Chapter 8: The Decision

He walked through the community twice more in the days that followed. Each time the seal was open. Each time I felt the war. Each time the weights shifted by fractions, the way tides shift: so gradually that you cannot see the water moving, only the mark it leaves behind when it has moved. She found him at the thin place. Not at the thin place. Below it. On the ridge above the valley, at night, standing with his face turned upward along the axis she had followed three times in the dark, the axis that led from the ground through the clouds through the thin air to the membrane where the warmth leaked through from somewhere she could not follow. He had come here alone. She had not guided him. He had walked out of the community after the evening fire, past the construction, past the seat's unfinished foundation, past the shelters and the food stores and the perimeter the steady man patrolled, and he had climbed the ridge and he had stood at the highest point and he had looked up. She materialized beside him. The ridge was bare rock and scrub, and the form she built was sparse, the materials thin, her translucence more pronounced than it had been in the valley where the gravel was plentiful and the moisture was rich. She was barely there. A sketch of a woman, rougher than usual, the joins visible, the edges uncertain. He did not look at her. He was looking at the sky. "It is up there," he said. "I can feel it. The thinness you described. The warmth." "Yes." "You found it for me." "I promised I would." He was quiet for a long time. The stars turned above them. The valley lay below, dark except for…