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Time seemed to pass more quickly now, in a good way. Pomni had spent almost as much time in the digital world knowing peace as she had under Caine-as-god-emperor. Six months of hot chocolate leaves a less lasting impression than six months of digital torment. She'd adapted well, relishing the novelty of boredom. The stress had yet to fully melt away, but it was going.
Pomni slunk out of bed one morning and went downstairs, where the others were already stirring.
Kinger hardly needed adjusting to the new way of life, as though he existed on a higher emotional plane and was only visiting the rest of them. Zooble was rearranging the bar again, squinting down a row of bottles. Gangle drew the six of them in just about every possible anime style. And Ragatha could usually be found working up a sweat outside.
"Hey, Pomni." Ragatha leaned in the doorway, glove on one hand. "You up for some baseball today?"
"Nah, sorry. Gonna go sit with Jax."
"Oh – okay. Maybe tomorrow!"
Pomni came down the rest of the stairs, one hand on the bannister, which was awkwardly tall beside her cartoonish frame. In the other hand, a book. Caine had pirated it for her. He was the only one with internet access, and he had a very unusual sense of taste, so what she'd ended up with was a poorly-scanned Practical Bookkeeping for the Small Sole Trader, fourth edition. The margins were already full of her small, careful checkmarks. She was halfway through.
Jax's abstraction caught her eye before she reached the bottom step.
Normally he moved like an old dog, pacing tight circles in his nest of dark or lying still and watching her with all his eyes at once. Not today. As though pinched by a thousand invisible hands, the vertices of its framerate-optimized body writhed, the eyes scattering, darting, independent of one another. Then every one of them snapped to Pomni at the same instant.
It screeched.
Pomni set the book down on the step. She came the rest of the way slow, the way you'd cross toward a spooked animal, hands open, voice low.
"Hey. Hey, it's just me." A step. "It's Pomni."
Screech.
"I know. I know." Another step. "Bad morning, huh. That's okay." She crouched a little, made herself small and nonthreatening. "You want me to read? We were just learning all about inventory management."
The eyes split their attention – half locked on her, half raking the room – and the body's pulsing climbed faster and faster until, all at once, it bolted out of the dark and into the open circus.
"Jax, wait!”
The rest of the circus had gathered at the commotion. Jax tore through the main space in long graceless lunges, scattering furniture, and the brightness of the room only seemed to wind it tighter. A tower of colorful shapes came toppling down in a slow, dramatic cascade.
"Pomni, what's gotten into him?" Kinger called.
"I don't know! He's never been like this – yesterday he was fine, he let me read the whole afternoon, and now he's–" She ducked. Something went past her ear, close: a single cube, tumbling end over end, lit flat and even on every face, with a hard white highlight sitting on it where nothing in the room could have put one. It threw no shadow as it passed. Then the chaos pulled her eyes away and it was gone. "He's hurting himself in there. I can tell. Something's wrong."
"He needs to get out of the light," Ragatha said, shielding her eyes. "Caine, can you make him a new shelter? Somewhere dark and sturdy."
"Say no more!" Caine performed an elaborate gesture that resolved in a profoundly snazzy snap.
A doghouse appeared. It was about the size of a shoebox.
Everyone looked at it.
Caine turned his palms up and lifted his hands out to either side. "What? I told you guys, I lost most of my powers. I can’t exactly give you square-footage."
Pomni wasn't listening anymore. She was watching Jax circle, watching the eyes find her and lose her and find her again. She stretched her arm in front of Ragatha, as though to say “let me.” Deep breath, then Pomni ran after him.
He scrabbled away from her, but the open floor gave him nowhere good to go. She lunged, and her fingertips brushed the surface of the abstraction – a bright spark of pain shot up her arm, and for half a second a thousand overlapping Ribbits flickered behind her eyes. She clenched her teeth and lunged again, this time wrapping her whole body around him. The spikes, where they met her, didn't pierce. They bent, fitting themselves to the outline of Pomni’s body like a pillow.
