He reached out without a word and laid a hand on my leg.
It wasn’t a sexual thing that time, but I sucked in a breath anyway, feeling him all around me, invisible hands shoving at me, pushing me out of my body until...
...I feel myself leaving.
I can’t stop it.
The car disappears like a shadow in brilliant light along with slices of road visible through a mud-spotted windshield, the plastic saint statue glued to the dashboard, the handcuffs, my bruised legs, his shirt collar with the dried blood...
I pass through what feels like a stretched membrane...
...and find myself once again in that endless black and violet sky.
The colors shock me back into remembrance.
It is a place without walls, with only dimension and light.
Here, though, with only him and away from San Francisco, the dreamlike place seems more real somehow, less abstract even than the world in the car with the ocean sliding by behind his long body and dark hair.
We are alone, surrounded only by distant stars and lumbering clouds.
Subtleties of light pull my attention from all sides. It is more than I can take in...the stars, the strange, river-like currents I can feel, flowing above and below where we stand, filled with flecks of different colored lights that dart and glint just past my awareness. A kind of prismatic wind ripples the light veins in my limbs, penetrating my light-filled skin.
Above us both, clouds so vast and mountainous trek inexorably by, moving so silently that to watch them float strains my mind.
I could spend hours looking only at him.
He stands beside me in this dark, star-filled space, carved in detailed gold and white and deep red lights. Bones, muscles, teeth, veins, irises, hair and skin are replicated in a million subtle shades and hues, all moving so fast the colors appear almost to be stable, even though waves flicker through the whole, changing them and him subtly and silently.
The space directly over his head fascinates me the most. There rotate complex geometries, like living math equations, perhaps thoughts rendered into multi-dimensional shapes. They look more complicated than that, though. I sense something else, too...presence maybe, but also a feeling of, I don’t know...function. As if those things I’m seeing have a use, as if they embody a direct functionality of some kind. Whatever they are, I definitely don’t get the impression they are just a bunch of pretty lights. I assume it must be some element of seer biology, or maybe something more subtle than that, more difficult to translate into words.#p#分页标题#e#
One thing is for sure: he is nothing like the man in the park.
He shines with a clear glow that is vastly different than Terian...and yet, he is not soft here, either. His eyes are diamond white, carrying a faint edge.
I am still staring at him when he points.
Some part of me follows.
I see nothing at first. Nothing but clouds and stars, endless skyscapes made of shifting dark, woven through with subtle frequencies of presence and light.
Light remains even in the darkest segments of that night, I realize, arrayed in more colors than those for which my mind has names.
Beings dart from and into those massive thunderheads.
They remind me of old woodcuts of tentacled leviathans surrounded by underwater forests. Some are singing. Watching them, I know I should be more afraid.
The man with me watches me, too.
I feel his attention on me as I flinch, reacting to a giant beast with whipping tail and claws that wings over our heads, screaming without sound.
It will not hurt you, he reassures me. You are not of its kind.
Where are we? I wonder.
Instead of answering, he points down.
Two long, twisting trails of light, one white and gold, the other a different shade of gold and white, loop languidly from our feet. I follow the course of those lights and find I can see any distance along their length.
At the bottom is a circle of blue daylight.
There, a black-haired man drives a car, blood staining the collar of his shirt. His hands grip a leather-wrapped steering wheel as he leans back in his seat, and next to him, a girl with matted blond hair with dark roots leans against the car door, her wrists handcuffed to the armrest and a big bruise on her arm, probably from when I got thrown against that tree in the park.
I look dirty to myself, exhausted, bruised. I have a bruise on my face and dried blood at my hairline. My eyes are closed. Slumped against the door, my body bounces lightly from the car’s motion.
Landscape flows by as he steers us to a frontage road. His eyes appear to shine white; I do not know how they would look to others, or even to me, down in that car.
To humans, I look normal. To seers, too, down there. After a pause, he adds, You are unique in that regard, Alyson...although it is rumored that Syrimne shared this trait with you. Humans and seers can see it in the physical world when you operate your light at certain frequencies. It is possibly something I can train you to control...