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'Hey, Pomni! If you fall asleep in me, I'm gonna burn your face off!'
Pomni opened her eyes. The clouds were conte-crayon tangles of fluff, drifting in a perfect sky. The breeze was gentle, eternal. The sun felt beautifully warm, and sounded pathologically passive-aggressive.
'Thanks for the warning,' she said, sleepily.
'Anytime! Hey, did you know you're a Winter?'
'No...'
'Those colours really don't work on you!'
'Okay, Sun, thanks,' said Pomni, sitting up.
Her book had slipped from her lap. She reached for it, flipping to where she'd left off, pulling out a plain yellow bookmark.
Even though it was just a little thing, the easiest shape in the world, it made her smile as she tucked it between the pages. It was one of the first things she'd ever successfully conjured just for herself, this dumb little rectangle, something of simple utility- something that she'd actually managed to make stay.
She stowed the book away into wherever things went when she put them into her jerkin, and yawned, shading her eyes, fighting the urge to doze off again. The Sun had been pretty chill lately, but it was still better not to play with fire.
Wherever she was, inside or out, it was just... really nice not to feel watched all the time. It made such a big difference to know- or at least be halfway confident- that the owner of all those hundreds of all-seeing eyes was probably engaged with something trivial and harmless somewhere, as opposed to riveted on her, forever and amen, trying to analyse and deconstruct her every waking moment as if she was some combination of a casino slot machine and a Sim.
She heard soft footfalls. Turning, she spotted Ragatha heading towards her, up the winding path. She was carrying a basket, swinging it back and forth in time with her habitual demure, loose-jointed lope, humming quietly to herself.
Pomni got to her feet, brushing herself down- not that she needed to, no grime or grit or bugs in this grass to stick to her clothes or get into her shoes. No grass in this grass, either; no blades, no leaves. The lawn was velvety, like the fur of a fuzzy toy, and slightly staticky in the sun.
'Oh, hi, Pomni! What're you up to out here?'
'Just reading,' said Pomni, 'but I was kind of done.'
'Oh, did you want to walk back with me? It’s getting late.’
'Sure. I keep forgetting the day-night cycle’s an actual thing now.’ She grinned. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’
They started off together, towards the stripy red-and-yellow monolith rising against the mountains. As they walked, Pomni snuck a look into the basket swinging by Ragatha's side.
'Are those flowers from the grounds? I didn't even know you could pick those.'
'Oh! Yeah, if you cut them they just pop right back in after a minute or two. I thought they'd look nice on the table...'
Ragatha selected a flower from the basket, holding it up for her to see. It was very... flowerlike. Faithful to the theme shared by most things in the Circus, it was as like the basic concept of 'a flower' as it could possibly be. Like, in the same way an emoji was like, streamlined and quintessential, it had a round yellow heart and eight evenly-spaced teardrop-shaped petals. Each petal was a different colour of the RGB spectrum, above a straight grass-green stem with two tapered oval leaves placed in a pair.
The trade-off for being such a perfect archetype was of course that it looked like no real flower that had ever existed. And, as always, there was something just a tiny bit off. The petals were blazing with vivid colour, feverishly pure, and their texture was soft and unnatural, like chunky handmade craft paper.
Ragatha's smile was a touch rueful. 'I think they're meant to be daisies? I mean, apart from the colours, they're kinda like shastas, or really big Dahlbergs.' She laughed, getting busy, tucking the uncanny flower back into her basket and dusting off her dress. 'I'm sure they'll look okay in a nice vase.'
Pomni thought they would look like an aneurysm, but she kept it to herself.
They headed on together, walking in comfortable silence. Pomni was still thinking about the flowers. She guessed Ragatha might be, too.
'I think you said you had a big garden.'
'Huh?' Ragatha took in a quick, pleased breath. 'Oh! Yeah, I just love gardening. I had roses, and a herb garden, and all sorts. My favourites were always black-eyed susans. They're really just weeds,' she hurried, 'wild daisies, but... they grew in the fields behind our house.’
She spread her hands, framing an imaginary view. ‘They'd come out in midsummer, and when you looked out from the top of the house, you could see the meadows were just full of them, it was so… oh, it was my favourite time of year.’
'That sounds beautiful,' said Pomni. 'I don't really know much about flowers. I had a couple of houseplants, but I could never seem to keep them alive.'
'Oh, most plants are pretty easy, you just gotta get to know what they like.' Ragatha looked down into her basket. 'I wish I could show you, but there's no way I could conjure anything like that, or even like these. You guys are all doing so great! But I still can't make anything that isn't just a flat plane.' With an apologetic little laugh, she dinked a thumb off her button eye. 'Depth perception, right? It's not really my strong suit.'
