Chapter 5 — The First of Senetis

Snow on the Klak Grove looks wrong and perfect at the same time.

The leaves are bluish-green and don't change for winter, because winter here isn't natural. The snow clouds are generated by machines deployed planet-wide on the first of Senetis, every year, since Year 57. The snow is artificial but it falls the same way — lazy, indifferent, covering everything that isn't moving.

Snow Day exists to remind everyone of Earth One. The birthplace. The planet that's gone. Forty-eight hours off, spent with whoever you've chosen to be your people. The history of why snow was the thing they chose to preserve was a long one, and understanding it mattered less than seeing the grove that morning — everyone still sleepy, the snow coming sideways through the Klak branches, and Akio running down the bedroom corridor at full volume.

"Guys! Chrys has to show you something!"

Marcus was right behind him, knocking on each door. Sam emerged with a hairbrush that she threw with considerable accuracy. Akio caught it.

"Someone could get hurt," he said. "Someone except me. Chrys says if we get everyone downstairs, we can sleep as long as we want afterward."

Sam looked at him for a moment. "Pleasure doing business with you." She turned and ran. "Rise and shine, losers!"

"The only voice you'd want waking you up," Marcus said, ducking the low beam at the staircase landing.

The lab underground was the same temperature as always regardless of the season, which was one of the things about it: the whitholium walls absorbed and regulated, and the climate systems Chrys had designed didn't respond to what the surface was doing. You could feel winter the moment you stepped off the staircase and then feel it disappear by the second step down.

"Good morning." Chrys was at the workbench, guilty grin in place. "Sorry for the hour."

He paused. He had a way of pausing before things that required patience from the listener, which they'd all learned to just give him.

"Time," he said. "What is time? What if I told you it isn't a constant, that we could live an eternity without it moving a fraction of a second in the outside world?"

He breathed in slowly. Concentrated. A small maroon dot appeared in his palms, warm, dark red, barely there at first, swelling as they watched. It placed itself on the lab floor and became something the eye couldn't quite hold, a shape that kept refusing to be one shape, its edge moving the air like a heat source moves air.

A breeze moved toward it. Then a pull.

"You have to trust me," he said. "Come in."

Before Akio could form an objection, he was already through.

The dark was the first thing, and it was not like other darks. It had depth and texture and something that was not quite temperature — a quality of the space pressing evenly against every surface of the body at once, like being submerged in something that weighed nothing. The floor was there: solid, immediate, exactly where a floor should be. But above and to all sides there was no ceiling and no wall, only the dark extending past the reach of any sense, and no sound except what they'd brought in with them, their breathing and the soft shift of feet finding footing, and the awareness that whatever the space was it was very large, or had no size at all, or had a different relationship to size than anything they'd stood in before. Sienna reached for Celestine without looking. Celestine's hand was already there. Chrys clicked something and a lamp came on, illuminating a radius of about four feet, and the dark outside that radius was absolute — not reduced, not softened, just held at the lamp's edge and no further.

"First time I came here," he said, "I didn't tell anyone. For this reason." He looked at their faces. "You can't die in here. The worst you get is a concussion. Your body's center is the moment you enter. If you leave — everyone else is returned automatically to just before you all came in. Don't stay in mid-tesseract. That's the passage between inside and outside. It's unpleasant."

"Define unpleasant," Akio said.

"I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies."

Sienna looked around at the dark. Her hand found Celestine's wrist. Celestine found her hand.

"How do you set the entry points?" Sienna asked.

"I don't. Mid-tesseract does. Everyone who passes through gets set automatically." He looked at Celly. "Go ahead."

A hand raised slowly, looking at the floor. "Can I go home. It's dark and it makes my skin shivery."

"Almost." He reached toward her. She grabbed his hand immediately, both hands, as though it were the only solid thing available, and grinned up at him.

"The second thing," he said, "is Will."

"Good day!" The voice came from every direction. "Yuck — I hope no one has claustrophobia."

The walls went outward.

They were standing in the gym. The one they'd been training in for years: familiar smell, familiar light, the floor that squeaked in the same three places, the ceiling high enough that the upper half of it lived in its own climate. The mid-tesseract had given them a space their minds knew how to hold.

