“I think the entrance is over there.” Daniel points in an unhelpful direction. “There should be a trail from there to the reference desk.”
Daniel pushes on. It never occurs to him that he takes larger and faster steps than everyone else. Ellie jogs to keep up. In his defense, this is working better for her than walking. The haze stops her feet when she kicks and her body is pushed in Daniel’s direction.
“How are you so comfortable with this?” Ellie’s head spins with each step.
“Oh, Ahdi would set me on some obstacle course in some universe with a ridiculous number of dimensions.”
Bookcases slide past each other, vertices of intersecting cubes that revolve through each other as they meet. They also make Ellie feel like she’s spinning as she jogs. Half her footfalls hit in some direction that’s almost, but not quite, down.
Daniel stops. Ellie crashes into him. It’s like slamming into a slab of steel. He seems not to notice except for one reflexive arm stretched out behind him to steady her.
“Can you hang on to me for this next bit?” The expression on Daniel’s face, sheepish and hangdog, is kind of epic. “It’s nothing you can’t do silently, but you’re having issues orienting yourself in this universe, and I really don’t want to get caught.”
If there’s anything Ellie finds frustrating, it’s an apologetic Daniel. That she’s dead certain he’s trying his damnedest to not look like an existential ache racks his soul is bad enough. That he’s failing makes it worse.
“Fine.” Her tone makes it clear that while she should be insulted, she’s not, but she really wants to be. “If I have to.”
Daniel turns into a one-man roller coaster. Traveling on foot will get them caught, apparently, because he’s gone off the habit. Instead, outstretched, he soars in graceful arcs. His every movement is gentle and smooth, slicing through the fluid haze rather than crashing into it as it seizes. The motion is utterly silent, even when the arc ends with him clinging to the backside of some bookcase.
Despite what Daniel said, he’s definitely doing at least one thing she can’t. Her arms are too short to span the bookcase. Daniel grabs both edges of a bookcase at once. His body is in an unreasonably stable inverted iron cross. This, of course, wedges Ellie between his body and the back of a bookcase. Just as obviously, this doesn’t occur to Daniel until after he does it.
“Oh, sorry,” Daniel murmurs. “I forgot you were there.”
“How do you forget someone hanging on to you?”
“It’s not like you weigh anything.” He sounds extremely defensive.
She bites down her response. Daniel will be Daniel. In the world according to Daniel, he is the typical one. Everyone else is short and small. Nothing about him could possibly be worth pointing out. In any case, like him, she’s upside down. The longer they talk,the longer she has to engage her core to avoid flopping over, and it’s starting to burn.
Ellie has no idea where they’re going. Bookcases revolve around her in way too many degrees of freedom. After every move, they are inevitably on top of, hanging off of, or stretched behind one bookcase or another. Daniel stops to listen. The clicks sound like they’re coming from all around Ellie. They don’t sound any louder or softer than before.
Someone speaks. Daniel’s head snaps in the direction of the voice. Ellie recognizes the language. It’s the lingua franca her mom taught her from birth. Unlike Mandarin, she can count the number of times she’s used it to speak to someone she didn’t know.
“This is ridiculous. You’re clearly one of Ahdi’s, or I would have tracked you down by now.” The voice is low, hollow, and a little breathy. “Show yourself, we’ll go to the reference desk, then you can go back to whatever you were researching.”
A kind referral is not what Ellie expected. Chris has scared Ellie with stories about isolationists ever since she was a kid. Even if isolationists have been nothing more than convenient scapegoats for Chris, it’s not like Ellie has heard anything about them from anyone else.
Ellie peers past the edge of a bookcase in the direction of Daniel’s gaze. The librarian looks like a tree trunk merged onto a giant spider and is closer than she expected, only a few bookcases away. A gauzy tunic with sleeves fitted around the segment branches cover the tree-trunk-like torso. An elegant wrap surrounds the giant, spider-like lower body. Segmented legs distribute weight onto eight points against the haze. The librarian clearly has no problems staying stable and upright.
There are an infinite number of cultures. Ellie doesn’t recognize the librarian’s at all, although she’s sure Mom must have at least mentioned it at some point. Daniel looks puzzled. Giventhat it’s Daniel, this doesn’t have to mean anything, but he probably doesn’t recognize the librarian either. So much for following Daniel’s lead as she had with Xu.
Looking at the librarian, Ellie decides she and Daniel are in trouble but not in any actual danger. It’s not that the librarian couldn’t cause some serious damage if they wanted to. The twig-like fingers radiating off the hand on each of their branches end in points as sharp as the points of their legs. They are, however, curled back, safely out of the way. The librarian’s branches cross each other, and one of their legs taps the haze. They look peeved, not ready to attack.
“We’re over here.” Ellie ignores Daniel’s glare and waves smoothly, rippling the haze.
“That close?” Their voice rises. “I should have heard you.”
Ellie tugs at Daniel, and he reluctantly comes along. They emerge from one side of the bookcase, Daniel wearing his most irked face. The librarian skitters back a few steps at the sight of him.
“Of course. You.” One of their tree-branch limbs points at Daniel, as though that explained everything. “A veritable silent sirocco, sweeping undetected through the archive.”
Ellie’s eyes dart between the librarian and a very surprised Daniel. His mouth forms a small O but he doesn’t say anything.
“We’ve met once. Daniel is memorable in spite of themself.” The librarian’s gaze sweeps Daniel up and down, mostly up. “They were a bit occupied at the time so I’m not surprised they don’t remember.”
The lingua franca doesn’t mark pronouns for gender. Sadly, the verb-tense system is ridiculously complicated. In Mandarin, Ellie had any number of conversations with her mom where Mom spent most of it correcting Ellie’s measure words. When they spoke in this lingua franca, Mom corrected her verbs.
“How does everybody know you?” After some wandering, Ellie’s gaze finally lands on Daniel. “Is there anybody you don’t know?”
