By Alicia’s estimates, Ik was busy working on the translation runes, or whatever they used, somewhere between “A good long while” and “Entirely too long.” To an outside observer, only a few hours passed, but to Alicia, now somewhat unmoored from time bereft as she was of the homemade sunrises and sunsets of Thereafter, it felt like eternities. Part of it, she realized, was that there wasn’t all that much for her to do at Camp. There surely was some kind of workout she could do if she put her mind to it, even if the weak nearly-inexistent gravity made all her bodyweight go-tos nearly pointless. She could, she figured, extend the air field of the Voidpearl, Ade had shown her how, and do some low-oxygen conditioning work, or barring that some low G agility training wouldn’t go amiss either.

The truth was Alicia wasn’t feeling it. It was a rare feeling to not feel the weak but persistent need to work out, building up in her chest and behind her eyes until it felt like ants were crawling on her skin and it became impossible to sit still. It probably was her body taking some extra recovery time for the ongoing exhaustion and all the time she had spent low on resources. Nobody, it seemed, could be in Danger Survival Mode forever. Human beings weren’t made for that, regardless of how society and contemporary economics seemed to expect it of them. If this whole Thereafter affair hadn’t done anything else, Alicia could safely say it had given her a new perspective on rest that she was starting to realize she had lacked in her adult life. For better or worse, the extremes were more intense in the world of Thereafter, the periods of stress more stressful, the periods of rest more peaceful. Life should perhaps be like this, Alicia found herself thinking, rather than stress and demands being this omnipresent thing. She seemed to recall Lex talking about how medieval peasants having more rest days than the average worker, “Not of course, to preach the virtues of Feudalism, that diseased, decaying ape of a social system,” Lex had said. “But at least they knew that if you don’t give people time to rest they’re not going to do what you need them to do.” Alicia hadn’t known what to say that, if she was honest she still didn’t. If nothing else, Lex had something to learn when it came to finding the difference between pointing out something that was wrong with the current way of doing things, and doing something about it. As far as Alicia was concerned, awareness of the wretchedness of the current status quo was important, but there was such a thing as information overload, there was such a thing as drowning in despair, either by accident or by choice.

Lia was within earshot, but Alicia felt like she couldn’t talk to her. The silence between them after they had eaten had grown quite out of proportion, and now Alicia didn’t know how to begin breaking it, or if she even wanted to right now. She wasn’t adversarial to Lia and Lia wasn’t hostile to her, not really, but Alicia wasn’t sure what to think of what they were to each other. There was a tension there, Alicia wasn’t sure if it was romantic, but it definitely was sexual. That wasn’t a problem in itself, even if Lia was a bit older than she had preferred at least so far. No, the problem was… more difficult to describe, or at least so Alicia thought. It could be she was grasping for language to describe a problem that was more emotional than what she could handle, or it could simply be that her instincts told her no for reasons she couldn’t entirely claim to understand.
Alicia shook her head, she was spiraling again, and while she didn’t especially feel like working out, she had to get her body moving in one way or another. There was nothing wrong with self-reflection, but Alicia had walked the earth long enough to recognize those never-ending loops of difficult thoughts and concepts that only led to further confusion and profound exhaustion of the soul… at least most of the time.
“I’m going to check out the spheres for a bit,” Alicia said as she got up. It was time to practice her low G moves, and get a closer look at the spherical wall of rock spheres proper. It was possible this was breaking some sort of taboo or best practice, but Alicia was a stranger in a strange land today, and she had to do something or she was going to go insane. With her actions thusly justified to herself, Alicia sprang into action, launching herself at a sphere not too far from the edge of the Hearth.

Moving from sphere to sphere reminded Alicia a bit of the little bouldering she had done. She’d wanted to do more climbing, but always ended up postponing it until she could find someone to climb with on the regular. In her dreams it was always a partner of sorts, but it hadn’t worked out that way for her yet. Dating was difficult enough, even if she had the potential to sample from a wider range of the population than what was usual. There were, of course, confounding factors, and it was hard enough to find someone you fit together with, and then the difficulty of finding someone chomping at the bit to do the same kind of free time activity than you in addition? It was a tall task. In a longer relationship Alicia could imagine asking a partner to try out climbing with her, but so far she’d had no luck establishing such a thing. Maybe the whole Polycule thing was what would finally work like that, but then again there weren’t any bouldering walls in Thereafter.
On some level, Alicia was aware that her attention was drifting away from her task, on the other she felt like she just had to get this bit right, and besides, she seemed to be able to pull herself along the wall of rock spheres with ease, even with one arm. That is to say, she managed to do so just fine until she reached for the next one, only to re-discover that these spheres all had a hole in them, and the second her arm disappeared into one, the weird gravity in play around the hole dragged her in causing her, for the lack of a better term, to fall up into the hole like a sock that had strayed too close to the vacuum cleaner.
Once inside, Alicia’s instincts took over, and while they weren’t what one would call particularly sharp or well-drilled, the tumble into the sphere took long enough that she could right herself to some sort of gravity “down” by the time she’d landed.