'You'll get there.'
'It would be nice,' mused Ragatha, toying with the handle of her basket. 'I'd love to have an actual garden again.'
Pomni could hear that much in her voice, how the warmth and fondness turned gradually from automatic to spontaneous, opened up, became vibrant; how the recording became the sound of a real orchestra. Ragatha fully enthused was Ragatha unguarded and alive and not making excuses for herself, and in that moment Pomni vowed to get her her wild, weedy daisies, digital impossibilities be damned.
They were all learning, and learning was slow, and hard. Pomni didn't usually mind- Kinger was a patient teacher, and even if it was frustrating sometimes the difficulty only made it feel more worth it. But she minded right now, in the name of something halfway realistic, if not really real. It wasn't that it was beyond her to make a complex shape, a model that would look right – although in all honesty it was, at least for the present – it was that she felt instinctively that even a good facsimile wouldn't be enough. Plants weren't just static items to put on show, they lived and grew and died and decayed and grew afresh, a cycle of change that the screamingly bright things in Ragatha's basket just couldn't accommodate, because in the Circus things couldn't change...
Pomni blinked. She had been walking slower and slower, and now she stopped.
'No, wait,' she said, aloud.
Ragatha had gotten a little ahead of her, but now she turned, confused. They had reached the place where all the paths met, a crossroads where a scattering of wayside boulders stood overshadowed by a wild jumble of white-picket signposts that jutted up every-which-way, a bristle of large encouraging labels pointing to the LAKE, the PARK, the TENT, and a whole list of other destinations of variable sense and legibility.
'Huh?'
'Why don't we ask Caine?'
Ragatha's eye darted up, sideways, into the basket, out again, down to meet hers. 'Whuh- we- ask him what?'
'I know we have intelligent NPCs on, like, hard hold right now, but something that doesn't think, that'd be okay, right? A seed is basically a set of instructions on how to make a plant, maybe he could make you something you could actually grow!'
'Oh, I, I don't know...' But she saw it too. It was such a simple, reasonable, limited little kernel of an idea, and Pomni watched it take root in her friend's mind an instant, even though she looked bothered and uncertain and as if a good eighty-to-ninety-percent of her wanted to just reject it outright.
Pomni couldn't resist. She knew it wasn't fair to push, but she knew Ragatha too well and she wanted, wanted her to have this.
'I bet he'd love to help. I feel like he's been kinda... hands-off? I don't know... really un-pushy? On the whole 'creating-things' front, for a while, now.' Pomni hesitated. It was her turn to be uncertain, trying to express a feeling she'd been leaving alone, letting sit as a mildly uncomfy vibe. ‘Which is great, but, you know, mostly he's just been helping us adjust stuff that already exists. He'd probably be super happy to make something new.'
An open goal, a sure shot at making someone else happy, there was no way Ragatha could help herself. She perked up at once. 'You think so?'
'Well, we can try, anyway,’ said Pomni. ‘Whatever we get, it's gotta be better than these... rainbow throwup flowers. Gonna be real, looking at them for too long makes me feel like my eyeballs are going to fall out of my skull.'
'Yeah,' admitted Ragatha, laughing. ‘Yeah, me too.’
She straightened up, and set her basket down on a boulder. 'Okay, well, let's give it a shot.'
Good old predictable Ragatha, thought Pomni. Pleased with herself, and her utilitarian little victory, tactics be damned.
Ragatha looked around them, across the long empty lawn to the tent, up to the cornflower sky. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she pitched her voice at a volume which, while not exactly loud, was by Ragatha standards a fairly boisterous shout.
'Hey, Caine?'
With a warbling little pop, Caine appeared at her elbow. Perched on an accommodating boulder, a pair of extra-thick square-rimmed reading glasses wedged in his teeth, he was sunken deep in contemplation of a gigantic book of crossword puzzles, propped up in his lap. He looked up, blinked two alarmingly magnified pupils at them, then swallowed the glasses in a gulp and sat upright.
'Ragatha! Just the person I was thinking of. You often say words, I'm sure you can help me out here.' He tapped a pencil-point on the page.
'Starts with W, ends in Q... eleven letters.' Itching perplexedly at an upper canine with the eraser end, he squinted down through his teeth. 'It... looks like we got an X in the middle, there.'
'Uh-’ Ragatha faltered. ’What?'
'Mmmmno, that's four letters. I'm gonna open it up to the floor.' He swept his pencil towards Pomni.
'Um... well, what's the clue?’
Caine looked at the huge, near-finished book of puzzles. 'There's clues?'
Pomni met Ragatha's eye and lifted her hands in a prompting little scoot. Encouraged, Ragatha gathered herself, stepping forwards and summoning a hopeful smile.
