Ishril 25, 4633 AIA

Midnight Hour

I blink a few times, but the moth remains. It can't be there. Wings flutter. Impossible—the moth is bone, somehow shimmering in the gloom over my head. 

Sometimes migraines trigger visual disturbances, I tell myself. I hear the words in Naraik's voice. Reassuring, cool. The moth pays no heed, flutters its bone wings again.

A low thud from somewhere outside, a pulse that runs through the ground, the low bed frame with its water dragon engravings, into my spine. I glance at Ajaë, a soft heap beside me, but he doesn't stir. The aftershocks tap at my skeleton. The moth's body shimmers in time.

Must be just the Gap again. A busy night.

Above my head, the Bone Moth's wings flicker, as delicate as the kata particles in the air. Another thrum through my own bones, and I push myself up onto my elbows. A risky move, says Naraik's voice again. A gentle signal to be cautious.

But the moth, fragile as it is, raises its body on its filigree legs and dances into the air. It hovers, each shudder through the bedroom sending ricochets of grey light through its being. 

Ajaë still doesn't stir. I should wake xem before I do anything else, but I can't drag my attention off the moth. It bounces, carried by air currents only it can feel, a drunken flight over my head.

I follow.

I have to know. This isn't a visual disturbance. The moth calls to my bones and I stumble out of bed, slide my feet onto the soft mat of the floor.

Amin Duum is hot even in the middle of the night. The dry warmth folds around me as I hoist myself up and breathe, shivering on weak muscles, loose joints, uneven metatarsals spreading under my body's weight. The moth has reached the corridor, pulling my attention along with it.

My feet pat across stone at the edge of the mat and the moth bounces off the air, inches from my face. I smell dust, earth, and fire.

I have to follow the moth. Something terrible is coming. I need to stop it. A whispering thought crawls up the back of my spine and takes root in some deep crevice of my brain.

Patter patter patter. The bare stone floor hard underfoot, and the night pale and softly lit by distant kata lamps.

No. All the lights are off. That dancing, fluttering light in the living room is fire. Fire! Something's on fire!

I step into the living room and see. The silhouette of the moth against the roaring of a fire that fills the canyon, the city. The world.

I scream.

"Tabby! Tabby!" My body shakes and a face looms in front of me. I blink and my eyes burn. Naraik and Ajaë stand on either side of me, and I'm in the middle of the living room and it's morning.

Beyond the windows and the terrace, the early sun draws a line across the West Wall of the Duum Canyon. No fire. Only pale rock and the tiny network of windows, paths, terraces that web the West City.

The Hour Bell tolls.

"What happened?" Naraik sits me on the soft couch while Ajaë busies xirself in the kitchen in the corner. Coffee odours fill the apartment as the others step into the morning.

I shake my head a few times, rub my temples. Naraik and Ajaë exchange words while I stare at my knees. Something dreadful is coming. Everyone else chats around me, while that seed in the crevice of my brain sprouts.

"I've got a couple of messages from Shinika. Some kind of hold-up downstairs." Naraik taps xir slate several times and sighs. "You're not going to like this."

It takes a blink to realise xe's talking to me. "What is it?" I ought to get down to the codex. I need to take another look at that book. There's something I've missed.

"Tishca's saying this is all a big deal about nothing. No need for us to go anywhere." Naraik flicks a hand and it's my slate xe's holding, not xir own. Xe shows me the feed, but I can't take it in.

"I need to get down to the stores," I tell xem. "I want to see the codex again." I take my slate back and hurry through my old files. "I kept everything from that study." I pull myself up and Naraik jumps to offer assistance.

"We need to get down to the stores." When xe sees my expression, xe doesn't argue, but xir brow does knit.

"You're going to need to get dressed first."

My mind flutters like an anxious butterfly, not settled until we're downstairs. We have a brief argument over whether and then where I'm having breakfast. In the end, Ajaë packs us something. I wait by the elevators, muscles itching, still hunting for my research notes.

"What is it you're looking for?" Naraik keeps tapping on xir slate while I set up the larger katarisation equipment. A filigree network frame holds a much larger slate and a series of smaller obsidian mini-hubs.

I reach for the codex, but my fingertips tingle. I pause. Somewhere past my left ear, a moth wing hums.

"What's the matter? Post-drome?"

"I don't know."

Naraik collects the codex for me, setting it in the middle of the frame under the katarisation slate. I gaze at the pages, the image of the moth fluttering at the back of my mind.

"I'll do the technical stuff." Naraik fiddles with the frame, repositioning the katarisation slate to guide it into a better position. This allows us to magnify each page, to such a degree that we can see even the finest threads of the papyrus, the microscopic dimples of ink webbing into suddenly gigantic letters.

I've been working with Naraik long enough that xe knows more than I do about this. A thought: Good thing nobody else is in the stores today. 

