The Sky Beneath Our Feet

The underside of Caelora smelled like iron and old rain.

Mira pressed her back against a silicate root as thick as her torso, letting the wind-shear pass. It screamed through the root-lattice in a high, thin note, almost like something alive. Sixty meters below her boots, there was nothing. Just violet haze and the slow churn of stratospheric cloud, and somewhere deeper, the permanent dark where the lower atmosphere became its own kind of ocean.

She breathed through her nose. Counted to three. Moved.

The Root-Paths were what the scavengers called this place, though they weren't paths in any honest sense of the word. They were the exposed underbelly of Lumen's sky-islands, a tangled architecture of calcified vines and mineral stalactites that the original terraformers had grown to anchor the islands' cores against gravity fluctuation. In dry cycles they were stable enough, crystallized into near-stone. But in storm-cycle, when the tides of Selu dragged the gravity field sideways and the islands groaned against their own weight, the roots sweated mineral water and flexed, and the whole lattice became a thing that breathed. That shifted. That occasionally let go.

Mira had been climbing them since she was eleven.

She found her next hold by feel, not sight. The root here was thinner, branching off from the main trunk in a Y that she'd used before, mapped in her body as a memorized gesture. Left hand on the fork's inner crook. Right boot toe on the node two fingers to the right of the moisture seep. Pull, don't push. She'd learned that lesson with blood when she was thirteen.

Above her, or technically below her from Caelora's perspective, the gold crystal pulsed.

She'd spotted it from her scanning perch twenty minutes ago, caught in a gravity eddy near the island's drainage cluster. Most crystals shed during storm-cycle were grey or pale blue, spent things knocked loose from the memory-spires by the wind. Easy to sell, barely worth the climb. But gold was rare. Gold meant recent, full, emotionally dense. Gold meant good money, which meant stabilizer medication for Jem, which meant she was going to get it regardless of what the storm was doing.

The eddy was the problem.

Gravity eddies formed when the main field buckled around a structural mass, and they spun loose objects in tight circles, which was actually useful for keeping the crystal from falling into the abyss. But they also made the surrounding handholds treacherous, applying random micro-tugs to her grip that felt like a hand plucking at her fingers. Twice she'd lost crystals to eddies. Once she'd nearly lost herself.

She moved down and sideways, traversing along a horizontal root that swayed gently despite its calcified surface. The storm hadn't fully ended. She could feel it in the dampness of everything, in the way the wind came in pulses rather than steadily, each one a little angrier than the last.

The gold light flickered at the edge of her vision. Thirty meters. Twenty-five.

The root under her left hand cracked.

Not broke. Cracked. A sound like a knuckle popping, and then a fine fissure appeared in the mineral crust, a hairline dark seam that ran from beneath her palm toward the junction with the main trunk. Mira went absolutely still. Old scavenger wisdom: when something breaks, you have three seconds to know if it will hold. She counted them in her head, eyes fixed on the fissure, feeling through her palm for any give.

One. Two. Three.

The crack didn't widen. The root held.

She let out a slow breath and shifted her weight off that hand, reaching instead for a lower branch of the lattice, a stubby silicate spike she hadn't planned to use but was there. It was rough under her fingers, sharper than the main roots, and it bit into her gloves in a way that felt reliable. She adjusted her whole position around it, hanging at an angle now, one boot pressed flat against the main root's underside for friction, the other dangling free.

From this angle she could see the eddy clearly.

It was a small one, maybe two meters across, a lazy spiral that spun the gold crystal in a slow oval. The crystal was about the size of her fist, maybe slightly larger, and it caught the violet light filtering down from above and threw it back in warm pulses. Gold wasn't quite the right color for it. More like the light inside a flame, amber shading toward something brighter at the core. It spun in the eddy with an unhurried quality that seemed almost deliberate, like it was waiting.

Mira had never let herself think of crystals as anything but cargo. That way lay the trouble her mother had gotten into, her mother who'd started listening to the memories, who'd started dreaming in other people's grief. Mira didn't listen. She carried. There was a difference.

