The air pressure dropped.
My right ear popped. My left ear popped a half-second later. The chiller, which had been humming since seven, stopped humming.
The building went quiet in a new way.
I walked toward the glass.
My left hand left the rail. My right hand came out of the kangaroo pocket. The whole inside of my body was the small bright forward-tilt of the moment before a jump take-off, the moment your body knows what it is about to do before your brain does, and I had not felt that forward-tilt in nine years and I felt it now, and I was already moving when I felt it.
The far rink glass—the panel directly in front of me, the one at center, the one that had just held the woman in the black dress with the silver beading—looked, up close, like the surface of a still pool seen from above. Pale. Faintly silvered. The reflection had gone. The amber light had gone. What was in the glass now was a long thin high sky in a color I did not have a word for, and underneath that sky, very far down, the shape of something thatmight have been a tower, or a needle, or a finger raised, white and gold and shining and so far away it was a rumor.
It smelled of cold water. It smelled of clean stone. It smelled, faintly, of something I want to say was honey or old paper but was neither. Some smells are not the thing they remind you of, justnearthe thing.
I pressed my bare right hand to the glass.
It gave.
It gave like water. It gave like silk. It gave, around the heel of my palm and around each of my fingers in turn, with a small cool patient yielding, and the cold of it ran up the inside of my forearm and into the hollow of my elbow and sat there like a hand had been laid against the inside of my skin. There was no pain. There was, instead,recognition. The cold knew me. The cold had been waiting. The cold, in some long quiet way I could not yet name and was not going to be allowed to refuse, had beenexpectingme.
Somewhere on the far side of the glass, very far down, the white-and-gold needle on the long thin horizon caught a light I could not see the source of, and shone.
I stepped through.
Chapter 2
Thefloorundermyfeet was not rubber matting anymore.
I looked down.
At first I thought I had stepped onto the ice. A smooth, colorless surface, slightly slippery.
White marble. Polished to a depth I could see into. Veined with gold, except the gold was not the dead gold of stone—it was moving, slow, as rivers move in aerial footage, threading through the marble in long languid loops that did not behave the way veins of metal behave in any rock I had ever seen.
I was transfixed by it, eyes following the veins. Without thinking, I leaned down, placed a palm to the surface. The marble was cold. Mountain cold.
I lifted my head.
The hall, if hall was the word, opened.
It opened upward into a vault of shimmering gold so high that my eye refused, at first, to climb it. Columns. White columns veined with the same living gold, each one as wide around as a small car, soaring up and up and up and meeting overheadin arches that knew what they were doing. The light came from everywhere. There was no source. The light was just present, like light from a dream.
There were no walls.
That was the second thing I knew, and it took longer than the first. Where walls should have been there were only colonnades, and beyond the colonnades there was sky—a sky going from a low bronze at the horizon up through a long slow lavender and into something deeper at the top of the vault, a color I want to call indigo but the word is wrong, a color I had never experienced before. Not like this, not with this much vibrance. Beyond the colonnades, beyond the sky, beyond the columns, was a drop. I did not have to walk to the edge to know it was a drop. The wind told me. The wind moved through the hall in long clean unhurried passes, and it smelled of cold water and clean stone and something faintly sweet underneath that I want to say was honey or old paper but was neither.
I knew that smell. I had smelled it half a minute ago, with my hand on the rink glass.
My right ear popped. My left ear popped a beat after.
The wind moved my hair, what wasn’t in the braid, the small flyaways at my temple. It moved the loose paw of the cougar on my fleece.
My shoulders came forward without me asking them to. I had spent nine years rounding my shoulders in rooms I felt too big for, in rinks and grocery stores and the lobby of my own apartment building, and the muscle memory was so absolute that the magnificent hall around me hit it like a hammer hits a bell. My weight shifted back. My right hand went into the kangaroo pocket of the hoodie and my left hand came up and crossed my chest and held my right elbow, the small inward-folding posture I had developed in the year after Tokyo.
I bit the inside of my left cheek.
It felt like I was back there. Back on the rink. Exposed.
The room, the columns, the gold, the bronze-going-lavender sky, the drop, the wind. It was too beautiful for me. Too wondrous. Like skating, I didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry, I almost said. To the hall. To the columns. To the marble.
