Everything melting. Everything colour and sweat and flow.
At midnight on the day of stormfall, the rangy ragged man entered the ruins of the Starlight Cinema in Tempest Bay.
Orgiastic frenzy. People dancing and twisting and painting the walls with the dirt and memories of the clifftop earth, shaping mad art on top of generations of mad art like layers of skin.
Jessica drawing him close. Ready to dismember him and eat him.
There’s no apocalypse like you’re hoping, she said. The world doesn’t end. It’s just weather rolling in and out. Believe me. I’ve seen a hundred years of it. You think the future’s all rich people sheltering in bunkers while everything else tears itself apart. But it’s this. Us. Over and over and over again.
Something pulling out of him. Knotty ripping cords of flesh and pain. With it, finally, realisation: he is not his father. He was and is a boy who didn’t understand the world.
You’ll be up on the walls, soon, she hissed. This is what you chose. For their amusement.
The roof of the Starlight cinema lifting off. The old gods looking down through the sky. Beings unimaginably vast and old and beyond human comprehension observing with a curious hunger. But a distant black star coming into orbit. The buzzing insect howl of the world he’d helped create. Circling. Becoming aware of each other.
Jessica stalking forward amid the drumbeats and howling—
• • •
And here is Lucia entering the Starlight. She understands this world. Moves in it. Feels the forces and conjunctions and frenzies and histories but steps through them like a dancer through raindrops.
There is no maze. There’s just adjustment. Tempest Bay, she knows, is a geography of dreams and memory. Emotional weather is real. It’s everywhere, like climate change. And it’s her job, just as it will one day be everyone’s job, to see it and navigate it and learn to build and live there.
When they put everyone into factories and computers and routines they lost everything, didn’t they. Forgot the real jobs to be done. It just took her, a weird girl who was confused and orthogonal to the assumptions of a broken world, to see it.
And she does see it. Everything. The people in their frenzy. The broken bones of an industrial world melting, thawing, resolving into twilight dew. Old gods up there, out there, the sky and the ocean and time itself, peering down. But that’s okay. That’s their job. Her job is something else and she knows it.
Huge relief, being honest. She’d wanted a job for ages, and a paper route seemed a bit boring. Plus they don’t really have papers any more.
Lucia rescuing them both, the man and Jessica, from the things stuck inside them. Only here, only now, but there’s a here and now for everything.
Taking two hands and speaking with terrible clarity.
It’s not your world any more, she said to both of them. It’s flipping just splendidly. See?
Jessica wept. The man screamed and laughed and screamed and laughed and finally, finally, entered the true centre of the maze he’d been lost in for so long.