She unclipped the harvesting net from her belt. It was a simple thing, woven from conductive filament that dampened the crystal's resonance on contact, keeping it from bleeding signal during transport. She'd made it herself from materials she'd traded for over three months. It was her most valuable tool after her hands.

Fourteen meters to the eddy. She needed to get close enough to throw.

The traverse took seven more minutes. She moved carefully, testing each hold, keeping her weight low and centered. The wind came in two more pulses during that time, each one trying to peel her off the lattice. She tucked herself flat against a root cluster during the worst of it, face pressed to cold silicate that smelled of mineral water and, faintly, of something electrical. The smell the air got before a cascade recall, sometimes. She noted that and filed it away.

When the wind dropped, she moved again.

She found a stable position on a junction node, a place where three major roots met in a fused mass the size of a small table. She could stand on it with both feet, which was luxury on the Root-Paths. She braced her knees against the curve of the highest root, leaned out, checked her distance. Ten meters. Close enough, maybe. Not ideal.

The eddy was directly below her position relative to the island, spinning its slow circle. She watched the crystal's oval path, timing it. It passed the near end of its orbit every four seconds. She needed to cast on the near pass, intercept it at the apex.

She coiled the net in her right hand, holding the tether in her left.

Four seconds. She counted by watching the crystal's pulse instead of in her head. Each pulse was the count. She picked one pulse as her mark.

When it came, she threw.

The net opened beautifully in the air, spreading wide, the conductive filament glittering briefly before it hit the eddy's edge. The eddy pushed back, harder than she'd expected, and the net deflected, catching only the outer rim of the crystal's orbit. The crystal bumped the net's edge and spun faster.

Mira yanked the tether before the net could drift further in. She pulled it back, recoiled, watching the crystal settle back into its path. Her jaw ached. She hadn't realized she'd been clenching it.

Second attempt.

She adjusted her aim, calculating for the eddy's push. Threw slightly inside the orbit this time, letting the deflection do the work. The net opened, drifted, and the crystal sailed right into its center.

She pulled the tether hard and fast, closing the net around it.

For a moment, the eddy fought. She felt it in her wrists, a genuine tug, the gravity field trying to keep what it had. The tether went taut and her left hand screamed with the strain of holding her position and absorbing the pull simultaneously. She wrapped the tether around the junction node, buying herself enough friction to use both hands.

Then the eddy released. The crystal dropped into the net with the weight of a large stone, and Mira nearly fell backward from the sudden lack of resistance.

She caught herself against the root cluster, heart loud in her chest.

The net hung from the node on its tether, swinging gently, and inside it the crystal pulsed its warm amber-gold light in slow, even beats.

Mira pulled it up hand over hand and held it in her palm through the conductive mesh. Even through the dampening filament, she could feel that it was warm. Not temperature-warm, or not only that. Something else. A quality she didn't have a word for that she felt in the center of her palm rather than at the skin's surface. A pressure that wasn't pressure. Like holding something that was paying attention.

She had held hundreds of crystals. Grey ones that felt like cold buttons, blue ones that hummed faintly, the occasional red that buzzed against her nerves like a warning. She had never felt one that felt like this.

She wrapped the net tight, secured the bundle at her belt, and began the long climb back to Caelora's edge.

The wind was picking up again.

The wind died between one breath and the next.

That was the first wrong thing.

Storm-cycle winds didn't die. They dropped, eased, shifted direction, but they kept moving because the stratospheric currents that fed them never stopped. Mira had climbed the Root-Paths in a hundred storms and she knew the grammar of wind the way she knew her own name. This sudden, absolute silence was not part of that grammar.

She stopped climbing. Her hands found a horizontal root and gripped it, and she hung there, listening.

Nothing. The lattice didn't creak. The silicate vines didn't flex. Even the gold crystal at her belt had dimmed its pulsing, as if it too were holding its breath.

Then the smell hit her.

Not the mineral-water smell of the roots, not the electrical sharpness she'd noted earlier. This was something older. Wet wool and candle smoke and something underneath that, almost sweet. Not burnt sugar, not quite. The memory of sweetness, maybe. The shadow of it.

Mira's stomach dropped before her mind caught up.

Memory-squall.

