Some things came into stark relief in the cold absence of The Void. How cold really was more an absence of heat than anything else, how the rough bumpy surface of the Stone Sphere dug into what had once been Alicia’s gym shoes. Other things, Alicia noted, was muted by the emptiness. Like distance. She knew she was moving as fast as the sphere would take her, or just about, and seeing as Lia’s still motionless form was not growing noticably smaller (nor, to Alicia’s dismay, larger at the pace she’d hoped,) Lia was traveling at a lower speed relative to her. Still, it felt like she was doing absolutely nothing. Standing alone on a rock in near complete darkness, straining as if she could recapture what was hopefully still the living body of Lia through some hitherto undiscovered telepathic power.
Alicia was, however, gaining on Lia’s form, and after what felt like an eternity she came close enough that starting to make a plan for what she’d do once they made contact was not only pertinent, but perhaps a thing one should have started on a little earlier. Alicia felt herself flounder, but when she thought about it, there really was only one thing to do. Aiming herself solidly at Lia, Alicia prepared herself to make the important catch.
Catching Lia felt strange. Alicia wasn’t quite sure what she expected, but it sure seemed like the kind of thing that would feel like a high speed maneuver of some sort, but without air whizzing by her it felt… strangely serene. It did somewhat help, Alicia supposed that she was not moving that much faster than Lia, which in a way explained why the whole process felt so damn never-ending.
“There we go, I’ve got you.” Alicia mumbled, mostly to herself. Lia gave no reply, which did somewhat sour the experience and left Alicia with a knot in her stomach. “Mountain Wind got ya.”

This was not the first time Alicia didn’t know what to do, nor was it the worst instance of it. That dubious honor went to a night after she moved into her first NY apartment where a pipe burst in the bathroom and she spent half the afternoon trying to get in contact with the landlord and the other half trying to find a plumber in an unfamiliar town back in the days before plentiful cellphone data. Unlike that moment, which Alicia had navigated mostly in various states of panic, though, Alicia felt calm. Resolute. Whether she was doing the right thing or merely hastening her own death she did not rightfully know, but there was a serenity to her mind and her actions. She was giving living through this the good old college try, and if it killed her it killed her. She didn’t want to die, not one bit, but this was the kind of place where there was no real room to worry. Either her actions saved them both or it killed at least one of them. Do or Do Not.
Alicia assumed the calm would not last, and so she moved to capitalize on it while she could. The “gravity” that the Sphere’s journey through space made carrying Lia a bit awkward, and Alicia spent a good few minutes trying to engineer a solution to how she would get Lia into the hole. The resulting maneuver was not her most gracious act with the body of another, but they couldn’t all be winners, now could they?
Lia had begun to move slightly and make noises that indicated she was at least awake-adjacent by the time Alicia had settled her in the comfiest nook she could make given the circumstances.
“There there,” Alicia found herself speaking softly. “I’m going to go adjust our course and then I’m coming back. You stay here, ok?”
Lia muttered something that probably was an affirmative. Alicia wasn’t sure if she was imagining things or if she heard a couple of the guttural morphemes of the Steppefolk in there, which should be impossible but it was that kind of a day so why not.

Alicia made it back to the steering spot, feeling the slight wobble of her resolve flickering. She still felt wide awake, but there was a maniac energy to it now, like her mind didn’t keep itself afloat over the ocean of sleep as much as it was perforated, run through really, by something sharp and hard pinning her to something solid. It couldn’t be helped, Alicia told herself as she located Thereafter and started leaning towards it. It wasn’t her smoothest navigation, but the Sphere, mercifully, at least didn’t make any sudden or sharp movements, opting instead as it always did to follow the direction she indicated as a perfectly trained horse. Once they were pointing the right way, it was just to make for the final adjustments, Alicia liked to form a circle with her hands and hold her arm straight to make for a bit of a targeting reticle. Lex, she was sure, could tell her all about the math of how hopeless this method was, but by the time they had the opportunity, Alicia would more than welcome it. She was tired of being in the void, she was tired of being scared, she was tired of being tired. It was, Alicia came to realize, time to listen to her body. It wasn’t a matter of choice at this point. If she didn’t concede to these pretty clear signs of being past the point of needing rest, she’d either fall asleep or do something stupid. With shaky knees, Alicia made her way back to the hole and crawled inside.