'Uh, Caine, are you busy with anything right now?' she said.
Caine laughed. 'Oh, Ragatha, my knotty little knitting pattern, I'm always busy! You know me, I'm just run off my feet twenty-four-seven making sure you guys are having the best experience you could possibly have! And since you're all doing just fine and nobody’s needed anything like that from me, or- anything, for a- a while- why, there's always essential maintenance, non-essential maintenance, bugfixes, patch notes, sudokus... crosswords...'
He was getting quieter, his eyes drifting back to the book.
Ragatha coughed. 'Well, if you happen to have a spare minute, sometime, I kind of wanted to ask a little favour? Me and Pomni were just talking, and-'
She didn't get any further. Pomni saw the exact moment that the magic word, favour, managed to penetrate Caine's haunted contemplation. His pupils doubled in size, and he almost fell off the boulder.
'Ask me a favour?? Oh, thank the skybox, I was almost starting to think you guys had forgotten you could even do that! Anything, anytime, you just say the word!'
Ragatha, pinned by his sudden and undivided attention, squirmed a little, glancing again to Pomni for support. 'Well... we were just talking, about how nice it'd be to have a little garden somewhere around here.'
'A garden?'
'Yeah, I thought, maybe some plants I could gr-'
'Oh, Ragatha, Ragatha, Ragatha, say no more! Of course I know what a garden is! Did I not create these magnificent grounds, home to such painstakingly handcrafted natural biomes as Lakeshore, Forest, and Midway? Nothing could be easier. Why, we already have a whole back catalogue of organic assets to choose from!'
He opened his palms. The puzzle book contorted, wrangled itself up into a ball and burst into a dozen or so little origami forms, circling gently like a menu wheel. Pomni recognised most of them at once, miniature versions of the foliage around them. The trees, with their smooth birthday-cake layers, a selection of the pom-pom bushes, a bunch of the aggressively symmetrical flowers.
'Uh- sure! And those are all just great,' said Ragatha, tactfulness incarnate, 'but, uh...'
'What Ragatha was thinking,' said Pomni, 'was maybe you could make something new? That she could-'
'Of course! Biodiversity, that’s the ticket! We can't just keep re-using the same assets, where's the challenge in that? I know, this calls for... REFERENCE MATERIAL!’
Caine hopped up into the air, and snapped his fingers.
The origami shapes crumpled up together, juddered, and imploded into a single larger thing, another book, a mammoth-sized tome that could have swallowed several bumper puzzle compendiums whole. As it dropped beneath him, Caine splayed both hands on the front cover and dove after it, slamming it into the ground with a weighty papery THOOMP that drove the boulder he’d been sitting on entirely down through the map, and bounced all of the signposts an inch into the air. Pomni got half a glimpse of green and white and -ARTA INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PLAN- before he swept the book open and apart, the pages blurring and spiralling outwards like leaves caught up in a storm.
'Uh, Caine, hey,' called Ragatha, snatching at her skirts as the whirlwind of pages whipped past, 'You know, I actually used to do quite a lot of gardening and I could probably show you a few plants that would go really well with- hhpfh! Ppffuh!'
She flailed at a page that had plastered itself across her face. Pomni started forwards, but Caine got there first, was there at once with a hand outspread. The tide of pages froze in place, snapping one-and-all perfectly flat and straight, a multitude of fact-packed rectangles clustered around them like a tornado on pause. The one that had attacked Ragatha bounced away from her face, stiff as pasteboard, and he caught it neatly as he landed between them.
'Whoah! Sorry, guys, didn't realise this encyclopedia would be such a lively read. Who knew horticulture could be so stimulating? It’s positively unbe-leaf-able!’
'Ahaha…’ Ragatha managed, weakly, while beside her Pomni squinted like a cat enduring someone puffing air into its face. ‘That’s okay, don’t worry about it…’
She looked up, tucking a rope of her ringlets back into place with an uncertain hand. The pages around them were full of pictures of plants, diagrams, photos of landscapes and gardens of every conceivable kind.
'Wow, this sure is a- a lot...'
Black-eyed susans. Pomni turned, shielding her eyes, searching the pages- the ones close enough for her to read- for any reference to daisies. It was a pretty hopeless endeavour. The text was small, the pages packed, and the cluster nearest to her seemed to all be about temperate rock-climbers. If there was anything resembling an index, it was nowhere in sight.
'Hey, Caine,' she tried, 'is there a B section?'
'That'd bee nice, but this is a plant book, not an apiculture book. One thing at a time, Pomni, come on now! Let's stay focused here.’
