Static Movment

I had made the transit to Port City one hundred and forty-three times.

I know the number because I keep it, the way I keep most numbers that matter and a great many that don’t.

It is not superstition.

It is simply the kind of information that accumulates around a thing you trust completely, the way a person might know, without ever counting on purpose, how many times they’ve unlocked their own front door.

One hundred and forty-three times, and every one of them had felt like nothing.

That was the entire point of the Layer. Not the absence of sensation but the absence of effort.

A held breath so practiced it no longer registered as held.

I stood at the eastern edge of the practice courtyard, where the stone gave way to gravel and the gravel gave way to the low sea wall, because I liked to begin my transits somewhere I could see the water first.

A small ritual. As I did with most things in my life.

Sandy was waiting for me at Port City. We had arranged to spend the day together at a spa. Or at least the closest thing to a spa that Port City could manage.

I closed my eyes.

It was not necessary — I had done this with my eyes open dozens of times — but it was a habit I’d kept since sixteen, since the first time my power had come to me.

So, with eyes closed and focused intention,

I pressed forward and stepped into the total darkness and cold of the place between places.

The Layer.

For a fraction of a second, nothing was wrong.

The dark took me the way it always took me.

Complete, silent, without temperature, without texture, the total absence I had named at sixteen because it had needed a name and no one else was going to give it one for me.

And then it pressed back.

For some reason the Layer, the place that was nothing, felt like something. Suddenly I found myself pushing against what seemed like water at first, and then like something thicker.

I felt as though I were inside a gelatinous sea, trying to press forward but with no momentum. I had stepped in with the intent of a peaceful hike through nothingness, only to find I needed to make it a sprint.

I did what I have always done when a plan meets an obstacle.

I did not panic.

I adjusted.

I redirected, tried to widen the angle of approach, applied more of myself to the effort than I had applied to a transit since I was seventeen years old and still learning the shape of my own competence.

It should have yielded.

Everything yields, eventually, to patient insistence. That has never once, in the twenty-four years of my existence, been untrue.

It did not yield.

It threw me back.

I came out of the Layer at a bad angle, weightless for a half-second too long, and then the courtyard was under me — not where I’d started — six feet to the left of it, gravel biting through the knee of my trousers and up through my palms as I caught myself before my face could join the list of things making contact with the ground.

For a moment I simply stayed knelt there, cataloguing.

My knees were scraped, minor, no real damage. My palms the same, one with a shard of gravel embedded shallow enough to remove without incident.

My breathing was too fast, which was interesting, because there had been no physical exertion to justify it.

The fear response had arrived on its own recognizance, uninvited, the way it used to arrive in the first months after the Tuesday, before I had trained it out of the habit of speaking first.

My heart rate was elevated. I did not need a monitor to know this. I could feel it in my throat, an unfamiliar percussion, insistent in a body that had spent eight years being told, successfully, that panic was an indulgence for people with less information than I had.

There was, I noted, a second thing happening beneath the first — a smaller, quieter observation running underneath the cataloguing of scrapes and heartbeat, one I would ordinarily have filed without comment — my hands were not quite steady.

Not shaking, nothing so undignified as shaking, but unsteady in the way a surface is unsteady just before it decides which way to settle.

I flexed them once, deliberately, until they stopped being interesting.

I sat back on my heels. Looked at the sky instead of the parcel, instead of the sea wall, instead of the precise spot in the air where I had failed at something I had never once failed at.

Around me, other students had stopped to look, most were dressed in black jackets and grey trousers or skirts, holding books and bags as they returned for the last of Saturday morning’s lessons.

I stood, wiping the dirt from my jeans and straightening my leather jacket. Then I turned my gaze to a group of first-year boys who stood watching me.

They froze for a moment as my eyes fell on them, and then, without any pretence of dignity, went back to whatever they’d been doing before I landed on all fours in the dirt in front of them.

The rest of the onlookers followed their example.

I smiled to myself. Being the holder of the Institute’s free combat titles, in both team and personal categories, was certainly useful when you needed to intimidate people.

Not that I needed a title to do so. Intimidation was a skill I’d been good at since I was a child. I was fairly certain I’d taken it from my mother.

It occurred to me, standing there in the thinning crowd, that in four years at this Institute I had never once been the person other students looked away from out of embarrassment on my behalf.

Out of caution, yes. Out of the particular deference people extend to something they’ve decided not to provoke.

But not this, not the quick, polite retreat of people who had seen something go wrong and wished, for my sake as much as their own, to pretend they hadn’t.