The sphere was bigger than the resting cave, more akin to a studio apartment than the deluxe-sized tent (that was to say deluxe camping, not deluxe glamping,) that the resting cave had been. The fact that it was round and with gravity that pulled her to the wall as if it was the floor somewhat limited Alicia’s abilities of spatial estimation, but there was another distraction, a particular displeasure of being a living being on earth that Alicia hadn’t even been mindful that she hadn’t felt in a while before she now felt it again for the first time since she’d come to Thereafter. Her feet were wet, wet and cold. Alicia yet again recalled the miserable winters she’d had after moving to New York, before she recognized the importance of solid, water-proof footwear. It was possible, on a purely philosophical level, to be happy while your feet were cold and wet, but Alicia doesn’t recall ever having had the pleasure.
Before diving too deeply into the finer point of cold foot misery starts sounding like a good idea, Alicia bends down to inspect the ground. Like in the resting cave, the floor-walls of this sphere is covered in some sort of moss or lichen. Unlike the resting cave, the floor is also covered in ice. Not in the sense that the ground is frozen, but in the sense that small to medium-sized chunks of ice lay scattered across the concave surface. The odd side covered by a grey-brown powder of some sort makes something click in Alicia’s brain, telling her that this ice has been shattered from larger pieces, probably from a chunk of void-dust-covered ice from out in the void. The apparent purpose, Alicia realizes, is using the meager yet persistent heat that the pale light in the center of the sphere produces to melt the void ice. By the looks of it, it’s a slow process, but seeing as the Void otherwise isn’t a particularly moist place, Alicia isn’t sure how else the Camp tribe would get their water.
Alicia has just about made up her mind on how she thinks exiting the sphere would work when a familiar voice calls out to her.
“Alicia, hey Alicia… strong dark skinned girl where are you?” Ik called out. Alicia suppressed a sigh, she wasn’t exactly relishing the thought of one-way communication while she was puzzling out this whole gravity situation.
“I’m here,” Alicia answered, deciding that while a one-way set of instructions didn’t seem ideal, it was better than puzzling out the weird physics going on here all on her lonesome.
“Ah that’s a mercy,” Ik said. “I finished my first batch of bracelets, so I can understand you now, just so you’re aware.”
“Oh, I see. I’m trying to get my mind around how to walk to get out of this place. It’s… difficult.”
“It takes some getting used to. Easiest way to think of it is to just walk like you’re walking towards a hole in the floor and just jump out with your knees together… or so they tell me. I grew up with these things, so having block-shaped rooms like you lot seems weird to me.”
“Takes all kinds, huh?” Alicia couldn’t help herself from bantering a little. It felt good to talk to someone she didn’t have a complicated relationship with.
“It does. Anyway, Lia told me you fell into one of these,” Ik kicked the rock sphere lightly with the tip of her foot, or at least Alicia assumed that was what she was doing. “So I figured I’d get here and check what the situation was. You were lucky you didn’t fall into one of the beast spheres.”
“Why?” Alicia asked as she approached the hole in the floor-wall that would be her route of egress. “Is it dangerous?”
“More uncomfortable. They shit everywhere, and can be a bit ornery at the best of times,” Ik answered casually. “For what it’s worth I think you could take a pod of them in a fight but it probably wouldn’t be very pleasant for either party.”
Alicia took a breath to steel herself before she jumped into the hole. She expected to come barreling out, but the gravity weirdness was so that she merely found herself floating in the void next to the sphere, as if she had jumped into water wearing some sort of buoyancy device.
“Fights usually aren’t,” Alicia said, she had to admit it was mostly to sound tough, but she also had some experience to draw on, so it wasn’t just for the grandstanding of it all. “That’s why I tend to try to avoid them.”
“Very admirable, and good hole clearing form,” Ik clapped, the sound swallowed by the void. “Anyway, since we’re up here, want to see the beasts?”