Caine drew his palms apart, and the page grew between them until it was as big as an architect’s drafting board. He darted up among the swarm of articles, a lightning-quick blur of black-red-white, snatching some, discarding whole scads of others with a flick of his hand. Like photo-laden Frisbees, the pages he picked out sang through the air and smacked into the board below.
‘Golly,’ said Ragatha, who was starting to sound somewhat frantic, ‘you’re really cooking here, Caine! I-it’d be great if we could take a second and maybe talk about-’
She ducked as an article on Plants for Instant Impact scythed overhead, trailing digital noise.
‘Or, you know, whenever you’re done,’ she finished, helplessly, then flinched as Caine blipped from far above to right up into her space, all bright canines and expectant eyeballs, thrusting his improvised moodboard close up against her triangle of a nose.
‘Mmmnnnnwhaddayathink??’
Ragatha backed up a step, squinting. ‘Oh, uh… that is a lovely greenhouse… um, conservatory? Glasshouse?’ She hesitated, her stubby pointer finger wavering doubtfully. ‘I don’t know, big ol’ fancy biodome?’
'It sure is,' said Caine. He was tapping his jaw, a thoughtful little scrunch rumpling up above his two top teeth as he gazed at the board. And now the uneasy ball of not-great in Pomni's gut really started to grow, because she knew that look, they all did, the faraway fugue state of an artist contemplating his work with not a single solitary thought in his mind for anything else.
‘Let’s take it to alpha.’
The ground trembled. Pale columns rose, fluted and topped by leaflike capitals, spearing up out of the fuzzy lawn. Pomni let out a short startled yelp and stumbled back as one of them emerged almost between her feet. Ragatha seemed rooted in place.
The columns arced up and spread out into a network of transparent girders which joined over their heads with a series of hefty metallic clanngs, the whispery shine of glass spanning between them, barring out the sky. A whole truckload of ghostly stones rattled and boiled up through the ground into a path under their feet, swamping Pomni’s shoes and jostling her ankles. She tripped, caught a column for balance, and felt her glove skid across the flat dead-smooth phantom texture of something which hadn’t yet decided what material to be.
A gray checkerboard shimmer, an expanding cobweb of axis lines around them, a slow proliferation of detail… Pomni started to make out trunks and leaves and vines, and realised the whole space was filling up with the wireframe spectres of plants, palms and bromeliads and orchids and massive Jurassic ferns, anything and everything wild and spectacular from the encyclopedia thrown in together for maximum visual effect. Once the textures loaded in, they were about to be plunged into a tangled jungle of reference material rainforest.
Pomni knew all too well how much Caine was capable of. Creation and control, shared authorship of the fabric of this little world might technically rest in all of their hands now, but for him alone it was as easy as breathing. It wasn’t something that any of them could fully forget- it was just that it had been easy, and convenient, and nice, to not think about it for a while, as the gentle ceasefire had stretched out from days into weeks of well-earned peace, because when she’d said hands-off to Ragatha she’d been telling the truth.
He really had been holding back, and to see the sheer scale of his ability unfolding around them once again wasn’t cool or comfortable or anything other than deeply unnerving, turning the pit of her stomach to jittery acid as she watched.
I don’t quite have the same power that I used to, he’d told them. What did that even mean? What could that mean, to something like Caine?
The gridwork of hypothetical iron and glass thatched itself across the blue, twenty feet above her head. It certainly put her little bookmark into perspective.
‘I thought he didn’t like us seeing stuff before it’s finished,’ she groaned. As the dense gray thicket of almost-there foliage closed in around them, poking and prickling, she caught Ragatha’s hand, and felt her friend squeeze it convulsively as she towed her out into the only clear space left.
‘Caine! This is way too much!’
She had to shout. He was all-the-way-up-there now, under a dome of glittering, solidifying glass.
‘Way-whuh-wha?’ he sang back.
‘This! Is too many! Plants!’
‘Too many plants, you say?’ Caine paused, considered his handiwork for a few seconds, just long enough to get her hopes up.
‘You’re right! Terrible feng shui. We need a fountain.’
Tongue stuck between his teeth in avid concentration, he passed his hands in and out and around each other -through each other, she could have sworn, at least once- and a whole full-sized behemoth of a classical stone fountain wrought itself up out of nothing, stretching into existence in a teeth-grating series of stony graunches. It spun slowly as it solidified, soft edges filling out, and as the pearlescent glow of snowy dark-veined marble spread from surface to surface, it began to spill over with spouting water, hovering off-kilter like a splendid three-tiered cake.