I scratch my scalp and take in the forms taking shape in front of me.

"You'll have to tell me what you're looking for though?" Naraik adjusts the frame again, then taps the katarisation slate to change the magnification. I can see in the tightness of xir jaw xe'd like to know what came over me last night, but I don't think I can find words to explain.

I should tell xem. Tell xem everything.

But I don't.

"I'm not sure yet." I sit forward in my chair and it resettles to support me. Kata in that, too, responsive to my movement. "I'm trying to remind myself what I was working on back then."

My words taste acidic, take up the wrong space in my mouth. My notes will be on the slate and I'm doing everything out of order. I should at least read through what I wrote, what everybody objected to—or at least thought was too irrelevant to publish.

The image on the katarisation slate clarifies, and my heart races.

Don't trust Naraik.

My thoughts are all scattered and it takes work to order them into speech. When I raise my hand to pull up the files stored in the depths of my slate, it trembles. That's not unusual for me, but right now, as my head starts to pound when I squint at the codex page in front of me.

"So, what are we looking for?" Naraik asked this before, didn't she. "And are you going to tell me what's going on with you? Your metrics are all over the place today."

Again, that thought: Don't trust Naraik.

I flinch and consciously order my thoughts, like putting a jigsaw together with my fingers. It's the migraine; it must be the migraine. I rub my temples. "That was a really bad migraine. Really bad—"

"Hey! Can we chat?" Shinika steps into our corner of the stores. Xe's jacket undone, xe looks distinctly off-duty.

Naraik takes charge, still adjusting the katarisation frame. "I got your message. What's the problem? I thought we were all clear to go ahead. I've put in a requisition to get three workers out, including me. It's—"

Shinika holds up a hand. "Not me. It's Tishca. Xe says there's no point and it's too much effort when we don't even know if there's anything important in there."

In front of me, the codex page expands. I hear wings fluttering behind my ear. A single ink stoke, cutting down the middle of the page hovers in front of me, captured by the soft beige kata of the katarisation slate. The edges of the ink crackle, lit up in glowing red, eating up the surrounding papyrus. Thin wisps of smoke coil up into the dusty air and why can't Naraik see any of this. Xe steps back from the frame and chatters away with Shinika as if there's nothing wrong at all.

I reach out, touch the hem of xir jacket. "Naraik..."

"—Tishca can pretty much veto anything xe likes, so it's partly that it's a pretty tense political situation out there and Tishca doesn't want us involved, but mainly—"

Tishca is the Senior Servant of the Guardian Defender, but also the leader of the Ishcai-Nashim. Xir popularity with the Warrior Classes, xir legendary status as a fighter on the Line, defender of the Gaps, has given xem a clout almost nobody else possesses in the entire Alliance—other than the Guardian Defender xirself, of course.

"What do we need to do?" Naraik's voice grows fainter. I must be getting another migraine. And that fluttering, it's everywhere now. I squeeze my eyes shut and emit a long, heavy sigh.

Naraik's hand responds immediately and xir hand settles like a bird on my shoulder. "Do we need to stop?"

I force myself to uncurl and wipe my brow. "No. No, it's fine." I swallow. My throat is as cracked as if I'd been eating sand. "No, it's not." I lean around Naraik and speak to Shinika. It's not just the Bone Moth itself. Even the Codex is somehow active. "We need to do something about this. It's not just archaeological junk. There are dangerous weapons in that haul and we need to make sure they don't get into the wrong hands."

I point at the page under the katarisation lens. "You see what this is? It's Tallat's Codex. It's the notebook she made when she was working on the Rending for the Basati Empire. It's got a design in it for a charm that would be able to hold somebody's entire consciousness. Ever since I got it out, I've been seeing visions, migraines. Last night, I saw the Bone Moth flying above my bed, and then the whole city was on fire."

Shinika and Naraik stare. An awkward silence descends and I can see the thoughts written on their faces: they think I'm crazy. It's just a migraine. It's just the way the Gap gets to me.

Shinika takes a deep breath. When xe speaks, xir voice is low, cautious. "That's not possible. This is the whole problem—We can't do that now. There's no way they could do it back then. Tishca's been talking to our materials experts, and says they're all telling xem it's not possible."

I stab a finger at the page and Naraik obligingly adjusts the magnification. It was nowhere near as enlarged as I thought it was. I hold up my slate and there's my journal article, all my files, all ready for me to use. "It's in there. Tallat wrote all of it out." I tap my temple. "I think now it's even in here."

"You're going to have to explain this to Tishca." Shinika looks skeptical. "But before you do that, you're going to have to be clear that a five-thousand-year-old bit of jewellery could still be dangerous. It's one thing to get a consciousness into something like that. But is it still going to be active? Will it still work."

I scrunch up my features and make a face at Naraik. "We're going to need to talk to Ajaë about that."