Raum knew this would eventually be a problem. He didn't expect it to come barely three days removed from leaving Capimus. Despite trying to walk off whatever weirdness he felt on land, the tells he was still trying to adjust hadn't left yet. The ground was exactly what it had been on the last step, and his legs were still waiting for something to happen.
He was walking too wide like he was expecting a sudden gust of wind to change the ship's course.
Vaelora was watching with interest.
"Don't," he said.
"I didn't say anything."
He looked at her once and kept going.
She fell in line beside him with the compass, holding it like someone who wanted it to agree with her about north. Raum noticed this much, but without accurate horizon lines and air currents to give him a better reading, he was just as clueless as her.
The trees slowly began to thin out as another town was beginning to form in the distance.
"What do you do when you go somewhere new?" Vaelora asked. "In the air."
"Read it."
"Read it how?"
"What's moving and what isn't." He moved around a fallen tree. "What should be there that isn't."
"And then you know what kind of place it is?"
"You know what kind of problem it might be."
She went quiet.
"What kind of problem would Capimus have been?"
"The kind where the problem is built into the floors," he said at last.
She made a sound. Not agreement. Something closer to recognition. He had named something she already understood from the inside.
A root crossed the path. Old, raised, the kind that had been there long enough to belong. His foot caught the lip of it. He shifted his weight in the same step, recovered without sound, kept moving.
Vaelora was looking at the field ahead.
She did not turn around.
The town came into view at the edge of the next clearing.
Something was wrong with it.
Not in any way that would have announced itself to someone who wasn't reading for it. The wrongness was in the surfaces. Everything looked too clean. Like everyone and everything agreed where everything should be, and how everyone should act.
A merchant at the first stall they passed was calling out prices at himself. Lower than what the sign said, but it wasn't like he was doing this as a negotiation tactic. It was like he was programmed to tell the prices regardless of who walked by or what was written on the sign.
Two men stood beside an overturned grain cart. One of them was gathering from the ground. Both of them were laughing. It was continuous. Nothing had resolved. They were still going.
On the far side of the square, a woman was giving a stranger directions. She looked like she had repeated the same directions several times by now, but she still provided it, while the stranger kept nodding after each direction given.
"Oh, this is nice," Vaelora said. She had already drifted to a flower stall and was talking to the woman there. The woman was explaining something about them in great detail and acted like it was the best thing happening to her today.
Vaelora collected a flower and appeared at Raum's shoulder. "Everyone's very friendly."
"They are," he said.
"You don't agree."
"I do."
He was watching the merchant from before, continuing to tell the prices in the same tone, every time.
"How rare is a Pulse here?" Vaelora asked. "On land."
"Having one puts you above most rooms."
"That's not what I asked."
"You don't survive in the air without one."
Vaelora had read it as something specific to Raum — his bearing, whatever it was that made Lonz sit up straight. She was revising that now. The ceiling on land was the floor in the air. Every working crew member. Baseline.
"What does that mean on land?"
"Here it means you're the most dangerous thing most of those people have ever heard of." He looked at her. "In the air it means you're just qualified."
She looked at the square. At the smooth surface of it. At the merchant, the grain cart, the woman still mid-directions.
"Do they know that something is wrong here?"
"No."
"Do you know what it is?"
Raum shrugged his shoulders.
Vaelora moved toward the far end of the square the way she always moved when something had gotten her attention before she knew it had.
He turned his attention to the air.
Something had been in it since the gate. Not a smell — something dispersed, sourceless. Not attached to anything or anyone.
He found her at the far edge of the square.
She was standing still, facing the wall. Her hair was the right color. Her eyes were open and blinking normally. Every visible thing about her was correct.
He stepped in front of her.
Something else looked back at him through her eyes.
"Hey." Flat. Like you were testing a transmitter if your voice was going through.
"Hello." Her voice said again. The effect was not hers. It was Vaelora's voice reading from instructions written by someone who'd never spoken to her.
"Let me see that compass," Raum ordered.
"We should stay a little longer." She said through a closed smile. "It's a friendly town."
He looked at the space between them.
The same thing that had been in the air since the gate. He could feel it now — floating, sourceless, doing its work the same way the merchant's prices were doing theirs, the same way the grain man's laughter was still going.
He moved toward the doorway across the square.
Vaelora was in front of him before he got there.
This was nothing like the gate.
He had watched her decision form and emerge on the other side as heat and wings and three thousand degrees of something older than any name for it. This was the same fire that had been ignited elsewhere. The same semi-transparent skin, with violet tattoos burning through from beneath. The same compressed wings, compressed light, and heat rippling outward from every surface of her.
Nothing lived behind her eyes.
He stopped.
Charging straight through meant enduring a wall of heat that carried a specific and immediate cost. Going around was possible for a short time, but she was fast, and the square's geometry made speed expensive. He needed to find the source that was causing this to happen to her.
The song had left the singer's mouth and immediately belonged to no one. That was its nature. Dispersed, unclaimed, released into the open air. It moved about its work without a hand to guide it, floating between the walls of the square.
He extended his hand toward the air between them.
It was a small gesture with no performance in it. One motion, and the thing that had been moving through the square, unsupported, unclaimed, doing what unclaimed things do, was gone.
The silence arrived all at once.
Vaelora folded, collapsing onto her knees.
He crossed the distance and caught her before she hit the stone. She was warm with her own normal warmth, the phoenix heat settling back to baseline. He lowered her gently and stepped back.
The scorch ring where she had stood measured about six feet across. The stone inside it was obsidian black. A crack ran from the center of the ring to the far wall. A few embers at the edge flickered out one by one.
Raum looked at her.
Her eyes slowly opened, first looking at the sky, then the city square, then the scorched ground around her.
Finally she looked up towards Raum. "Did I fall asleep?" She yawned like she had just woken up.
He looked at the embers. The crack. The scorched stone. "Do you do that in your sleep?"
She looked down. "Sometimes."
The square returned to itself behind them. The woman cut her directions short and the stranger walked away before she could find the next detail. The grain men looked at each other and one of them finally said something sharp. The merchant stared at his sign for a long time.
Somewhere to their left, an argument that had been waiting resumed.
Raum and Vaelora kept walking.