She'd only been caught in one before, at fourteen, and she'd come out the other side shaking so hard she couldn't unbuckle her harness. The scavengers who'd found her had thought she was having a seizure. She hadn't corrected them, hadn't explained that she'd stood inside the projected grief of forty strangers and felt every thread of it without being pulled under, which was somehow worse than being pulled under, because she'd had to stay present for all of it while pretending to drown.

A memory-squall was what happened when too many crystals shattered in proximity. The storm-cycle knocked crystals loose from the spires above, and most of them fell through the Root-Paths and into the abyss without breaking. But sometimes a cascade started, crystal striking crystal on the way down, and the resonance built, and the echoes didn't dissipate into the open air the way they were supposed to. They pooled. The Root-Paths were a basin for it, a tangle of mineral structures that caught and amplified the signal the same way a cave caught sound.

She needed to move. Down was the abyss. Up was home and thirty meters of exposed lattice between here and the island's edge, every handhold requiring her full attention, and she could not give it full attention if the squall hit while she was climbing.

She looked for a pocket, anywhere dense enough to shelter in, and found one six meters to her left: a mass of fused roots, a place where four major trunks had grown into each other and calcified solid, leaving a hollow on the lee side roughly the dimensions of a large wardrobe. She'd sheltered there during wind surges before. The shape of it might deflect at least some of the resonance.

She moved fast, not carefully, and her haste cost her two bad holds and a scraped knee that she didn't feel until later. She pressed herself into the hollow, back against solid calcified root, and pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.

The squall arrived like weather. Like pressure change.

It came as sound first: a low chord that wasn't exactly audible so much as felt in the back teeth and the sternum, a vibration that made her jaw want to unclench and her eyes want to close. She kept her jaw tight and her eyes open. She pressed her thumbnail into her palm hard, using the point of real pain as an anchor.

Then the images.

Not images she saw, exactly. More like the space in front of her eyes became unreliable. The grey-brown texture of the calcified root directly across from her nose remained there, solid, but behind it, superimposed on it the way a reflection sits on a window, other things began to appear.

A kitchen with a yellow ceiling. The kind of yellow you only saw in old photographs, before the terraforming had shifted the light spectrum. A woman standing at a counter with her back turned, and the smell of something cooking, real and specific, oil and onion and a herb Mira couldn't name because she'd never had the money for herbs. The woman's shoulders were tight. She was trying not to cry, and the effort of that was its own presence in the hollow, pressing against Mira's ribs.

Mira pressed her thumbnail harder into her palm.

The kitchen folded away, replaced by something faster: a boy running. A dirt path between structures that might have been lower-Caelora tenements, the kind that clung to the island's edge before the gravity barriers were installed. The boy was running hard, looking back, laughing, and the feeling attached to the running was pure uncomplicated joy, and that was almost worse than the woman at the counter because joy was the hardest to hold at arm's length.

Mira knew what was happening to her, or what should have been happening. The crystals raining down somewhere above her were breaking, and their echoes were washing through the Root-Paths, and a normal person caught in a memory-squall would be drowning. They would be inside the kitchen, they would be running beside the boy, they would lose the thread of their own timeline in the tangle of borrowed ones. People had died in squalls, mostly the very old or very young, whose grip on their own identity was already loose. They'd been found afterward with their eyes open and nothing behind them.

Mira did not drown. She never drowned. She stood waist-deep in other people's grief and joy and terror and felt it all perfectly clearly, felt the shape and temperature of each one, and remained herself. She didn't know why. She'd assumed for years that she was simply cold, simply broken in some useful way, until the first time she'd held a crystal in bare hands and felt it recognize her, and realized it was almost the opposite of cold. She was too present. Too open. She took everything in and somehow it flowed through her and did not stick.

She had never told anyone that.

A new wave hit, harder. Three memories at once, layered.

Someone falling. Not from a great height, but from standing, the specific collapse of a person whose legs have decided before their mind has. The gritty scrape of pavement, and the particular shame of falling in public, the wish to be swallowed before anyone looks.

Beneath that: hands. Older hands, spotted with age, holding something small and blue. A blue memory crystal, faded to near-white. The hands were shaking slightly, and the feeling attached to them was goodbye, and loss so familiar it had worn itself smooth, like a river stone, and had become almost comfortable, almost companionable. A grief that had been carried so long it had become part of the body.

