decision and went further.
Further over.
All the way.
People often say that when I have my Aspect on, it makes me feel more solid, heavier, as if I acquired gravity with a flick of thought. Maybe they’re right; it can feel that way to me, too. When you can punch your fingers into brick, you need another way to think about the world, and physics, and physicality.
But I think it’s mental more than aspectual. Aspective. Aspectant. Whatever. Or maybe it’s instinctual. Instinctive. Cats can do it. Tybs can be so light on his feet in your lap that you think he’s all fluff and no body; then he curls himself up for a sleep and suddenly you’re cuddling a cannonball in a fur coat.
Anyway. I had been hanging back over the edge there, trusting Jacey to counterbalance me, both of us caught in equipoise, almost no work at all for either one.
I trusted him; I guess he trusted me.
Now I made myself abruptly heavy. You wouldn’t have moved me, if I’d been standing on the ground. Suspended in mid-air, nobody could have held me then: not even a Power.
Jacey would have let me go, except I didn’t let him.
With my legs locked tight around his waist and my hands reaching up now to grab his arms, there was no way he was slithering free to be left behind for the Corbie.
I toppled backwards, and he came too: over the railing and down, down and down into that long waiting fall.
CHAPTER SIX
H OW FAR WAS it?
Thirty feet or so, I guess. I wasn’t really counting.
Mostly, as we fell, I was unhooking myself from Jacey, fending him off. Either one of us would make a softer landing for the other, but – well, sometimes it’s not about sacrifice. Not when one of you is feeling particularly... concentrated, and the other is an unknown quantity. On an earthly scale, Jacey outweighed me by a distance; add that he’s the son of two Powers, possibly the sum of two Powers, and I wasn’t sure that he couldn’t push his fingers into solid marble if he felt like it.
Into solid marble, or into solid me.
I just didn’t know. I’d pulled him off the balcony in case we were wrong one way; I pushed him away from me as we fell in case we were wrong the other way. I didn’t want to break his ribs, landing on him; I really didn’t want him to shatter mine.
Two young fit people who know what they’re doing shouldn’t be too shaken by a thirty-foot drop. We’d both done parachute jumps, individually and together; we’d both done martial arts. We knew how to fall, in a simply human way – as witness, here we were, falling – but we knew how to land, too.
Besides which, he was Jacey Cathar and I was Desdaemona. I really wasn’t worried about the fall, or the coming to ground after.
So long as I wasn’t wrong about Jacey the other way. So long as we didn’t find out the hard way – the extremely hard way – that actually he had human-normal bones in there. Thirty feet onto parquet is really quite a long way to fall, if you’re not ready for it. Perhaps I should be pulling him close, falling beneath him, giving him that softer landing after all...
Thirty feet is plenty of time to second-guess yourself. If you remember your high-school physics, maybe it doesn’t seem so much – thirty-two feet per second per second, it only takes a second to fall that far – but trust me. Second thoughts don’t take as long as that. Your mind fills fast when it’s flooding with fret and regret.
Still. I’d done what I could, or at least what I’d done; it was done now. Nothing to do but fall, until we hit.
Then nothing to do but “Oof!” – daemon or Power or not. Oof is an active verb, all about impact. Flesh and bone, decelerating hard. From 32 fps squared to nothing, in nothing flat. Hope not to be too flat.
Then nothing to do but ride that impact, roll with it, spend a little of that vicious energy in movement.
More of it had gone straight into the floor. I’d never broken parquet before; I hadn’t known that
Further over.
All the way.
People often say that when I have my Aspect on, it makes me feel more solid, heavier, as if I acquired gravity with a flick of thought. Maybe they’re right; it can feel that way to me, too. When you can punch your fingers into brick, you need another way to think about the world, and physics, and physicality.
But I think it’s mental more than aspectual. Aspective. Aspectant. Whatever. Or maybe it’s instinctual. Instinctive. Cats can do it. Tybs can be so light on his feet in your lap that you think he’s all fluff and no body; then he curls himself up for a sleep and suddenly you’re cuddling a cannonball in a fur coat.
Anyway. I had been hanging back over the edge there, trusting Jacey to counterbalance me, both of us caught in equipoise, almost no work at all for either one.
I trusted him; I guess he trusted me.
Now I made myself abruptly heavy. You wouldn’t have moved me, if I’d been standing on the ground. Suspended in mid-air, nobody could have held me then: not even a Power.
Jacey would have let me go, except I didn’t let him.
With my legs locked tight around his waist and my hands reaching up now to grab his arms, there was no way he was slithering free to be left behind for the Corbie.
I toppled backwards, and he came too: over the railing and down, down and down into that long waiting fall.
CHAPTER SIX
H OW FAR WAS it?
Thirty feet or so, I guess. I wasn’t really counting.
Mostly, as we fell, I was unhooking myself from Jacey, fending him off. Either one of us would make a softer landing for the other, but – well, sometimes it’s not about sacrifice. Not when one of you is feeling particularly... concentrated, and the other is an unknown quantity. On an earthly scale, Jacey outweighed me by a distance; add that he’s the son of two Powers, possibly the sum of two Powers, and I wasn’t sure that he couldn’t push his fingers into solid marble if he felt like it.
Into solid marble, or into solid me.
I just didn’t know. I’d pulled him off the balcony in case we were wrong one way; I pushed him away from me as we fell in case we were wrong the other way. I didn’t want to break his ribs, landing on him; I really didn’t want him to shatter mine.
Two young fit people who know what they’re doing shouldn’t be too shaken by a thirty-foot drop. We’d both done parachute jumps, individually and together; we’d both done martial arts. We knew how to fall, in a simply human way – as witness, here we were, falling – but we knew how to land, too.
Besides which, he was Jacey Cathar and I was Desdaemona. I really wasn’t worried about the fall, or the coming to ground after.
So long as I wasn’t wrong about Jacey the other way. So long as we didn’t find out the hard way – the extremely hard way – that actually he had human-normal bones in there. Thirty feet onto parquet is really quite a long way to fall, if you’re not ready for it. Perhaps I should be pulling him close, falling beneath him, giving him that softer landing after all...
Thirty feet is plenty of time to second-guess yourself. If you remember your high-school physics, maybe it doesn’t seem so much – thirty-two feet per second per second, it only takes a second to fall that far – but trust me. Second thoughts don’t take as long as that. Your mind fills fast when it’s flooding with fret and regret.
Still. I’d done what I could, or at least what I’d done; it was done now. Nothing to do but fall, until we hit.
Then nothing to do but “Oof!” – daemon or Power or not. Oof is an active verb, all about impact. Flesh and bone, decelerating hard. From 32 fps squared to nothing, in nothing flat. Hope not to be too flat.
Then nothing to do but ride that impact, roll with it, spend a little of that vicious energy in movement.
More of it had gone straight into the floor. I’d never broken parquet before; I hadn’t known that
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