Inside the sphere, the atmosphere felt wrong. Well, Alicia arrested herself, the sphere’s internals didn’t have an atmosphere as such. It was the vibe, in the parlance of our time. Whatever you called it, it became immediately clear to Alicia that things weren’t great. The inside of the stone sphere was a mess, with waterskins and packs of food floating free, a crate was ripped open, and not entirely cleanly either. It wasn’t until Alicia saw the likely perpetrator, Lia, huddled up in a corner, that things were starting to make sense. Sort of. Lia had raged out over something, but what? Blows to the head could get humans doing any number of strange things, and as far as Alicia could tell, the stone that struck Lia had hit her upper chest and possibly head. Still though, Alicia hadn’t seen the impact, and she wasn’t comfortable with writing Lia off as merely punch drunk. Thus, there was only one thing to do.

“Lia?” Alicia asked as she approached, brushing aside the three-dimensional mess in the hope that it would find its way to the ground at least. “Are you ok Lia?”
Lia stirred faintly, but otherwise gave no response. Her arms rested on her knees, the Deepspeaker hid her face, bundled up as she was.
“Lia? You’re scaring me girl.”
Alicia was almost upon Lia when she spoke.
“Leave me alone,” Lia’s voice was hoarse, and lacked the strength it usually had.
“Hey, hey, it’s going to be fine. It got a bit scary for a minute there, but we pulled through didn’t we?”
“You DON’T KNOW TH….” Lia’s commanding proclamation broke along a hairline fracture and collapsed into coughing.
Alicia rushed the rest of the way, grabbing one of Lia’s arms in a grip that was firm, but hopefully gentle.

Lia offered no resistance when Alicia pulled the limb away, revealing a pale face drenched in sweat, and lips that were almost blue. It was such a shock that it took Alicia a second to see it’s apparent cause. On Lia’s jacket, the void pearl only stuck together because of the pin it was attached to, and the shards of the dark sphere sparkled with impossible-colored light. The void pearl was broken, or as close to it as it could get while still maintaining some semblance of functionality. The fact that it produced atmosphere and translated Alicia’s words at all was a small miracle.
“Oh god…” Alicia found herself whispering.
“Don’t concern… yourself… with me.” Lia spoke, having learned from her last exertion she took long pauses, allowing herself to draw as much oxygen as she could get from the by now dangerously thin bubble around her. “I’ll … be … fine.”
“Bull SHIT you’ll be fine,” Alicia got up. “We gotta see if we can find anything we can repair that thing with.” She started searching through the supplies. “Did the Campfolk send any flour with us? With that and some water we could create a paste and maybe…”
“Tried… that… already” Lia wheezed. “No flour.”
“Oh…” Alicia stopped herself, realizing just a second too late that she was re-threading the same ground that Lia probably had gone through when she found herself holding the lid to another crate she had ripped open.
“Besides, this thing isn’t… a toy.” Lia pointed at the pearl. “Complex… magic. Never could figure it out.”
Alicia frowned. The situation seemed pretty damn dire, but something about Lia’s complete surrender to her fate rubbed her the wrong way. Wasn’t there something they could do? Alicia searched the back of her mind. This was a possibility she had considered before, and she remembered that she’d had a solution in mind, but what was it? She made up her mind then and there that if she survived, she’d tell every Scavenger to bring a spare Void Pearl. They were simply too important to survival to not have backup. But there was something to that, had she discussed it with Ade? It had something to do with why they went out in pairs?