The journey to see these beasts were a little bit longer than Alicia expected. For the apparent bounty of meat they produced, Alicia expected them to take center stage, and yet Ik led her on a trek all the way around the wall of spheres, to just about the antipode of where Alicia had fallen.
“Before, we had more beasts,” Ik explained as they climbed. “There were more spheres, and water wasn’t so much of a concern. Partially because we had more spheres to melt, of course and, well, I hope it’s not just nostalgia, but I distinctly remembering the ice being better. Cleaner, not quite as hard and cold. I guess the Unmaking went and undid those mountains of good ice as all the other things it ruined.”
“The Unmaking, huh, that’s what you call the Cataclysm? The disaster that destroyed all those worlds?”
“We don’t consider it a disaster,” Ik said, “which is to say, it was bad, but disasters strike randomly, without cause and with little warning. The Unmaking wasn’t like that.”
“Oh?”
“I mean I never saw it myself,” Ik said, echoing the most common sentiment about the Cataclysm that Alicia had heard. “But our scouts, the ones that survived at any rate, said that it, whatever it was, moved with… uh… intentionality I guess? Like there was something that was controlling it. Something… or someone.”
Alicia became aware that Ik had stopped moving. She stopped and pulled herself into a clumsy U-turn to face her.
“And now you find people lost in the void and you start getting suspicious…” Alicia found herself saying. It wasn’t a de-escalating thing to say, but she found it difficult to come up with anything else to answer the unspoken questions.
“I try to see the best in people,” Ik said. “I’ve had to do that a lot, ever since the Unmaking shattered my people’s spheres and tossed what few survivors there were into the darkness of the deep void. I still don’t know how many survived or how it came to be that I managed to salvage enough stone spheres to have a fighting chance once I started picking up other survivors, all I know is that I survived and I did manage it.”
“So what’s different this time?”
Ik shrugged. “There is the fact that there’s two of you, you don’t speak the same language, and while I can’t claim to know what the Shining Star is even supposed to be, it does seem far-fetched that you’re from there.”
“The Shining Star isn’t really a star… I suppose you may not know what a star is, it’s a celestial body… a large object that produces light and warmth in my world’s equivalent of the Void… that’s not important I guess,” Alicia found herself unable to not be frank with Ik. Even if her posture was guarded, even if the words she said balanced right on the edge of being accusatory. In Ik’s place, Alicia was pretty sure she’d be the same way, if not worse. “The light you see is coming from the city I and Lia come from, well, it’s where we live. The whole place is put together hastily to house survivors of the Cataclysm, or the Unmaking, and the light itself is from a sphere that is meant to protect us, a bit like this, I imagine,” Alicia knocked on a stone sphere with her knuckle.
“Huh,” Ik didn’t sound convinced per se, but there was a note of credulity to her voice. She hadn’t made up her mind to make Alicia into the enemy, which was encouraging. “Then how come you’ve gotten here? Even riding the fastest sphere we’ve got it’d take days, maybe even weeks to get all this way, and that’s assuming my guesstimates about the distance is correct.”
“We have…” Alicia hesitated briefly. Perhaps there was a world where she got out of this without explaining the Teleport Crystals, but she had no idea how she could make this world into that one. “Magical artifacts that allow us to travel long distances in short time. It has allowed us to travel further and further into the Void. We use it to look for food and tools, anything that can help us survive.”
“You must be truly desperate to look for food in the Void,” Ik snorted.
“I’m afraid we are,” Alicia conceded “The city is good at housing people but there’s not much room for agriculture, and frankly we’re not very good at it yet.”
“It did take some time for people to stop agitating the beasts,” Ik hid a smile at the thought, but she didn’t do an outrageously good job at it. “I suppose I can believe that. So what happened with you two? Why not just magical artifact your way back home.”
“There was an accident,” Alicia said, “Well, we assume it was an accident. Something smashed into our outpost here, shattered the artifact, stranding us out here.”
“This artifact of yours…” Ik asked “is it a small thing? Brittle?”
“Can’t speak on the brittleness, but it was pretty big, and I got the impression it wouldn’t be easy to destroy… the thing that crashed into us, it seemed to move with intention too in a way, it came back for a second… attack I guess. I thought it looked like an eye for like a brief moment then I thought… better of it” Alicia found herself staring at the hole of the closest rock sphere. There was something familiar with it, wasn’t it?
“Oh son of a bitch,” Ik’s anger was sudden and, refreshingly, not aimed anywhere close to at Alicia and Lia. “Those spin-brained void jockeys, I told them didn’t I? I fucking TOLD them. I’m so sorry but I gotta…” With all apparent though on Unmaking-sympathizing infiltrators gone, Ik started climbing back towards the upper half of the sphere with great haste, and it was all Alicia could do to keep up. Eventually this would resolve into a situation she could understand, she told herself, even if it didn’t quite look like it at the moment.

Author’s Note: Things are moving into place for our finale, and while my mental health haven’t been doing great, I will admit it feels good to have the story come together like it is. Writing is good like that. I’m currently considering whether book 3, which I have ALMOST decided to name Souls Of Stone, should take place mostly concurrent with this here book, or a short while afterward. I’ll figure that out eventually, but for now, get ready for more reveals, more drama, and, of course, more lore.

VSD