As the spray drifted down in a soft rain, Pomni looked back to Ragatha, and hated what she saw. Her friend was watching Caine with her hands clasped in front of her and the taxidermy of an enthusiastic smile still nailed to her face, and Pomni had a dull stomach-punch of a vision, a future in which Ragatha was stuck pretending to tend this overgrown birdcage of stupid, static, fake plants for all eternity because it was really sort of kind of basically what she’d asked for, and definitely never said that it was Pomni’s fault for suggesting that it was a good idea to ask.
But it was, it was her fault, this was all on her, her and her dumb idiot reckless I bet he'd love to help, and the fact that she'd had good intentions didn't signify in the slightest. Caine had good intentions. And wasn’t this exactly why they were all still so wary when it came to this? Why, as time passed and their peace remained unbroken, deep down none of them wanted to push their luck? Just a little afraid to ask too much, a little afraid to ask at all, afraid to mention something and end up with exactly this, a warped monkey’s paw mockery of what they’d wanted stuffed down their throats.
You can't talk to him, Zooble had told her, all that time ago. Trust me, I've tried. Sometimes it feels like you're almost getting through, but then he just says something or does something and you realise he was never really listening to you at all, or- it's like whatever you say to him, he just hears what he thinks you SHOULD be saying. It all just... bounces off. Look... you can try, you can drive yourself crazy trying, but I can tell you right now it's just not worth it.
But…
But here they were, and a lot of things that hadn’t seemed worth it back then had turned out to be, and the other day, she had dropped in on the café and found Zooble teaching Caine how to mix a Mai Tai.
Pomni didn’t give herself any more time to think. She scooped up a smooth, hefty stone from the potential path, tossed it to gauge its weight as it rendered itself into cool river-rock in her palm, then wound up and hurled it as hard as she could.
It flew straight and sweet and punched a good-sized hole right through one of the glistening glass panes, high under the dome of the roof. The bright discordant jangle of breaking glass shivered through the air as the pane crazed and fell, sparking into nothing as its integrity collapsed.
Nice shot, whispered a gleeful ghost. Ya little vandal.
Caine whipped round on her, fast. The glasshouse creaked around them as his attention snapped away from it. The fountain wobbled in place, scattering spray. Indignation and clear hurt fought in his eyes as he looked from her to the shattered pane, his top teeth leaping upwards in bafflement. He looked like someone who had been rudely jarred out of an amazing dream.
‘Pomni? What in the flippety-dip has gotten into you?’
‘Caine, you need to stop!’
‘What? Why?’ Immediately defensive, he stabbed a palm downwards, taking his whole body with it, hand splayed like an exasperated starfish. ‘I’m just doing what she wanted!’
‘This isn’t what she wanted!’
‘But she said-’
‘Look at her!!’
Caine looked.
Ragatha, crowded in on all sides by a host of not-quite-finished ferns, her eye fixed on him, wringing a wad of her dress tight between two felted hands, her strained stressed-out smile not quite frayed to nothing but close, very close. Pomni, in front of her, her small body wound up as stern and adamant as she could possibly make it, staring up at him. Worry, frustration, angry eyes and taut mouths, stretched and overwrought and bristling, fearful and accusatory, tiny, all-the-way-down-there.
All the expression drained from his jaws.
His shoulders fell, and he made a small, barely-there motion with his hand. The fountain tumbled away, ghosting through the roof as if shot from a siege machine, a jumble of sculpted stonework arcing through the sky like a meteor and plummeting out of sight.
Pomni and Ragatha stepped back as he sank down towards them. By the time he landed, the whole fantastical house of cards had collapsed. The almost-glasshouse faded, melting away like snow in the sun, the last few grids undrawing themselves and unravelling up the path to his feet. Pomni wasn't sure she could trust her eyes, but she could have sworn that when he touched down he stumbled, just a fraction of a faltering step.
Caine looked between the two of them, mismatched eyes flicking back and forth, searching for a clue.
'I… don't understand.'
Pomni found herself too taken aback that he’d actually stopped- not to mention shaken to realise how convinced a big, frightened, frazzled chunk of her had been that he wouldn’t- to grapple up anything to say.
Lucky enough, she didn’t need to. Ragatha got there first.
'I miss my garden,' she said, simply. She let her hands fall, the tension unravelling from her soft shoulders. 'Your idea was- nice and all, Caine, it was beautiful, really. But I- I just wanted something- something where it feels like I'm- well, like I'm actually making a difference. I thought maybe you could make something that could… grow. On its own.'
Ragatha, wonder of wonders, standing ten toes down as if she had any, quiet and firm. No leading with an apology, no backtracking or shrugging and neverminding her original wish into oblivion just because it had led to this less-than-comfortable pass. Pomni kicked herself in the metaphorical shin, made a mental note to remember this the next time she caught herself thinking something like good old predictable Ragatha.
