwork. But there didn’t appear to be anything else down here.

She was just starting to consider going back when she saw the corpse.

It was an anonymous bag of bones in a black wetsuit, sprawled out across the floor between two cabinets. Not a victim of the flood, but a diver. Its left hand was folded over its chest, clutching something bright, something that seemed to glow under the beam of Gray’s headlamp.

She felt equal parts dread and curiosity as she swam down toward it. Her living hand brushed over the dead one, and she shivered.

Still, she had no intention of leaving without figuring out what this poor diver had died for. She pried the corpse’s long, bony fingers open.

Sitting in its skeletal palm was a gleaming pearl, almost too large to be real.

Gray took it, of course. It fit perfectly in her left hand. Only when she turned around, triumph mingling with urgency in her veins, did she realize her grave error.

She had only the vaguest idea of where she’d come from. The hole in the ceiling had disappeared, way back in the pressing dark. Her thoughts felt sluggish, suddenly weighed down by panic.

She kicked back toward the ceiling, searching along its craggy surface for any holes, but the room was massive and her headlamp barely illuminated a fraction of it. As far as she could see, it was unbroken.

Her mind returned to the other diver, with painful recognition; they had probably died just like this, searching for an exit until their lungs gave out.

She was determined to remain calm, and yet dreadfully aware of the point of no return barreling toward her. It would take her a while to get back to the air pocket near the entrance, even if she escaped from the storeroom now. After another minute it would be a moot point.

She sighed a little, and watched the bubbles drift away from her face, twirling toward the ceiling. They hit the rock and then, to Gray’s surprise, began to drift along it like stones rolling down a slope.

She followed the bubbles, keeping her movements slow and smooth, though all she wanted to do was thrash and claw her way out of the depths. Through her clenched teeth, she could feel her pulse racing. Her watch said two minutes, forty-six seconds. Forty-seven.

Above her, the bubbles picked up speed as they tumbled one-by-one into a cavity in the ceiling.

It wasn’t the gap Gray swam through earlier; this crevice was far narrower, so small that she’d almost overlooked it. She had no idea where it led, but at least it wasn’t going down. At this point, anywhere was better than here.

She had to squeeze her elbows to get through the channel. It cut through the rock like a chimney, stretching up into the murky darkness, claustrophobically tight. Her flippers brushed against the walls with every kick. She couldn’t even see the bubbles anymore.

Up above, the light from her headlamp bounced off a flat ceiling.

Gray couldn’t turn around in such a cramped space. She kept going. She didn’t want to check her watch again, but she could feel the strain in her lungs. It told her everything she needed to know.

As she reached the end of the tunnel, her head bumped against the ceiling. She saw a narrow, rectangular slot in the wall beside her.

On a whim, she pressed against the wall. The whole thing fell away with a metallic clang. To her astonishment, she found herself staring at the museum’s entrance hall.

She had gone rocketing up through the basement mail chute, bypassing the lower floors entirely. Now she wiggled out of the hole, blinking away the darkness at the corners of her eyes. Her heart was pounding wildly. The right wing was just up ahead.

Gray clenched her jaw and kicked like mad until she saw the neon green marker pointing up. The reflection of the water’s surface gleamed silver from below.

Nothing ever tasted so sweet as that first breath of air.