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EVERY SINGLE NEURONE in Fluppit’s head was firing. She heard people shouting, felt the rush of them pushing past her, dragging her arms, pulling her. She could smell fear everywhere but felt none of it herself. Where her face was pointed, the highest part of the bubble the Air-sense picture was clear—a huge curved reflective surface in what would otherwise have been a wide but unremarkable corridor. But that was not the end of the sensory input. Every place in her brain that the Air-sense registered seemed to have an accompanying feature in her mind. She blinked back hard tears and Air-sensed the rest of the room. That seemed normal. But above her? She wiped her eyes and tilted her head back again. No, up there it was different. Something was forming in her brain. There was a fog of something. Not a fog that had feel or taste or smell. Something else. She could Air-sense where the room ended, this new thing she was detecting, was beyond the roof, if that were possible. How was that possible?
The fog in front of her head started to resolve. Almost as if it were a cloud of cooking steam from the most delicious gravy, but she could taste every single molecule on its own. Every single molecule. But molecules of what? Then, with a click, it snapped into focus. Above her were tiny sharp bright pinpricks. The points seemed to be beyond the bubble. On the other side of the glass roof. Infinitesimal pins puncturing something like a huge curtain. And there were so many. So, so many. Hundreds, thousands, more. She had trouble thinking of anything that had ever come in that sheer volume of things in her life. Maybe molecules were all she had. She only knew what they were because Sari had explained at length one span. She blinked hard. The fur was wet on her face. The molecules briefly became fuzzy, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, blinked and slowly they resolved again. The pins of the outside.
Then she had a flash of memory from somewhere. As a tiny pup being told not to go somewhere. Where was she told not to go? Somewhere awful-smelling with damp air, but that wasn’t important about the memory. What was? She was told not to go there and remembered the event, the trauma, for that reason. What was it? Why had it come up now? She fought hard to hold on to the tenuous thread into her mind as she felt more hands around her, checking her, dragging her; voices talking to her, shouting at her, but none of that was important. Follow the thread. What was there? Suddenly a light touch on her face, she batted it away. Then another, she swiped again. Then one on her arm, she batted across with her other hand. Then they were everywhere, all over her body and face. Tiny Spear-flies. Culex, the alchemists and healers called them. Every place she could feel the touch was a stab, tiny needle mouthparts, drawing up her blood. The sheer mass of them was the thing. A massive swarm. And the noise: a tiny screeing symphony of wings or shrieks. They carried disease. Fluppit remembered the fever that her curiousness had brought her. But the swirling cloud of tiny things was mesmerising, that was the largest collection of discrete things she’d ever encountered in her brief life. Every part of that swirling fugue of sound was an individual. She could hear all of them as discreet pinpoints in her mind before they detected her, landed on her, and sunk their needles into her flesh. That was what this new mystery was like. A thousand, thousand discreet stabs to her. But this new thing? It was like those same stabs, but in her eyes.
She flailed at all the tiny invasions to her body. Were they real? Was any of it? She remembered, as a pup, she had been kept nearly a cycle with the healers, lapsing in and out of consciousness. Get them off me please. Please help me. That was how the dialogue had gone span after span. Get them off me. Are you okay Fluppit? Get them off me. Can you hear us Fluppit?
“Can you hear us Fluppit? Fluppit?” Not a dozen voices from the past. Not a dozen voices at all. A single voice. “Can you hear us Fluppit? Fluppit, lovely, can you hear us?” A specific, kind voice: Sha-cha. Sha-cha the healer.
“Whuh...” Talking was hard suddenly. As if all of Fluppit’s systems had scattered apart like the cloud of Culex being repelled. The Mushroom-folk burned a particular plant leaf that smelled of lemon. That broke up the clouds and sent them away. Could she smell something now? Yes. Something strong under her nose. She sneezed. “Sorry.”
“No need to be sorry, lovely,” Sha-cha said. “Are you okay?”
“I—I don’t know. Am I? What happened?”
“We were rather hoping you’d tell us.”