The room came apart into symmetry and color.
She landed in the dark.
There was the lamp, the familiar one, throwing its small circle of light onto nothing. Jax was at the edge of it, smaller than she'd ever seen him, hands clamped over his head. He didn't look up. He wasn't the one making the noise.
The noise was everywhere else. Voices, coming out of the dark from every side, no bodies to put them on – and under all of them, threaded through, the sound of people laughing.
"I hate you." Flat, from over her shoulder.
"Aw, why the long face?" Bright and fast, his own cadence turned against him. "It's a joke. It's all a joke, sweetheart, none of it's even–”
“Why're you crying, you can't even take a–"
"You ran." Low, underneath. "You always run. Maybe if you weren’t so pathetic, she’d still–"
"Jax." Pomni approached the lamp. None of them so much as paused. "Jax, hey, it's me–"
"–real comedian, huh, real funny guy–"
"–maybe they'd all be better off, every single–"
The image of Ribbit pierced Pomni’s mind. The bow. Jax’s mother.
She approached the curled shape, still ignoring her. The laughing went straight through her like she wasn't even there. She tried to get close enough to put her arms around Jax once more, but couldn’t. With each new burst of insults from the void, Pomni was physically thrust away.
“Jax!” Pomni shouted desperately. The laughing accelerated, as though her bid was another hilarious line in a comedy routine. They seemed to amplify the force, shoving Pomni nearly as far back as she started.
Pomni gritted her teeth and shouted, "I'm not giving up on you. So you can quit acting like I will." Pomni braced herself against the voices. "I'm gonna go get someone who was there for the part I missed. And if you hate that – good. Be mad at me. Mad is better than this."
The dark started to fold her up.
And for the first time, the curled-up Jax seemed to react, his shape trembling a bit less. A single neon eye found Pomni, and held her, and stayed on her the whole way out, until the color took her.
She went to find the tank.
They’d built it a couple months back as a way to be closer to the abstractions. The glass was dark enough to placate them, but transparent enough for the abstractions and humans to see one another. The forms’ many multi-colored eyes shone beautifully. It no longer seemed like a fate worse than death.
Pomni spotted her. “Hey, Ribbit.” At her name, its eyes turned. “Will you…let me in?” Pomni pressed her hand against the glass as an invitation. The shape swam towards her, a bit faster than its earlier aimless amble, meeting Pomni’s hand against the glass. The glass slowly changed form, bending to make way for Pomni and Ribbit to form contact. At last, Pomni was bathed in light.
Cold.
Pomni's breath came out in a plume and hung there. Her feet broke through a crust of old snow into older snow beneath. The ground went up ahead of her – a long white slope rising into the blue-black dark, wind dragging across it in flat sighs. Up at the top of the climb, at the lip of where the slope fell away into nothing, was the only thing in sight: a small lime-green light.
"Ribbit?"
It came back to her – ibbit, ibbit, ibbit – thinned out across all that empty air, and then nothing. She'd had to nearly shout it. No answer.
She started up the slope. The light didn't seem to get closer for a long time. The cold found every gap in her. Partway up she stopped hearing her own footsteps over the wind and had to look down to check they were still happening.
The light was a lamppost – old copper gone soft green with the years, a glass head, and the glass was full of fireflies, dozens of them, drifting and lifting and settling, and it was their slow collective breathing that made the light pulse. It stood right at the cliff's edge. At the base of it a tall, slender figure sat with its back against the metal, knees drawn up, looking out over the drop at nothing. A pink bow at the throat, a little crooked.
"Ribbit."
The head turned, slow. Two eyes found her and didn't quite focus.
"...go back," Ribbit said, empty. "There's nothing out here."
Pomni lowered herself into the snow beside her. She didn't say anything for a second. She picked at the crust with one finger, looked at the fireflies, looked at her own hands.