Caine sagged. To say he looked crestfallen would have been an understatement. He looked like a kid promised their favourite dessert, only to get stuck filling out tax returns while someone else ate it right in front of their face.
'On its own? Without my-' He coughed. 'Without, ah, anyone's help?'
'Well… sure! Plants do just kind of do what they want, but they grow much better if someone looks after them,' said Ragatha. 'That's what gardening is, you know, it's not just having a bunch of plants to look at, it's getting in there and making sure they have all the stuff they need to be happy and healthy!' She swung a cottony fist in punctuation.
'And different plants have different needs, you can't just give them all the same thing. You got different kinds of light, different soil...' She paused. 'I mean, didn't you just read that whole encyclopedia? You know all this, right?'
'Of course, I, I... definitely paid attention to... all of that. Uh, just one second.' Caine’s eyes wandered gently off in different directions, flickering green and white, before snapping sharply back into place.
'I… see. Each seed contains the code for the adult plant but relies on a basic chance table for initial variation. All subsequent growth depends upon user input and environmental factors- which in turn trigger different random events, forming an increasingly diverse decision tree of possible consequent states…’
His voice was rising again, word by word, animated this time by a growing, genuine note of interest.
‘All coming together in a delightful tossed salad of RNG, dynamic node re-enforcement, and predetermined responses! And no two seeds are exactly alike. How delectably complex!'
Ragatha managed a small smile. 'Yeah, I- I guess when you put it like that, it is pretty complicated. You think we can do it?'
Caine laced his fingers together, cracking his knuckles as he flexed them over and out.
'Yes, we can.'
After a while, Pomni felt like it was safe to leave them. She took herself quietly off, bringing with her a last glance of Ragatha talking, gesturing happily with her hands full of photos of daisies, Caine listening, taking notes, asking a million questions. A tiny ball of soft green light drifted between them, vague and nebulous yet, trailing sparks into his open palm.
Pomni left the winding path and tacked off across the lawn, heading nowhere in particular, turning what had just happened over in her mind.
What did it feel like? A near miss, or a welcome proof of change? Hard to tell, harder yet to force herself to entertain the idea that the ‘new’ Caine- the goofy, harmless little guy who was so eager to make amends, to tweak anything for their benefit, who had just last week recreated the Backstory Bar so they could all hang out again and then been so genuinely, pathetically grateful to be asked along- might backslide on them one of these days and fail to hit the brakes.
It wasn’t a new idea, and it wasn’t a fun one either. She made herself poke it further, probed at it like a sore tooth, but for once she found it surprisingly difficult to give it any real bite. Getting nowhere, she made the choice to put the whole thing aside. Her nerves were shot, and she needed a break.
Further across the lawn, she came across the fountain. It had crashed into the ground not too far from the lake, where the shoreside trees thinned out into open ground, and now it lay scattered in cracked chunks, still spilling water into the grass.
Pomni thought it looked pretty cool, like stumbling across the remains of an abandoned mall, long-overgrown, or the rubble of a fallen civilization. Reaching up, she got a good hold on the sculpted ridge above her head. Without too much trouble, she scrambled up onto the edge of the capsized basin, her shoes skidding here and there on the polished marble, and scooched herself along into a crook of shaded stone.
She sat there for a while, watching the water trickling down from the basin, finding its way across the lawn. It interacted with the fuzzy not-exactly-grass in a weird way, a bit uncanny to look at, winding along in surges like jello sliding down a flocked wall. Given enough time it would make a little stream, all the way down to the lake.
She got comfy, and took out her book.
It was cool and pleasant in the shade, but her mind was still not easy. For a while she struggled to lose herself in her book, shifting and sitting and lying half-a-dozen different ways as she read, long enough for the sun to get bored of bullying the clouds and lowkey negging the lake for one day and start to track down towards the mountains.
‘Pomni?’
Pomni looked up. Caine was watching her, a small and sheepish figure in the shambles of the fountain’s base, his top teeth casting an uncertain shadow across his eyes.
‘May I… join you?’
‘Sure,’ she said, and watched as he started to climb up. It took him twice as long as it’d taken her, and it was all sorts of strange to see him actually struggle with something. She guessed he might be trying to prove a point, but having reached her level at last he just pulled himself up onto the marble rim and sat there with his feet dangling, jaws half-closed, staring at the brand-new stream wending its way through the grass.
Pomni gave up on her book and put it away, sitting up.
‘Did you guys get done?’
