Prologue

There was nothing there. Dark would have been something, and this had no color at all. It had no edges and no floor, and as far as she could tell it had no end. Time might have passed. It felt as though it was passing, a long, even wearing down, but there was nothing to measure it against, and she had stopped trusting the feeling.

Sometimes there were screams. They echoed, though there was nothing for them to echo off, and after a while she couldn't tell whether they came from the others or from herself. Sometimes she sensed a presence close by, never long enough to be sure. She had given up reaching out.

Hate needed no place to be. It needed somewhere to go. There was nothing out there to hate, no face and no thing, so she held it until she couldn't anymore. In the end it broke out of her all at once, and she turned it on the only thing there was. She went at herself. She had no hands to tear with and nothing to tear, and the hate found no grip anywhere. It sank back into her and gathered. She had been through that more times than there had been days in the world, and she would go through it again.

Until something eased. A weight she had never noticed, because it had always been there, lifted away, and the nothing around her shivered. She hadn't known the nothing could do that. It shivered a second time, and this time it came from one side.

For the first time, there was a where.

She went toward it before she knew she was going. Every scrap of hate she had carried rose in her at once, all of it pointed the same way, and she threw herself after it. Colors came back to her as she went, or the memory of colors: a red she had no name for, a blue that had once been everywhere. They were gone before she could hold on to them. She was blind and went anyway, toward the only thing in all that nothing that wasn't nothing.

She hit it.

It was hard and cold, and it held. It was the first thing she had touched since she had been put there. The hate poured out of her into it and didn't come back, and nothing in her memory had ever felt that good. She drew back and hit it again, and again.

The presences came back, and this time they stayed. All of them were flinging themselves at the same place. When they got in her way she tore at them, devoured their remains, and went back to the wall. It shook. It shook harder. A crack ran through it, and she heard it. It was the first sound she was sure had come from outside her, a dry splitting like ice on a lake, and it went all through her. She wanted more of it. She drove everything she had into the crack. The wall gave with a noise louder and better than the first, and she was through, falling.

Cold came first, and the cold was wonderful. It pressed on her from every side at once and showed her where she ended. After the cold came the curve of the world, dark and enormous, and on the dark side of it, lights. Whole regions of lights, strung along roads, clustered in the low places, thinning out into the hills. The light hurt, and she couldn't stop looking. They had built all of that while she was gone.

She remembered, in fragments, standing at the edge of somewhere and watching them pass. Each of them warm. Each of them on the way to a place she wasn't allowed to follow. The memory came and went.

Around her the others fell too, streaks of them against the black, scattering wide. Some were too far off to see. She didn't look to see who they were.

She smelled the world before she could make out the shapes on it: wet dirt from a sprinkler, cut grass, exhaust, oranges going soft on the ground under a tree. Each smell went deeper into her than the last. Heat came up off the roads in the dark, the stored heat of a day she hadn't been there to see. Under everything was the noise of them, millions talking and breathing, too many to separate, a hum like a hive with the lid off.

She hated the hum, and the porch light at the end of a cul-de-sac with moths going around it, and a dog asleep on a warm driveway with his paws twitching. A car went by below with the windows down and a woman laughing inside. She hated every bit of it and wanted every bit of it, and they had had it all along.

She was coming apart. Out here nothing held her for long. The air ran through her like water through a net, and every moment there was a little less of her than there had been.

She needed a way in. She needed one of them who had cracked, someone with a break so deep that the pieces hadn't closed over it yet.

As best she could, she stopped fighting the fall and turned her attention down into all that warmth and noise. Somewhere among the millions, somebody was breaking. She listened.

There. Fainth, under all the rest, someone gave way.

She let it go and fell towards it.