Chapter 2: The Woman Who Published Nothing

"Pronto," she said, and then, because the word had been a reflex and not a welcome, "who is this."

Her voice was thinner than he remembered. Sharper around the edges. The line picked up a faint sound behind her, water in a kettle or wind against a window. He put his hand flat on his knee and kept his voice where he wanted it.

"Doctor Marchetti. My name is Felix Ward. We haven't met. I'm calling from California."

"Then you have the wrong number."

"I don't."

A pause. A small impatient breath.

"I'm not accepting students," she said. "I don't know how you got this line. Lose it."

"I can sense the field," Felix said. Plain. No weight on it. "Not well. I've been holding a compression for about forty minutes without breaking it and I can feel my ceiling. I need to learn how to get past that ceiling before Tuesday. I'm not asking you to teach me. I'm asking you to look at me once and tell me whether what I'm doing is going to kill me."

The line stayed open. He heard her set something down. A cup, possibly. Or a pen.

"Tuesday," she said.

"Tuesday."

"Felix Ward." She tasted the name, found nothing on it. "You understand I have heard every version of this call, boy."

"I don't doubt it."

"And you think yours is different."

"I think it won't take you thirty seconds to decide whether it is."

The kettle, if it was a kettle, clicked off behind her. She did not speak for a long moment, and he did not fill the space, because filling the space was the shape of every version of the call she had already heard.

"One visit," she said finally. "My door. Not inside. You come today before noon or you do not come at all. If I don't like what I see, you do not call this number again."

"Understood."

"Eleven," she said, and gave him a street number in a Berkeley-adjacent neighborhood he already knew, and ended the call without saying goodbye.

He sat looking at the dark screen of the phone for three breaths. Then he stood up, because he had a little over two hours and a body that had not been outside yet in this timeline.

• • •

He showered fast and cold. He put on a black t-shirt, denim that fit worse than he remembered, and the jacket that had been hanging on the back of the door for three years and was no longer technically the shape of a jacket. He ate a banana because there was a banana. He filled the thermos with the tea he had made for himself at seven and had not touched, because good tea was a currency that cost him nothing and sometimes bought him a sentence.

Rideshare would be faster. He took his own car anyway, because he did not want anyone in a database logging the address on a day before he knew what that address was going to become. The car was a beige ten-year-old sedan that started on the second try and smelled faintly of old coffee. The thermos rode in the passenger footwell, because the seat tilted forward and he did not feel like fixing it.

The bay bridge was half-empty in the late morning. He ran the sentence in his head, the one he had already given her and would not need again. He discarded three alternates on the way across the water. On the Oakland side, a Zenith billboard angled over the freeway in matte black and clean white: a single open hand, palm up, with the faintest shimmer across it that was not quite CGI and not quite anything else. *STEWARDS OF A NEW MEDIUM.* He glanced at it once and set it down, the way he had learned to set down the orange-cream light in his apartment window. Nothing in that sentence meant what it said, and he had seventy-one hours to not get drawn into parsing it.

Near the off-ramp a queue of people in branded hoodies snaked around a capsule-bay storefront, preordering their floor-time or waiting for demos. He did not look at their faces.

• • •

Her street was narrow and old, houses crouched shoulder to shoulder behind tired front gardens. The one he wanted had a low fence, a rosemary bush somebody had given up on, and a concrete path cracked neatly down the middle. A maglev line hummed two blocks over, the way it had hummed over his own apartment, which was either coincidence or a small joke from whatever had sent him back.

He parked across the street. He left the thermos in the footwell, because arriving with a gift would look like a bribe, and took it with him at the last second, because not arriving with one would look like he thought he didn't need to. He crossed the street with the thermos in his left hand.

The screen door did not latch. Behind it, the inner door stood open onto a shadowed hall, and behind that, someone was moving in a kitchen he could not see. He rang the bell once and stepped back to the bottom of the two-step porch so she would have height on him when she came to the door.

She came to the door.

She was smaller than the phone had made her sound. Seventies rather than early sixties, he thought, and then he corrected — no, sixty-three, but sixty-three carried badly. Silver braid pinned up, dark eyes in a web of lines that were not the laughing kind today, a thin technical shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbow. She kept the screen between them. She did not unlock it.

"You're early," she said.

"By six minutes."