"Much better," Will said, with audible relief. "You worry me, Chrys."

"I just wanted to show them how it feels." Chrys looked around the gym — his gym, in his time, in a space that wasn't moving while the world outside wasn't either. He'd spent a year of total time here. He'd learned to integrate Will into the dimension. Many days of failure before it worked. And when it worked he'd had something that was difficult to explain to anyone who hadn't been inside.

Company. Not the company of the house above — which he had, always, and which was different from being alone without being alone. This company. Will existing everywhere at once, in every dimension of the Tesseract simultaneously, which Will had described as pleasant and which Chrys had chosen to believe.

"A year," Marcus said. "You've been in here a year total."

"Connected Will three days ago."

"How did you eat?"

"I don't have to. But if I want to–" He breathed out. A small black bowl appeared in his palm, liquid, dark and still. "Particles. The dimension regenerates infinitely. I can concentrate mass into anything solid or liquid." He held it out. "No taste."

Amy took a small sip. "Nothing."

"With Will it can have taste and smell."

"Texture also," Will said. "Order anything."

Akio's eyes went to the bowl.

"Can you take objects out?" he said. "When you leave."

"First question I asked." Chrys smiled. "No. Everything created here is destroyed in mid-tesseract on exit." He crushed the bowl in his hand. It vanished. He looked around the gym. "Shall we see how the training bots have held up?"

"Wait." Something connected in his face. "The Lost Boys. After the fight. Four years ago."

Akio frowned. "The who?"

"The gang," Marcus said. No hesitation. "We fought them. They disbanded a few days after." His memory logged everything since age eight. Every face. Every sound.

"So they were in here." Chrys looked at the ceiling. "In the Tesseract." He thought about this for a moment. "Will — extraction estimate."

"One percent failure rate," Will said. "Think explosion, not implosion."

A dark dot in his palm. Growing. Compressing.

"Boom," he said quietly.

Every piece of equipment retracted. A pulse of displaced air. When it cleared, forty men stood in the room, blinking, barely upright, their faces carrying the look of people who have experienced something that has no category yet.

"Hi," Chrys said, and waved.

"SPARE US," one of them managed. "We've been in there. Even a moment was enough. We apologize. We apologize for everything." He was shaking. The words came out in the wrong order.

Most of them left. Byron paused at the door long enough to say: "I'll come back when you're weak."

"Have a nice day," Chrys said.

One stayed.

Gray shirt. Almost-black jeans, mud dried into the knees. Both ankles showing old blood. A bruise under one brow. He stood up slowly, testing his legs the way you test things you aren't sure about.

"Just Chrys," Chrys said. "Not sir."

The boy's name was Eon.

His squad had been liquidated a week before the raid. Not useful enough. He was the only one who'd made it to the fight, which meant he'd been the only one in the Tesseract, which meant he'd been alone for whatever subjective time the Tesseract had given him. He didn't say how long. He looked like someone who had spent a long time alone and had done the math on it.

"My allies are my friends," Chrys said, as they walked toward the shower cabins — klak wood, eight of them, built with Marcus, water from River Rofdon. "You didn't even get to do anything. But find whoever was responsible and ask their forgiveness anyway."

Eon was quiet for a long moment.

"Right," he said.

He meant it. Chrys could tell the difference.

Days became weeks. The House of Confidence spent more and more time in the Tesseract.

"Screwdriver, please."

"You have quite a few. Can you be more specific?"

"Right — the white one."

"There are eleven white ones."

"It's on my belt. Sorry." Chrys snapped his fingers. Amy laughed.

He picked up the screwdriver and looked at it. Looked at her sweater.

"Is it orange with white stripes?" he said. "Or white with orange stripes? Or just a sweater with white and orange stripes?"

"Where are you going with this?"

"From time to time we focus on only one color." He tapped the workbench — the one they'd moved inside because he worked better with people nearby, which was a thing about him that everyone knew and that he'd never said aloud. "Here we need to hold every viewpoint at once. There are shortcuts if you know what the cloth is. But if you don't–"

"We guess," Amy said. "Or–"

"The lab," they said together.

She laughed. He went back to the screwdriver.

Outside, snow was falling on the Klak Grove, covering everything that wasn't moving, patient and indifferent and identical to the real thing.