“–th.”
The rectangular opening winked out of existence and she wasn’t in Aught anymore–or anywhere in her world.
She fell through air that smelled like ozone from a burned capacitor. But now burned electronics smelled good, like burning was how flowers should smell. She tried to find up and down, but it was hard to orient because the gravity was lower and ever so slightly sideways. She wasn’t falling so much as floating.
Her lungs hurt and she realized she was holding her breath. She forced herself to breathe. At least the air wasn’t poisonous. For all she’d known, the mad god lived in space or on a sun. She hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this. She didn’t regret saving Mom, but she was terrified. She wished she’d had longer to say goodbye.
It took second for her to realize gravity had shifted. The sky was now beneath her feet and ground spun above her.
She closed her eyes. She was part god, she should be able to do something, like float to the ground. She listened. There was no breeze. No birds. No sounds.
Hopefully mom had been right. If the mad god was distracted by finally finding its old wife (husband?), maybe the daughter it never met would provide even more distraction. She wanted to imagine Mom and Cindy and her dads were now safe, but the truth was she just didn’t know.
Perhaps if she presented herself, that would help? She tried to think of some way deduce a direction to the mad god. The larger problem was what she would do once she found it.
“Is anyone there?”
The sky changed by degree until it was night. Flowers floated around her in a cloud. The petals danced around each other like little birds and… it wasn’t that they formed words, the movements cycled and somehow she could read the actual moves, like semaphore or sign language.
The dancing flowers read:
THIS PLACE.
YOU FOUND IT.
YOU SEE ME.
I AM EVERYWHERE.
The ground stretched like rubber, obscuring the sky, up and around Miranda. Convex became concave, the edges came together until the entire landscape became the inside of an enormous ball and she floated in its center. The surface seemed to be perforated with millions of holes. Some of them expanded and she could see windows into space. Another shrank into a pinprick. For just a second, she thought she saw the earth, but the hole containing it shrank again.
She’d never felt this alone.
“Hello?”
The petals burst into dust. As it blew away it created one word:
WELCOME!