"Two questions." She didn't invite him up. "Who told you I was teaching."

"Nobody." He kept his eyes level through the mesh. "I heard you speak at a symposium I shouldn't have been at. A while back. I remembered the name."

It was half true. He had heard her speak, once, on a recording Rhea had given him in a cellar in the second year of the apocalypse. He let her have the half.

"Mm." She did not blink. "Second. Why Tuesday."

He felt the shape of the honest answer in his chest and set it aside. "Because after Tuesday I won't have time."

"That is not an answer."

"It's the one I've got."

Her hand moved to the inside latch. He watched it move. The screen was going to close in about two seconds, and after it closed the phone number was going to stop working. He had known this was possible. He had not, in the two hours since he had hung up, allowed himself to plan for it.

He sat down.

Not dramatically. He turned, put the thermos on the top step behind him, and sat on the lower step with his back to her door and his forearms on his knees. He heard the screen door stop moving.

"Get off my step," she said.

"In a minute."

He closed his eyes.

He had been holding the compression since the shower, loosely, the way you hold a kite string on a no-wind day. He drew it in. Not toward his chest, which was how he had taught himself to do it in his first life, but along the centerline he had been testing this morning. Down the sternum. Into the diaphragm. A held beat, shorter than was comfortable. Out through the left arm and into the cup of his palm, where he held his hand loose and upward on his knee.

The thread was thin. He had said forty minutes on the phone, and forty minutes had been optimistic by about ten. The burr was there, small and wrong on the note, a rebirth artifact he still did not understand. He did not chase it. He compressed around it and kept going.

The first pressure came up against his sternum the way it had all morning. He pushed, gently, and it went. He inhaled again, shorter. The pressure shifted, and for a beat he felt it travel, actually travel, from the center of his chest along the line of his arm in a way that was not the diffuse leaking he had been managing since dawn. Something pushed behind his eyes. He ignored it.

The air above his palm thickened.

It was small. It was crude. For maybe two seconds, a shimmer sat a few centimeters above his cupped hand, the way heat sat above pavement in summer, except the air around him was sixty degrees and still. A neighbor's cooking smell drifted past his shoulder. He did not move his hand. He kept the draw going.

Warmth ran over his upper lip.

He did not touch it. The shimmer died first, slowly, going thin and then going nothing. Then he let the compression go, and the pressure behind his eyes let go with it, and he lifted his free hand and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. The blood was bright and there was more of it than he had meant there to be. It ran down onto his jacket cuff. He looked at it for a beat, then looked up.

She was not standing behind the screen anymore. She was standing in the doorway with the screen open, holding a tissue box against her hip.

"Get up," she said. She did not sound kind. "Shoes on the mat."

He got up. His legs were not entirely steady, which annoyed him, so he took the porch step slow enough to pretend otherwise. She handed him two tissues without looking at his face.

"Shoes," she repeated.

He left them on a braided mat inside the door. The hallway smelled of old paper and bergamot and, faintly, the cooking from next door coming through an open kitchen window somewhere at the back of the house. She did not wait for him. She walked into a room on the right and he followed with the tissues pressed to his nose.

What had been a dining room once was a working space now. One window was half-blocked by a gray filing cabinet. A desk built for somebody who still used paper sat under it, and on the desk a brass pendulum the length of his hand hung from a small stand, motionless, a measurable degree off true. The walls were covered. Hand-drawn spirals, most of them in black ink on yellowing stock, a few in a blue that was not quite blue and a violet that was not quite violet. A printer he had last seen in a school district office wheezed to itself in the corner. On a small shelf near the door, a tarnished brass tray held keys and a thimble and two or three coins he did not allow his eye to stop on.

"Ink," she said, catching the direction of his glance as he scanned the wall. "I mix my own. Commercial doesn't get the frequency right."

He didn't ask. He filed it.

"Stool," she said, and pointed.

The stool was low, backless, and wooden. He sat on it with the tissues still at his nose. The bleeding was slowing. She came around in front of him and looked at him for a full three seconds without speaking, and it was the first time he had been properly seen since he had woken up, and he made himself not flinch from it.

"Take that down," she said, meaning the tissue. He did. She put two fingers against his sternum, gently, and pressed. "You are pulling from here."

"Yes."

