Lewis retrieved the plastic stopper on the little perfume bottle and dumped both bottle and stopper into the pocket of his blue jeans. “Are you ready?” he asked me.
I was still on a redecorating high. “Are you kidding?” I couldn’t control the laugh that bubbled up out of me, fierce and hot with delight. “Show me the problem. Damn, this is good!”
I felt him rise up. Since he was human, he didn’t disappear in the real world; his body just stayed there, temporarily vacant. I rose with him, noting with interest the silvery cord that connected him back to his flesh, and emerged into the negative-space glittering fairyland that was the aetheric plane. It got more beautiful every time I visited, I discovered. Maybe my Djinn eyes were still adjusting, but whatever caused it, the colors were stronger this time, the glitter and shimmer and depth of them more intense. Lewis had an aura like milk glass, cool at the moment but far stronger than anything I’d seen on a human before. Not like a Djinn aura, either. Something… unique.
Human voices didn’t carry well up here, so he touched me and pointed. I grabbed on to him—he was still solid here, and more or less the same in form—and we began to move across the landscape, heading up and at an angle to the right.
Way up. Way, way up. The earth curved away beneath us at the edges, pearl-bright and beautiful, misted in clouds. He kept pulling me. I felt what little resistance there was to aetheric travel—and there had to be some, for reasons of not-so-simple physics— begin to lessen. We were reaching the edges of where it was safe for a Warden to go.
I let go of him and hovered next to him. He lifted his hand again and pointed. This time I could feel the force of will that went with it, the compulsion that would guide me to the destination.
Way the hell out there. Farther than even Patrick had taken me.
Into someplace that, in this reality, wasn’t even really space.
I had no choice, I found; I was already moving. I felt Lewis’s hand touch me one last time, gently, as I darted away, swimming like a fast, elegant mermaid through that sea of increasingly thin resistance.
I set myself to glide the rest of the way, and before long I saw it. Not so much a presence as an absence; space out here was big and empty and a kind of neutral gray, shot here and there with fleeting speckles of power being transferred from one place to another. I braked myself, spreading thin against the barely felt touch of the sun, and hovered, considering the problem. The Void didn’t manifest itself here, on this plane. I’d have to go up to see it.
Up from the aetheric are other levels, but David had already warned me not to go exploring on my own without a guide; David, however, was nowhere to be seen. And I had a compulsion.
Three layers up was the highest possible level of the known universe, at least the highest we could reach. Its most primitive, primal form. The black-and-white template for the sixteen million colors used back on Earth. It was hard to focus on anything for long, because there were no familiar landmarks, nothing that conformed to human sensibilities. Just swirls, drifts, eddies. I couldn’t even get a sense of the rhythm of the place, although I was sure it had one. Either the heartbeat was so simple and subtle it defied detection, or so complex and multilayered I couldn’t hope to understand it. Either way, not helpful.
It took me a while, watching, to realize that there was a kind of order to the chaos.
Everything moved the same direction. It moved in circles, sometimes, but the circles were always counterclockwise, just like the flow of the wind-fluid-matter stream.
There was one area moving the other direction. Clockwise. I focused on it, stared hard, and felt a kind of absence there, a kind of gray confusion. It didn’t want to be found, this thing. It was a trap door into our world, and it was designed to stay hidden. I drifted slowly over to it, moving against the current, and paused at the very edges of the spiral.
It felt like… nothing. In fact, I couldn’t even be sure that I’d touched it at all, except visually, where the fog phased into a bluish color as it came into contact with my presently-not-solid form. Was that good? I couldn’t tell. My senses weren’t helping me out at all on this one. As far as I could tell, this swirling eddy looked just like all the other swirling eddies, except that this one went right instead of left. Not a lot to go on, really. I would have preferred a nice big sign that said this way to the void, but I supposed I’d have to settle for what I could get.
I reached for the hot golden flow of Lewis’s power, and began the strange job of closing off the rift. Where I touched the moving pool of energy, I sampled the normal space around it and began replicating it over the tear. It was a little like darning— take good material, stretch it over bad stuff, tack it in place.