And beneath even that, pushed low as if someone had tried to bury it: fire. Not flame but firelight, warm and moving, and a voice reading aloud from something, and the absolute safety of being very small in a world that is, in that moment, not dangerous at all. Someone's earliest memory, maybe. Someone's only safe place.

Mira's eyes stung.

She did not let them close. She kept her thumbnail in her palm and her back against the root and she breathed through her mouth because the smells were still cycling: the wet wool and candle smoke now mixed with frying onion and the cold air of a night that wasn't this night, and something else coming, she could feel it building in the pressure behind her eyes.

Something large was falling.

Not a crystal. Or not only a crystal. Something with too much stored in it, too much emotional density, the kind of overloaded shard that accumulated near the memory-spires during long periods of high use. The squall was building around it, feeding on its resonance. She could tell because the separate memories stopped cycling and began to merge, the way streams merged before a river, all those individual textures blurring together into a single enormous pressure that pushed against the inside of her skull.

She made a sound she was not proud of. Low and involuntary, pressed out of her the way air was pressed from a compression seal.

The hollow wasn't enough. The shape of the fused roots deflected some of it, but the merged pressure didn't care about physical direction, it spread through the mineral structure the same way sound spread through bone. She could feel it in the roots against her back. A vibration that made her vision pulse.

She did something she'd never done deliberately before.

She pushed.

Not with her hands. With whatever part of her it was that received the resonance, she turned it outward instead of inward, opened it like a door swung the wrong way, and the merged pressure hit that reversed surface and scattered. Not cleanly. Not all of it. But enough that the inside of her skull stopped feeling like it was about to split along a seam.

The scattered fragments bounced around the hollow for a moment, reduced now to fragments of fragments: half a word in a voice she didn't recognize, the color orange without context, the texture of grass under bare feet. Then they dispersed.

The squall kept going above her, she could hear it now that her head had cleared, a distant roaring that was not weather but was made of weather's building blocks, a sound that had no single source because it had a thousand sources simultaneously. But the hollow held. The scattered pressure didn't rebuild.

Mira unclenched her jaw.

She sat in the hollow with her back against the calcified root and her arms still around her knees, and she waited for her hands to stop shaking. They did, eventually. Her thumbnail had left a red half-moon in her palm, and she pressed her finger to it and felt the clean, honest sting of it and was grateful for it.

The gold crystal at her belt was still warm. She could feel it even through the conductive mesh, through the harvesting net and the leather of her belt pouch. That quality she didn't have a word for, the pressure-that-wasn't-pressure. It hadn't changed during the squall. Hadn't merged with the other resonances, hadn't been pulled into the current that had swept through everything else.

She thought about that.

A crystal that kept its own signal coherent in the middle of a memory-squall should not exist. Resonance was contagious; that was the whole principle of cascade recall. Crystals in proximity bled into each other, picked up harmonics, accumulated noise. A shard that simply stayed itself, clean and separate and warm, in the middle of all that chaos, was not a thing she had a category for.

She didn't know what to do with that yet, so she set it aside the way she set aside most things she didn't have time for and would need to return to later.

The squall's roaring began to fade, the way storms faded, gradually and then abruptly. The pressure against her sinuses eased. The smell shifted back to mineral water and cold stratospheric air, the regular smell of the Root-Paths, and she breathed it in deliberately and let it clear the borrowed sensations from her throat.

She was going to have a headache by the time she reached home. She could already feel the beginning of it, a tightness behind her right eye that she knew from experience would take three hours and two cups of water to resolve. Water was expensive.

She unfolded herself from the hollow, testing her limbs before she committed her weight to them. Her legs were solid. Her hands were steady enough. The scraped knee she'd given herself in her rush to find shelter had stiffened slightly, but it flexed, and it would hold.

The lattice above her was quiet. No more crystals falling. Whatever mass had broken in the squall had finished breaking, and the abyss had taken what it always took.

She began the climb back up toward Caelora's edge.