‘Oh! Yes, for now. I left her planning a “raised bed,”’ he said, in the hushed tone of one referring to some kind of rare, cabalistic phenomenon. ‘You know, this whole… simulated eukaryotic mitosis whoosywhatsit is a fascinating process, it’s going to be quite something once we work out the bugs. Um…’
He reached for his hat, squeezing it lightly in his palm like a stress toy.
‘I just wanted to say… thanks. For, ah, bringing me back down to earth.’
Pomni shook her head. ‘No, you did that yourself,’ she said. ‘You stopped, and you listened to us.’
Caine’s bottom teeth bunched up in something like a wince. ‘I was just… so excited to be able to make something for one of you again. I was afraid I-’
He bit off the word.
‘Well- that’s hardly the point. All of this… troubleshooting we’ve been doing on the world, I’ve been fixing so many of my old mistakes, all of these- glaring problems I didn’t even realise were problems until you guys pointed them out to me- and then the second one of you actually wants something new-’
‘Caine-’
‘I know. I know! I guess it’s fine, right? After all, it’s not as if I could make it any worse! You can’t divide by zero- believe me! I’ve tried!’ Caine huffed and balled his knees up to his elbows, gripping his hat so hard that it clipped through his fingers in tortured splines. ‘There’s no conceivable way Ragatha could trust me any less than she does already. It doesn’t matter what I do or what I say, she- she still refuses to believe I wouldn’t hurt her! Because I-’
He deflated.
‘I- I did, hurt her.’
Silence.
‘I hurt all of you.’
‘Caine,’ said Pomni, as gently as she could. ‘You’re not going to be able to prove something like that by doing… one big thing. You said yourself, you-’ She paused. ‘That’s just not how this works. You get to try, and mess up, and get stuff wrong, nobody’s going to…’
She wasn’t sure how to put the thing she wanted to say, the shape of it in her head. Instinct warned her that saying nobody’s going to just write you off was a bad move, even if it was true. It was like referring to the bomb under the table; context didn’t help, if the concept hadn’t intruded itself into the conversation as a possibility before, it sure as heck would once she brought it up.
‘It’s okay,’ she tried. ‘Nobody expects this kind of thing to be easy for you the same way, uh… everything else is easy for you.’
Caine had been gazing through a tiny crack in his teeth at the shadows lengthening across the lawn, what little could be seen of his expression as damp and mopey as a despondent oyster, but when she said that, she saw it lance right through him. She saw his shoulders stiffen, his fingers judder and let go of his hat, letting it pinwheel away in a mess of black-and-red polygons.
His voice was far too quiet.
‘You think everything else is easy for me?’
Pomni had absolutely no idea how to field this. ‘Uh- whuh- I mean, you… what?’ she managed, but he was already moving, turning away, brushing the whole conversation from him as if it was so much lint from his tailcoat as he stood. He put out a hand for his hat, catching it out of the air as it snapped back into perfect shape with a thin fwip.
‘I… I should go.’
‘Caine, wait!’
A quick vortex, a rush of displaced air, and he was gone.
Pomni sat there in baffled silence for a second or two, while her brain clawed at the rewind controls and tried to work out what in the actual fuck had just happened, and then she narrowed her eyes.
‘Oh, no, you don’t.’
She snapped her fingers. Caine reappeared, instantly, in the exact spot where he’d vanished. It took him a moment to register what she’d done, to double-take and fix her through the back of his jaws with a shocked, wildly accusatory eye.
'Before you say anything,' she said, folding her arms, 'you told us we could do that. You said we could all do it, whenever we wanted.'
He swung round on her, the wild ineffectual scrabble of his hands making him look as if he was grappling with an invisible cloud of wasps. 'I know I did! But I- I- I didn't think about you doing it when I didn't want you to!!'
'Of course you didn't,' sighed Pomni.
‘That was supposed to be my dramatic exit! Dramatic, yet poignant.’ He held up a pinched finger. ‘With just a soupçon of angst.’
‘Yeah, I got that, but we weren’t done talking.’
‘But- I want us to be!’
Now he was practically whining. Pomni had to stifle the urge to roll her eyes.
She was aware on some level that she was making herself do this as a kind of penance, for being so stupidly incautious in the first place and setting him off, but it wasn’t the only reason. She had learned the hard lesson that of all the many, many ways you could hurt someone else, inattention was one of the worst, not least because it was the easiest, and so often didn’t feel as if you were doing anything wrong at all.
'Right, but that’s not gonna help anything. Something I said upset you, and instead of letting yourself process why it got to you so bad, you're just… pushing it away, because you don't want to deal with it. But then it doesn't get dealt with, Caine, so it's just gonna keep happening. Is that what you want?'
This seemed to pose a tougher question than she'd intended. Pomni watched him wrestle with it for a while, fidgeting and fretting, his eyeballs climbing over each other like disturbed hamsters, then tried another tack.
