Chapter 18

  Eric Walker

  The thing was, it had a heartbeat. Eric could tell as soon as he set foot on the cold crystal floor of the cavern. Light moved in the walls. Even though Eric didn’t hear it, and didn’t exactly feel it, he could tell. There was a heartbeat here, and it belonged to something big. It set the tempo, making his own heartbeat an intrusive arrhythmic pattering, the same way that the storms far above had their own pulse.

  It was bright as hell too, but he had shades for that.

  The heartbeat sounded three times during the walk from the entrance of the cavern to the vast, glittering chrysalis of Kate’s Guardian, Absolem. (“Or p-p-possibly a c-coc-c-coon,” she said, “d-depending on whether it’s a moth or a b-butterfly.”

  It hung in the air, the size of a small blimp, suspended by glassy strings that looked like frozen spittle. Light churned within, bleeding out through the crystalline shell into rainbows that schooled like brilliant fish over the shining walls of the chamber.

  “Hi Absolem!” said Kate with a wave. Then, to Eric in a whisper, “isn’t he b-b-beautiful?”

  “Sure, yeah.” Eric wasn’t listening to Kate. He was trying to listen to the heartbeat. He thought he heard something.

  …come…

  “You hear that?” he said.

  “Goodness me!” exclaimed Elmer sky as he and Amelia strolled in behind. “How marvelous! Stupendous! Positively superlative, my dear!” Amelia made some grunt in reply.

  …time…

  Kate was looking at Elmer, not Absolem. She didn’t hear what Eric was hearing. Eric peered into the glassy refraction of lights.

  …not…

  The impression came upon him that Absolem was trying very hard to tell him something, and that it was something very important. This idea, once formulated, hardened into a certainty. The Guardians knew something. Possibly, as Isaac suggested, they knew everything that was going on around here.

  Eric approached, step by careful step, to the shining chrysalis. It was bright even with his shades. What would it look like…

  He flipped up the sunglasses. It was like looking at an exploding sun, if a sun was full of rainbows on the inside.

  Nope. Shades back on.

  He was right under it. The whole crystallized pupa hung five or six feet off the floor, low enough that he could reach up and touch the bottom of it.

  …now…

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  “Eric!” Kate said behind him, whispering loudly. “W-what are you d-doing?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Eric. “I think it wants to tell me something.” He raised a hand, hesitated. “It’s safe, right?” He looked from Kate, to the Theians, to Shape and Sky. “You don’t think your Guardian will pull an evil-god-thing and try to kill me, right?”

  Kate thought about it, finger on cheek, her eyes unseen because her big round glasses reflected the brilliant glow of Absolem like a cartoon supervillain. “I d-don’t think so,” she said. Then she smiled. “Only o-one w-wa-w-way to f-find out!”

  “Wow, thanks,” he said. “Fuck it.” He reached up and slapped a palm onto the cold crystal at the bottom of Absolem’s chrysalis/cocoon.

  He realizes at once that something has changed. It is like a

  zap

  in the back of his brain. He feels all jittery. His heartbeat is running up and down the bpms. He hears Kate crying out in alarm, scampering toward him.

  But he is also elsewhere. No…elsewhen. A lot of elsewhens.

  Here he is, for example, later, discussing this very event with Isaac over some weird board game littered with potato chip fragments while Jim plays with watercolors under the warm light, patiently waiting his turn.

  “…and do you have any fucking clue how weird it feels to be stuck in the present tense, man?” Eric asks.

  “Oh, I can do that too,” says Isaac. “Like the Lords. It’s not so bad. You should try going second-person. That’s weird.” His angel is an owl, which looks pretty fucking creepy without eyes, just looming over their table from the side.

  “Anyway,” says Eric, “it was like all this shit happening at once, or in rapid succession. Just all these short flashes.”

  “You were unstuck in time? Like that guy in Slaughterhouse Five?”

  Unstuck? Sounds about right, Eric thinks. “Guess so,” he says. “Wait. Shit, maybe I still am.”

  But Isaac is musing now, thinking. “Hmm,” he says, scratching at greasy hair that’s been too long inside a space helmet. “I get it,” he says, his eyes widening. He sits up suddenly. “That’s why the last week was so weird! I thought it went by too fast!”

  Jimothy looks up from his coloring in surprise and joins Eric in staring at Isaac as he leaps to his feet and begins pacing, waving his arms around like a madman conducting an exceptionally silly orchestra.

  “Think about it,” he says. “What’s a way of compressing events in a story? Making it all go faster, just showing little snippets to display the trend of a period of time?” He demonstrates what he’s talking about by grabbing a big invisible accordion and squeezing it together.

  Jimothy is baffled, but Eric thinks he understands. “What,” he scoffs, “so me touching Absolem caused us all to have a montage?”