It was slow going. Her arms burned from the earlier traverse and from however long she'd spent braced in the hollow, and her hands kept wanting to shake when she asked them to grip. She made herself grip anyway, testing each hold twice before weighting it, using the slowness as its own kind of discipline. The Root-Paths required a particular relationship with your own body, an ongoing negotiation between what you wanted to do and what your muscles could actually perform, and right now her muscles were in the middle of lodging several formal complaints.

She reached the last major junction, the one with the split root she used as a step, and hauled herself up onto the underside platform where she'd left her pack. Her pack was still there, chocked into a crevice she'd wedged it into on the way down. She slung it over one shoulder, clipped her harvesting tools to their respective loops, and looked out at the sky.

The violet haze was settling after the squall, the stratospheric clouds below reorganizing themselves into their usual slow patterns. The bioluminescent blooms that clung to Caelora's underside, dormant during the worst of the storm, were beginning to extend again, their pale threads reaching down into the open air. In an hour they'd be fully extended, glowing faint rose-gold in the tide-wind. She wouldn't be here to see it.

She turned toward the access channel that would take her back up through the island's skin, into the lower warrens of Caelora.

Jem would be awake by now, or he should be. She'd left him with two hours of water and the clear instruction to stay in their bunk and not touch anything in the crate under the left shelf, which was the crate that currently held six grey crystals waiting for sale and which he would absolutely touch if she wasn't there to prevent it.

She was so tired her vision was slightly soft at the edges, the way it got when she'd spent too long in resonance territory. Like the world needed a moment to fully render. She knew it would pass. It always passed.

The gold crystal pulsed against her hip, warm and steady, and she pressed her hand to it through the pouch without thinking about why she did it, and then pulled her hand away and climbed.

The access channel smelled like rust and old water, the way it always did, but tonight Mira barely registered it. Her boots found the ladder rungs by memory alone. Twenty-two rungs to the first platform, six more to the low corridor that opened into the Tanglewalk, then left at the cracked blue marker, then three lefts and a right through the compressed-stone passage that half the residents of this quarter didn't know existed, and then home.

She'd done it a thousand times. Her body could do it without her.

What wasn't doing itself was the thing in her chest, the low-frequency worry she'd carried for four hours of climbing and one memory-squall, the thing she hadn't allowed herself to pay attention to while she'd needed her hands and her head for the work. She paid attention to it now, moving through the Tanglewalk with her pack slung and her hands shoved in her jacket pockets, and it felt like pressing a bruise. Familiar. Not good.

Jem had been worse for three weeks.

She'd been telling herself it was cyclical, because the bleeds did cycle, had always cycled since the year the illegal rig had touched his six-year-old skull before she'd known what it was, before she'd been old enough or fast enough to stop it. The man who'd done it was gone now, gone to the abyss or gone to the Holloway hollows, she didn't know and had stopped thinking about, because thinking about him used up energy she needed for other things. Like finding stabilizers. Like keeping the grey crystals moving. Like watching Jem sleep and counting his breaths.

The bleed-cycles had been getting shorter. She'd been telling herself that, too, was temporary.

The gold crystal sat in its pouch at her hip and said nothing. Just warm.

She turned the third left into the compressed-stone passage, ducked automatically at the low ceiling joint, and then stopped.

Light under the door.

Not the low amber light of the single lamp she always left burning for him. Brighter than that. Whiter. The kind of light that happened when a crystal broke.

She was through the door before the thought finished.

The hovel was a single room about four meters square, lower-Caelora construction, which meant the walls were raw stone parged over with a grayish sealant that had stopped being white sometime in the last decade. There was a two-shelf unit against one wall with the crate wedged under it, a cooking surface she used twice a day, their two bunks folded against the opposite wall with Jem's lowered and her own still raised. A small table. Two stools.

Jem was on the floor.

Not the bunk. The floor. He'd fallen or rolled from it, she couldn't tell, and he'd taken his blanket with him, which was twisted around his left arm and leg, and he was convulsing. Not violently. Not the grand, obvious kind she'd seen once in the Tanglewalk when a man walked into a cascade zone unprotected. This was smaller and more terrible: a fine trembling that went through his whole body like a string being bowed, continuous, relentless, his back slightly arched and his jaw clenched and his eyes half-open and showing too much white.