It all came to Alicia as if divinely inspired. It was more than a solution to a practical problem too. It’d have to be. Lia was strong yes, but also stubborn. There were certain barriers to overcome here, and Alicia was going to overcome them.
“I’ve got it!” She said. “I know what we’ll do!”
Lia didn’t say anything. Alicia wasn’t sure why, but she got the distinct impression Lia also knew but had decided to hold her peace.
“We’ll share my pearl. Ade showed me how I can thin the atmosphere field out, cover a wider area. We’ll be a bit short of breath but it sure beats hypoxia.”
“No!” Lia said. “You need to be clear-headed if you’re going to get us out of here. I’ll be… fine.”
“You are barely hanging on,” Alicia said, finding her patience running out. “So scoot to the side a bit and we’ll have some delicious thin air about it and…”
“I’m not her. You know that, right?”
Alicia stopped dead in her tracks. A second as long as many vacations Alicia had taken passed as her brain processed everything. Of course it would come down to that. It was always going to come down to that. The elephant in the room between the two of them, as impossible to avoid as it was to deal with. Alicia wasn’t going to back down. Not this time.
“You mean… you’re not Lia of The Fire Eyes?” Alicia asked after the neverending second had allowed her to stack her thoughts into piles. “Lia, I know that…”
“Yes you know that, in the same way that my parents Knew That.” Lia said. “I was named after her, you know, because of… my eyes, of course.”
Alicia nodded, the particular type of heterochromia both Deepspeaker Lia and Lia of the Fire Eyes, “her” Lia, had, gave them both blue eyes with a pattern of brown around the iris that looked like a flame in the right light. In “her” Lia’s time, it had been considered an ill omen, which probably explained why she had been such an outcast, but things had, apparently, changed in the years after the Dragon Thane.
“But I am not her… however hard I try I remain… just me.” Lia continued. “And I’m hardly worth fighting for. I mean look at me…”
Alicia shook her head, their agreement ended here. “You’re wrong, you know,” She said as she approached Lia again. “You are very similar to her in a lot of ways.” Alicia twisted the filament of the void pearl, expanding her personal atmosphere, making it as thin as it would go. It didn’t take more than a couple of steps before she felt the effect, despite breathing like normal she felt her lungs desperately pull for more. It certainly wasn’t a pleasant sensation. “You are stubborn, you are strong, you pretend you’re dispassionate, but you’re not.”
“I’m no hero,” Lia insisted. Alicia could tell that she wanted to get up and move away when she sat down, but her oxygen-starved muscles allowed no such thing. “I’m no-one to emulate.”
“She’d say stuff like that some times too,” Alicia mused as she sat down as close to Lia as she could within propriety. Arguably a bit closer. “’Ain’t Nothin bout me that you can’t learn in a day or two,’ she used to say… but she wasn’t on knocking on death’s door when she said it. She wasn’t as confident as you are. Maybe she grew into that part, I don’t know… but that’s not important.”
Lia said nothing, again. Alicia could see she was doing a bit better, but there was still ample room for improvement. Improvement she intended to make.
“Listen, Lia.” Alicia said, “do you know what you two DO have in common, though?”
“Hm?”
Alicia made her move, she did not hesitate. She had spent enough time considering and planning and fearing and doubting, and would do so no longer. In one smooth movement she got up on her knees and straddled Lia. It was easier than she had imagined it to be in the low gravity. As to compensate, she fumbled with narrowing the atmosphere to just about cover the two of them. Fate, it would seem, had decreed that Alicia could not, and would not, ever be smooth.
“Mountain Wind… this isn’t…”
“I liked the other Lia a lot too.”
“I’m… Stones and Thunder, Mountain Wind, I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“Just about,” Alicia conceded. “Does that bother you?”
Alicia held Lia’s gaze, she had tiptoed around this for more than long enough. She wasn’t sure if it was the lower oxygen count making her light headed or if it was the sheer adrenaline that shot through her in waves, but either way, she felt unstoppable.
“No,” Lia looked down. “Though I wish it did.”
“Why is that? Does being a Deepspeaker come with a vow of chastity or something?”
Lia laughed, a quick bark of amusement, and Alicia got the distinct impression she had just asked if a bear shits in the woods, but as a genuine question. Again, when would she be allowed to be smooth and cool?
“Far from from it.” Lia looked better, her lips were still on the blue side, but her saddle-tan complexion was on its way back, and there was a glint in her eyes that had not been there prior to this improvised oxygenation plan. “It’s just… you are still young, you have the world ahead of you, and I am…”
“Stop that.” Alicia found her voice growing strict. “You always talk yourself down like that. You’re way too young to start cruising for grave plots, so either say you’re not interested like a damn adult or…”
“Or what?”
“Or let me love you god damn it.” Alicia seized Lia by the collar. She was angry, but not bad angry. She was Taking Care Of Business Angry. She was call out unfair practices angry. She was shit or get off the pot angry.
“Mount… Alicia,” Lia wet her lips “I… I… I mean…”
“Shh,” Alicia said as she leaned down towards Lia. “You don’t have to say anything.”
Alicia felt the heat off’ Lias skin now, they were so close that the distance was more of a formality. This crossing of the final threshold was always terrifying to Alicia, but she bore it with confidence. This was it, the moment that she either seized, damn the consequences, or backed away, cowed by her own inner doubter and more rejections than she was comfortable with thinking about. It was a beautiful, vulnerable, ethereal moment that brought Alicia into the deepest contact with herself that she thought she ever to achieve. And then, in this most transcendent and vulnerable moment there could ever be, as the flickering light from Lia’s pearl made the fire in her eyes dance like real fire; as she beheld Alicia like it was the first time, Alicia’s fucking phone rang.