"Stop." She moved her other hand to the base of his skull, thumb and forefinger, and adjusted his head a quarter-inch. "Sit tall. Not military. Tall like you are listening for something two rooms away."

He sat tall.

"Breathe in four. Hold two. Not four, two. Four is vanity. Out six. Do it."

He did it.

"Again. On the out, you are not pushing to your palm. You are going down the line. Sternum, diaphragm, hip, floor. Mana is mana. It does not care where it is. It cares how you hold it."

He did it again. The draw was different than he had been running. Quieter. He had been treating compression as a muscle and she was treating it as a posture. On the third cycle the thread came in along the centerline the way it had on the porch, but without the shove he had used to get there, and the pressure did not stack behind his eyes. It settled in his hips instead. He felt his weight change on the stool.

"Better," she said, neutrally, not as praise. Her fingers lifted off his sternum. "You were bleeding because you were squeezing something that does not like to be squeezed. It likes to be placed."

He nodded once, carefully, because her other hand was still near his neck.

She stepped back. "Again."

He ran the cycle three more times. On the fourth she moved behind him without warning and adjusted his left shoulder by a degree. On the fifth she said, mildly, as if it were a weather observation, "Whoever wrote the Zenith capsule specs got two of the thresholds wrong. Not in a direction you could do commercially by accident. Either they have someone brilliant, or they have someone who isn't entirely the one writing the specs."

He did not open his eyes. He filed it. He kept breathing.

She let him run two more cycles without speaking. Then she said, quietly, "The field is thickening this decade. You feel it too."

It was not a question.

He breathed in four, held two, breathed out six. He did not answer. He felt her watching the side of his face, not his hand, and he felt her not ask the question behind the question. He let the silence sit. On the exhale he let the thread go to the floor and kept his eyes closed until the room came back to its ordinary weight.

When he opened them she had turned away and was at the desk. She touched a key. The old printer wheezed, clicked, and began to roll out a single sheet.

"Forty-eight hours," she said, without turning. "You run this cycle every waking hour for ten minutes. Not longer. If you bleed, you stop for that cycle and you drink water. If you bleed twice in a row, you stop for the day, and you come back tomorrow instead of the day after, and I will tell you why."

"Understood."

"Dawn on day two. Not late. Dawn means before sunrise. I have coffee. You will not want it."

"Understood."

She lifted the page off the printer, folded it once along the spine of the spiral diagram so the cadence markings faced inward, and held it out. He stood up from the stool, took it, and slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

She walked him back down the hall. She did not hurry him and she did not make small talk. He stepped down onto the mat and put his shoes on, one and then the other, and noticed that his hands were steadier than they had been when he had come in, which was either the drill or the fact that somebody else in the world now knew what he could do.

She held the screen door for him. He picked up the thermos from the top step where he had left it and, after a half second, held it out.

"Tea," he said. "Good one. You can keep the thermos."

She looked at it. She took it. She did not say thank you.

On the threshold, with her body half-turned away from him and her hand on the inside frame, she said, "Whatever you think is coming, you are not the only one who has been waiting for it."

She shut the door.

He stood on the porch for a breath. The rosemary bush, dead at the tips, rustled once in a wind he could not feel on his face. Then he went down the two steps and across the cracked concrete path and across the street to the beige sedan, with the folded page inside his jacket pressed flat against his ribs and the crumpled tissue still balled in his left hand.

He got into the driver's seat. He did not start the engine. He set the tissue on the passenger seat, where the thermos had been, and put both hands on the wheel at ten and two, and let himself register, for one clean second, what had just happened.

She had known before he had opened his mouth. Not the specifics. The shape. She had been waiting, for how long he did not know, for someone to sit on her porch and push the field into a shimmer and pay for it with a nosebleed. She had watched for it the way a person watched for weather. That was a different problem than the one he had driven out here to solve. He did not catalog the implications. He did not need to, yet.

He flexed his fingers on the wheel. The burr on the thread was still there, quiet under his attention. The drill was folded against his chest. Dawn on day two was now a fixed point, which meant so was everything else.

He started the engine on the first try. He checked his mirror once. Her porch receded in it, narrow and unremarkable, the screen door already closed, the rosemary still dead at the tips. He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.

Seventy-one hours to launch. Forty-six to dawn. He drove.