And the light was coming from him.

From his skin, or from what was happening just under his skin, from whatever the bleed was doing, because when it was bad like this, when it had gotten past the point where she could calm him with the lullaby or with her hand steady on his chest, sometimes his skin went luminescent. She'd thought it was her imagination, the first time. She'd thought it was the residue of the broken crystal he'd gotten into, reflecting ambient light. She'd tested the theory against three subsequent bad episodes and the theory had not held. The light was his. The light was wrong.

She dropped to her knees beside him.

"Jem." She put both hands on his face, framing it, the way that sometimes helped. "Jem. I'm here."

He didn't respond to his name. He almost never did, during. But she kept talking anyway because the sound of her voice was something he'd told her once, one of the rare, clear moments he had between episodes, that he could hear even when everything else was noise. You sound like an anchor, he'd said. She didn't know what that meant to him. She'd chosen to believe it was good.

"I'm here. I've got you. It's Mira. You're on the floor and I'm going to help you up in a minute, I just need you to stay with me. Keep breathing. You're breathing fine."

He was. She checked: chest rising, jaw clenched but not locked, no signs of aspiration. His color was off, too pale under the luminescence, with a grayish cast around his mouth that frightened her and which she didn't allow herself to look at for more than a second at a time.

Jem was eleven. He'd been eleven for six weeks. She'd made him a small cake with dried fruit for his birthday, trading three grey crystals for the ingredients, and he'd eaten it sitting cross-legged on his bunk with his feet tucked under him and told her it was the best thing he'd ever tasted and then corrected himself: the best thing he could currently remember, which was the qualification he always used now, with the solemn awareness of a child who had understood too early that his memory was not a reliable record.

The trembling wasn't stopping.

She pressed her palm flat to his sternum. His heartbeat was fast, too fast, but regular. She pushed down with firm, steady pressure, not to restrain but to give him something real to orient to. Sensation. Here. Now.

"Come on," she said quietly. "Come back. I found something good today. I'll tell you about it when you can hear me."

Nothing. The light in his skin pulsed, slow and irregular, and she watched it travel up through the tissue of his forearm in a wave, the way bioluminescence traveled through the bloom-threads below Caelora's underside, and her stomach did something she did not name.

She reached into her pack. Under the coiled line and the harvesting tools and the folded emergency patch, she kept a small case, dented metal with a latch she'd replaced twice. Inside it were three things: a thumbnail-sized white crystal she'd bought from a medic in the upper-Caelora market eight months ago and had been rationing ever since, a strip of contact-bond wrap, and a folded page of handwritten instructions she no longer needed to read.

She took out the white crystal.

It was small and cool against her fingertips, cooler than it should have been, which meant it was nearly spent. She'd known this was coming. She'd been trying to get the money for a replacement for three weeks and had been eight credits short for three weeks and was still eight credits short, and the gold crystal in her pouch was the first thing she'd found in two months that might change that.

She pressed the white crystal into Jem's right hand, curling his fingers around it, and held them there.

White crystals, medical-grade, the ones used in legitimate memory-stability treatments, were calibrated to suppress resonance bleed. They were the pharmaceutical equivalent of noise-canceling, tuned to absorb excess emotional frequency from a suffering nervous system and hold it long enough for the body to quiet itself. They cost what they cost because producing them required controlled extraction under clinical conditions, and accessing clinical conditions cost what they cost, and she was eight credits short.

She held his hand closed around it and waited.

Thirty seconds. A minute.

The trembling didn't stop. The light in his skin didn't change.

"Come on," she said, and the words came out differently this time, with something behind them she hadn't meant to let out. She swallowed it down and tried again, leveler. "Come on, Jem."

Usually the white crystal worked in under a minute. Had always worked in under a minute, even when it was faint, even when she'd been sure it was too spent to do anything. It worked because it gave his nervous system somewhere to put the excess signal, the shards of other people's lives that his brain had been absorbing and couldn't process and couldn't discharge, the accumulated noise of a childhood that had started too early and too close to tech it hadn't been built to handle.

The crystal was cool in his palm. Inert. Too spent.