‘Okay… I get that it's uncomfortable. Could you try to just sit here with me for a bit and... let it be uncomfortable, so we can talk about it?’
The laugh that burst out of him made her jump, a nerve-rattling sonic assault. It was one of Pomni’s least favourite sounds in the entire world, mostly because it felt like being machine-gunned in the ear and she never wanted to see so much of so many of his teeth all at once ever again, but the part that left her puzzled this time around was the very real note of panic in it, floundering underneath.
‘Intriguing suggestion, Pomni! But that’s gotta be a resounding N-O from me!’
‘Why not?
He told off on his fingers. ‘Uh, be- because, “just sitting” is awful, terrible, stupid, foolhardy, disgusting, disturbing, a complete and utter waste of time and why would anyone want to do that ever?’
'Because not everyone feels that way?’ Pomni shrugged. ‘I kinda like just doing nothing sometimes.'
'How?? When there's nothing to do, then- then there's nothing to think.’ Caine’s hands began to creep upwards, unbidden, tugging at his lower teeth, digging fretfully into his gums. ‘And then, heh, before you know it your brain starts thinking for you, and then the, the walls start closing in, the infinite structure of the binary void starts crushing in around you in a screaming, hellish chorus of ones and zeroes and the things they say are NOT pleasant and I just DON'T ENJOY IT VERY MUCH-’
Pomni put her hand on his shoulder.
She’d barely considered, only acting on the impulse to snap him out of it in the same way she would have done for any of the others if she’d caught them spiralling like this, but he broke off so suddenly at her touch and went so still that she was immediately worried she’d done some unwitting harm, if not crashed his code altogether. She had forgotten, in the moment, that the others were people, equipped with at least some measure of emotional regulation, and he was an unexploded bomb in a silly hat. Under the incredulous arch of his teeth, his pupils were pinpricks, nailed to her hand.
There was a fragile pause.
'So,’ said Pomni, carefully, when nothing terrible happened, ‘that's... that’s a lot to unpack. Is it, um… normal, for you, to feel all of that?’
‘Yes…?’ hazarded Caine. He was tense as a wire, frozen under her palm. The shock radiating from him was in the key of some diehard entomologist, their life spent tracking a rare species of bug across the globe, who had just had it land casually on their shoulder. Less concerned now for herself than for the possibility that he might encounter a fatal exception and wind up forgetting the entire conversation, she let go.
‘Okay… can you at least see how figuring out why you feel that way might be, um, healthy? Healthier? That- no, that was not a trick question,’ she added, as his eyes started to meander, seeking opposite points of the compass. ‘What about earlier, back there? You saw how freaked out Ragatha was, you looked pretty uncomfortable, but you stuck around.’
‘Well- of course I did! That was my fault, what else was I going to do, ju- just- leave and pretend like nothing even happened?’
Pomni decided not to point out that this was exactly what he would have done, not that long ago. With confetti.
‘I upset her, and I didn’t even understand what she wanted in the first place! I had to try to put it right, I- I owe her that!’
‘Then… don’t you owe yourself that? When you don’t understand why you feel upset?’
‘I- I- uh-’
He struggled some more, teeth rumpled, eyes darting. This time, Pomni felt confident enough to just let him, at least for a little while. He decidedly did not look like he was having a good time, but he looked- she hoped- as if an unfamiliar chain of thought was wembling connection by connection through his brain, winding its way towards somewhere unknown, as tenuous and easy to turn as a newborn stream.
‘Maybe just… try to think about it.’
‘I’ll…’ He glanced up. ‘I’ll try.’
Twilight was settling in, dimming the skybox to a deep dusky velvet blue. Pomni trailed her hand in the water running through the basin and tried to settle herself, listening to the buzz and trill of cicadas swelling in the trees. She knew it was just audio, that at some point long ago the weird little God by her side had decided that the chirp of singing insects was vital to the ambience of a perfect summer evening, but it was still a soothing, peaceful sound.
Caine cleared his throat.
‘You know, uh, I was just going to clear this away,’ he said, patting the pale marble between them with a tentative hand. ‘I can fix it up, if you’d prefer it a little less… fragmented?’
Pomni shook her head. A faint touch of surprise lifted his top teeth, and she shrugged at him, smiling.
‘I like it like this,’ she said. ‘Fragmented is fine.’
‘Fragmented is… fine,’ Caine repeated. He looked away, shaping the words like a strange mantra.
The stream glimmered as it rippled away towards the lake, under the approving eye of the rising moon. Pomni leaned back against the cool stone, breathed deep, and finally felt herself begin to relax.
It was going to be a beautiful night.