I did not enjoy the distinction.

I pushed the discomfort of that realization to the back of my mind, and turned my thoughts back to the Layer.

It didn’t feel like home. Not anymore.

The thought arrived complete, already filed, already true in the particular way thoughts are true when you’ve been declining to have them for some time.

I had noticed the change a month ago, after the winter break. It had been barely noticeable at first. A change in quality, a resistance at the edges that I had pressed past because pressing past things was what I did, and it had always, always worked.

It had worked less well each time.

I understood that now, retroactively, the way you understand a slow leak only once the tire is flat. I had been ignoring smaller versions of this exact failure for weeks.

I took a breath, steadied myself, and pushed again, feeling reality itself splitting open around me as I pressed my body into the Layer once more.

I was prepared this time, going in with far greater strength than should have been necessary. I felt the space around me — the space that should have felt like nothing — feel like water again, and the cold of the Layer somehow felt even colder.

Still, my push was enough this time. Enough to make the Layer yield to my will, as it should, and let me finish my transit.

I stepped out into the alley in Port City that I usually used for my transits, a small dead end between two buildings that, in four years of use, I had found occupied only twice.

But the force I had used to cross was too much, and by the end of the transit the Layer felt as though it were actually pushing me away, throwing me off balance.

I was ready for it this time, steadying myself before I could fall, using a martial stance to center my weight, as though I were entering a fight instead of a spa day.

I stood there a moment longer than necessary, in the narrow strip of shade between the two buildings, waiting to see if my legs intended to hold the position without further instruction from me.

They did. Good.

That, at least, was one thing today that had gone the way it was supposed to.

Sandy Davis stood a few meters away, watching with wide blue eyes.

She had a way of standing that I had never quite managed to imitate, though I had, in an idle moment once, considered whether it could be learned.

Weight loose through the hips, arms comfortable at her sides, tall enough that she never had to work to be seen and athletic enough that she never seemed to notice she was being looked at. Blonde hair pulled back in the quick, unfussy way of someone who had somewhere better to be than in front of a mirror. Tanned in the manner of someone who had grown up outdoors rather than someone who had cultivated it.

She looked, as she always did, like she belonged wherever she happened to be standing, which was either a rare gift or the simple by-product of a life that had never once asked her to prove she belonged.

“What are you doing exactly?” she asked, in her characteristic Southern accent.

I stood and looked at her, raising an eyebrow.

“Practice,” I told her, as though everything that had happened in the last ten minutes had been my choice.

“Practice?” she asked.

“Drop it, Sandy,” I told her, in a soft but commanding tone.

Sandy stood there watching for a moment, the particular look she got when she had decided something was worth pressing and was calculating, in her own unhurried way, exactly how hard.

It was not a look I saw on her often.

Sandy’s gift was for knowing when a wound was ready to be touched, and she seemed to extend the same instinct to people as she did to injuries. It was, I had always privately thought, the harder skill of the two.

Mine was knowing exactly where to press. Hers was knowing when not to.

I took a breath, then gave her a warm smile.

Sandy was one of the two people I actually considered friends, and I hated myself instantly for being harsh with her.

She smiled back, her own smile warm and thin. “Do you want to grab a beer first?” she asked finally.

“Yes,” I told her, without thinking twice.

“And then you can tell me all about your practice, and why you, of all people, were late.”

I nodded and let her lead the way to the pub, out of the alley and onto the crooked cobbled street that ran down toward the harbor, past the shopfronts that had been rebuilt twice since the Flux and still bore the low, squat, defensive architecture of a city that had not entirely forgiven the world for what it had done to it.

Sandy talked as we walked, about a healing session that had run long that morning, about a professor who had thanked her by name in front of the whole clinical seminar, about nothing in particular, filling the space between us the way she always did when she suspected I needed the space filled and did not yet have the grace to ask for it directly.

I let her.

It was, I had come to understand over four years, one of the more generous things a person could do for me, and one of the few I had never learned to do for myself.

As we walked, I couldn’t help but think about what was wrong with my power, and why it had chosen now, of all times, to happen.

Five months before my graduation.

Six before the duel that would decide whether I returned to my family a daughter they could be proud to name their heir, or one they would need, delicately and permanently, to reconsider.

Seven before I had to stand in front of my parents and let them see which daughter had come home.

I had to find a solution, and fast. In twenty-four years, I hadn’t failed at anything, and I didn’t plan to start now.