Her hands were steady. She made them be steady. She kept his fingers curled and her palm over his and she breathed in and out and thought, very clearly, no, and then, very clearly, what next.

The white crystal was done. She needed a replacement. She needed the money for a replacement. The money for a replacement was in the gold crystal in her pouch, if she could get it to market before morning, but she could not go to market while Jem was seizing on the floor.

She could try the lullaby. She always tried the lullaby eventually, but usually after the crystal had done its initial work, using it to hold the ground the crystal had already won. Using it first, without the crystal having quieted the baseline bleed, was like trying to patch a hull breach with cloth.

She sang it anyway. Low and without melody, which was how Jem had first heard it, because she had no singing voice and had always known it, but she'd been singing it to him since she was twelve and he was four and she'd learned quickly that he didn't care about the melody. He cared about the rhythm. The specific, repeated rhythm of it, which never changed, because change was the thing his brain liked least.

The words were simple. She'd invented them herself, assembling them from scraps of old songs she'd heard from the older scavengers and from traders in the Tanglewalk market, matching rhythm to his breathing so that they would always fit him regardless of his state. She sang them now, pressing her palm to his sternum, feeling his too-fast heart under her hand.

The light in his skin pulsed.

The trembling continued.

She sang through two full cycles and watched his face and waited, and nothing shifted, and she reached the end of her prepared responses. Her chest was very still, the way it got when she was in the worst kind of trouble, the kind where panic was a luxury she couldn't spend anything on. She looked at his face, at the grey around his mouth, at his eyes showing white, and she thought: stabilizer. She needed a stabilizer and she needed it tonight and the gold crystal might or might not cover it and she didn't know how much time she had.

Her hand was still on his. His fingers loose now around the spent crystal.

Almost without thinking, she reached with her other hand and pulled the gold crystal from its pouch.

It was warm before she'd fully closed her fingers around it. That pressure-that-wasn't-pressure, distinct and steady, the same warmth it had carried since she'd pulled it from the gravity eddy four hours ago. She held it in her left hand and kept her right pressed over Jem's sternum and looked at it.

In the white-lit room it looked less gold than it had in the Root-Paths. More internal. The color seemed to be happening below the surface, behind the facets rather than on them. Like something lit from memory rather than from light.

She had resonated with it once already, deliberately, when she'd first picked it up from the eddy. She'd reached into it the way she always reached into crystals, the flat careful opening she'd taught herself to perform without showing it on her face, and she'd found the girl and the laughter and the clean fact of joy without any of the sensory hook that would have pulled a normal person into the experience. She'd sealed it back up immediately, replaced the resonance with the clinical assessment habit that kept her safe: content, emotional valence, storage quality. Done.

She hadn't fully examined it since. She'd been busy climbing and surviving and not thinking about the thing she'd noticed at the edges when she'd pulled out of the resonance: the sense that the crystal was aware of being examined. Aware wasn't the right word. She didn't have the right word. It was more that the resonance had a shape that seemed oriented, like a signal aimed at something rather than simply radiating outward.

She looked at Jem. At the light moving in slow waves under the grey-cast skin of his arm.

She put the gold crystal in his hand.

She wasn't sure why. She wasn't sure what she expected. She'd never used a found crystal for medical purposes, never used anything except the medical-grade white ones, because the resonance in found crystals was uncontrolled and unpredictable and putting an uncontrolled signal into a nervous system that was already spilling signals in every direction was not something she could defend logically.

She held his fingers closed around it the same way she'd held them around the white crystal, and she kept her other palm on his sternum, and she waited.

The warmth passed through his skin into her fingers almost immediately. She felt it travel up her hand, the way warmth traveled from a mug, but different because it wasn't temperature exactly, it was the resonance she'd been feeling all afternoon, the pressure and the steadiness of it, and now it was flowing between the crystal and Jem's palm and she was the bridge.

She stayed very still. Stayed herself. Stayed present, which was the thing she was good at, the thing that kept her from drowning.

The light in Jem's skin did something she had never seen it do.

It changed color. Slow, barely perceptible, the way dawn changed the color of the stratospheric clouds. The cold, uneven white of the bleed-light began to warm. Just at the edges, just in the tissue closest to where his hand held the crystal, a faint gold began to replace it, moving in small increments outward, the way warmth spreads through cold metal.