Alicia froze for a second, not recognizing the slightly tinny reproduction of… what appeared to be a 2000s era club anthem remixed with some Japanese song she wasn’t familiar with.
“I… hold on,” Alicia said, too dumbfounded by this incongruity to say anything else. The act of withdrawing her phone from her pocket both felt as natural as stepping into a pair of well-worn shoes, and like doing a task requiring dexterity with her off-hand, which was to say subtly and yet inescapably wrong.
The caller ID was not exactly helpful in assuaging Alicia’s confusion, as she was pretty sure she hadn’t added anyone as ‘Mx. The Fxster’ followed by an incomprehensible sequence of various colored hearts. Under normal circumstances Alicia would not accept a blind call, especially if something looked non-regulation about the caller ID, but when stuck on a small rock going very fast through the void, certain rules of so-called civilized society would just have to be ignored.
Alicia clicked ‘accept call’
“Hello?”
For a second, all she heard was strange, distorted static, then a voice she was more familiar with.
“Alicia? Alicia? Holy crap is this actually coming through?”
“Lex?”
“The one and only, holy shit, I can’t believe this worked.”
“What worked?”
“The Magical Talk Network!” Lex’ voice crackled. “I’ve been expanding that dang thing’s range as far into the void as I could. It’s a bit uneven still, try not to talk about platonic solids or math in general if you can help it.”
“I think I’ll manage that…”
“And speaking of miracles! You’re alive! Big ‘n Horny seemed to think you’d didn’t immediately bite it.”
“Ade?”
“Yes yes, your rhino paramour. I’m not jealous. Or experiencing any insecurity-based angst, by the way. Anyone else made it?”
“I’m here with Deepspeaker Lia. Nobody else made it on our end.”
“You ever figure out what went wrong?”
Alicia couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah I think so. It’s a long story to tell over the phone and I’m kind of…”
“Don’t worry yourself about it,” Lex interrupted. “Now that we have a connection it should only take some slight adjustments to… oh that is not supposed to….”
Lex’ voice exploded into something that sounded like someone had fed their weird computer sound electronica through a woodchipper, only for the sound to fade into something very similar to whale song ending in electronic distortion.
“Lex?”
“Hoh, oh, that’s not how we do that, note to self: that’s not how we do that going forward… yes I’m here.” Lex’ voice sounded strained. “I’m running my own switchboard slash highly classified surveillance station here, many apologies…. Alright, there! I’ve got you!”
“You got us?”
“I’ve got you” Lex confirmed. “You’re… oh you’ve traveled a long way huh. You gotta tell me how you managed that… and how the fuck you’re going that fast… is breaking going to be a problem I need to worry about?”
“No, no problem, this thing turns on a dime. Do you mean to say you know where we are?”
“Not only do I know where you are,” Lex sounded that particular version of smug that only Lex knew how to be. “I know how fast you’re going. If you were an electron, that would be very impressive I’ll have you know.” Lex cleared their throat. “Anyway, I think we should be able to get some people to intercept you and take you to the closest port crystal within… say one hour?”
“One hour, huh?” Alicia asked, taking this opportunity to take in the situation she found herself in. “Could you be a dear and make that two hours actually?”
“Oh, sure, that’s as easy as me taking a lunch break. Do I… want to know why you need that extra hour?”
“I’ll tell you when you’re older darling. Love you.” Alicia made a kissing sound and disconnected the call.

“I’m sorry that was…”
“A communication device from your world that Exalted Lex has managed to make work?” Lia suggested.
“Yes. Exactly. How did you know?”
“I try to keep up with what Exalted Lex tries to do in their experiments. I’m no wizard, but their approach is fascinating.” Lia sounded somewhat self-conscious about this, but it made sense. Lex believed information should be free, and was one hell of a chatterbox as a direct consequence of that. “Now Alicia, are you going to tell me what you needed to postpone our rescue for?” Lia asked, like she didn’t already know.
“Shush you,” Alicia murmured and finally closed the distance and found, to her delight, that it was every bit the wonder she’d wanted it to be.
And so, in a rock moving every bit as fast as the Mountain Wind that gave Alicia her Steppefolk name through the cold, barren emptiness of the void; for about 95 minutes, everything was lovely and honest and close and warm and beautiful. Alicia had to concede that while the reason she was out here wasn’t good, something good, potentially multiple good things, had come of it.
Lia and Alicia was back in their clothes, albeit somewhat disheveled-looking, by the time Lex contacted them to ask them to slow down ‘whatever voidborne superhorse you two are on’ a little so that the rescue could begin proper.

Author’s Notes: The scene inside the Stone Sphere was the first scene that came to me in this book, and while it always is a relief to get to such a scene, writing it can feel quite scary. I think it ended up pretty good if I can say so myself. It feels a bit different to my usual approach stylistically, but a little change-up in style can be refreshing at times don’t you think? Anyway, the next chapter will be the closing chapter in this here book, and after that I will go on my usual outlining hiatus, but I do have some other stuff from the world of Thereafter that I want to share with you during the hiatus this time, so stay tuned. In closing, let me wish all my readers a very good International Worker’s Day, and saying, without getting into a whole Thing about it, that it is more important now than ever before to remember that we’re all in this together, and that together we are strong.

Catch you next time for the denouement

VSD