The trembling slowed.

Not immediately. Not all at once. But it slowed, like a string given room to settle after being bowed too hard for too long, the vibration losing urgency, losing compulsion, finding some quieter frequency.

Mira's throat tightened.

She pressed her thumb into the red half-moon in her palm, the one she'd given herself in the squall, and used the sting of it to keep herself steady while she watched her brother's convulsion ease toward stillness.

His jaw unclenched. Slightly. Just enough that she could see his lower lip relax from the lock of it.

"Jem," she said softly.

He breathed. In, out. The gold spreading up his forearm now, slower than his pulse, warmer than the medical crystals had ever made him look.

"I'm here," she said.

His eyes moved. Still showing too much white, still not fully tracking, but moved, toward the sound of her voice, the way a plant moved toward the direction of light. Not consciously. Just orienting.

She looked at the crystal in his hand.

The warmth hadn't changed. It was still exactly what it had been in the Root-Paths eddy, still that clean steady specific warmth that had stayed itself in a memory-squall, that had kept its own signal coherent while everything around it dissolved into chaos.

She thought about what that meant. Tried not to think about it too hard, the way you tried not to look directly at something you weren't sure was real, in case looking directly made it stop. She let the thought sit at the edge of her attention, where she could feel its shape without demanding it resolve.

A crystal she had never seen before. That warmed in her hand. That stayed coherent in a squall. That was now quieting a bleed in her brother's nervous system in a way a spent medical-grade stabilizer had failed to do.

That she had pulled from a gravity eddy on the underside of Caelora on the night after a storm.

Jem's eyes closed. Not seizure-closed. Sleep-closed.

His breathing settled into something almost even. The trembling was gone. His skin held its warmth, the pale gold of it still glowing faintly but no longer pulsing irregularly, no longer sending those cold waves up his forearm that she hadn't been able to name and had refused to think directly about.

She stayed where she was, on her knees on the cold stone floor, her hand over his heart, the gold crystal warming both their hands from between his fingers.

She was very tired.

She thought about moving him back to his bunk, but the effort of that seemed enormous and she didn't want to break the contact between his hand and the crystal while he was still in this first shallow sleep, didn't know what would happen if she did. She thought about getting her blanket from her folded bunk and covering him, and that she could do, so she did it: eased herself carefully to her feet, moved the three steps to the bunk shelf, retrieved the blanket, brought it back and tucked it around him without disturbing his hands.

Then she sat on the floor beside him with her back against the bunk frame, her knees drawn up, because this was apparently the position she used when she didn't know what else to do.

She looked at the gold crystal and thought about all the things she didn't know.

She didn't know where it had come from. Not in the sense of which spire had shed it; she could trace that by resonance signature if she had the equipment, and she didn't. She didn't know whose memory it held, only that it held a girl's laughter and something she hadn't let herself look at too closely, some quality of the space around the girl's joy that felt oriented, aimed, like a letter rather than a photograph.

She didn't know why it hadn't merged with the squall.

She didn't know why it was quieting Jem when the medical crystal hadn't.

She knew it was different from anything she had found in three years of climbing, and she knew that different things in Lumen tended to belong to people who wanted them badly enough to do something about it, and she knew that she needed money for a real stabilizer before the next episode, and the obvious solution was to sell the crystal, and she was sitting on the floor next to her sleeping brother and not moving toward the door.

Because the way it had changed the light in his skin. Because the way the trembling had left him like something lifted rather than suppressed. Because the warm fact of it between his fingers, steady and specific and coherent, like it knew what it was doing and had simply been waiting for the right hand to put it in.

She pressed the back of her head against the bunk frame and closed her eyes.

The headache had arrived, the one she'd predicted on the climb up, pressing behind her right eye with the patience of something that had reserved the appointment in advance. She was hungry. She was tired in the deep way, the kind that sleep alone didn't fix.

Jem breathed beside her in the quiet room.

She put her hand over his, over the crystal warm between his fingers, and did not think about what it meant. Let the thought sit at the edge. Let it be tomorrow's problem.

But she kept her hand there.