"I, um." She cleared her throat. "I have to ask you a favor. I'm sorry, I know that's a – I know that's a weird way to walk up to someone, I've been practicing it the whole way over and it didn't get less weird, so." A small, nervous laugh that died fast. "It's about Jax."
The wind hit like a wall, snow ripping up off the ground in white sheets. In the glass head of the lamp the fireflies all lit at once – blazing, frantic, flinging themselves against the inside of the glass with hard little taps – and the light flared up bright enough to hurt. Ribbit hadn't moved. Ribbit was sitting exactly as still as before, staring at the same patch of nothing, and the whole world was screaming on her behalf.
Pomni kept talking, afraid of what the quiet would do if she let it sit.
"Okay – look, I get it. I get why you'd want to never lay eyes on him again. I can't stand him half the time. I hate his guts." She caught it. "Her guts – whatever, that's not – the point is every single time I think I've finally got a real person in there, a real feeling, an actual thing – bam. Right back to the jokes. The sarcasm, the dumb voices.." She was talking too fast. "So I'm not gonna sit up here and pretend he's easy. I'm probably the last person alive who'd tell you he's easy. I just–" She ran out. "I need your help anyway."
The wind dropped, by a degree. The snow stopped ripping and started just falling. Up in the glass, the fireflies settled out of their frenzy one by one, the light easing back down to its slow pulse. The whole slope pulled itself into order, like Ribbit was holding still on purpose now, to hear her.
"...yeah," Ribbit said. Barely. "Yeah. That's him."
She was quiet a long time, and when she talked again it came out in pieces, like she had to find each one before she could set it down.
"I still don't get it. Things were good. None of it meant anything – Caine would reset the world after every adventure – but we had each other. I had people I could." She didn't finish. Her hand had drifted up to the bow at her throat without her seeming to know it. "I keep – I go back over it. Trying to find the part where it went – Where I should've done it different. I pushed too hard, probably. Too fast. Should've gone and got Kaufmo. Those two were closer in the end."
Pomni leaned over and put her arms around her – clumsy, her head barely at the height of Ribbit’s shoulders. Ribbit went rigid. Then, slowly, she relaxed.
"He abstracted a while back," Pomni said into the cold, letting go. "But I can tell he's doing a lot worse lately. He's – he's okay, mostly, these days. He sits with me. But this morning there was a whole crowd of voices in there tearing him apart, and I couldn't get him to so much as look at me." She pulled her knees in. "And the whole time. The only thing in there that isn't an insult is you. When I touched his abstraction, I saw your face. I don't know how to do this. I just know I can't do it on my own."
Ribbit was quiet.
"You think he misses me." She said it flat, testing the shape of it.
"I know he does."
"...I don't know if I can get my hopes up again." Her voice thinned. "That's pretty much the only thing I ever did."
"Then don't." Pomni made herself meet her eyes. "You don't have to hope for anything. You don't have to forgive him, you don't have to fix him. Just come stand where he can see you, and we'll find out together. That's all.” She paused. “Can you do that? For me?"
Ribbit closed her eyes. A few tears came and she let them. Then she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and looked at Pomni, and nodded.
"Okay." Pomni almost smiled.
They sat a little longer, shoulders touching, while the wind dropped the rest of the way and the snow fell straight down. Just before the cold took Pomni under, Ribbit spoke, very low.
"Hey. Pomni."
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for climbing all the way up here." The faintest curve at the corner of her mouth.
The firefly light blurred and ran, and the snow gave way to color, and the color settled into the strange familiar interior of the circus.
Pomni walked Ribbit's abstraction across the main floor toward the nest of dark, stopping every time it balked, starting again when it let her. Jax's form coiled tight as they got close, every eye pinned on the shape coming toward him, somewhere between the attention one pays to an old friend and a predator.
They touched.
The circus tore open. White light folded through itself, the floor came apart into raw color, and the blast of it lifted Pomni clean off her feet – and then Gangle's ribbons whipped out across the room, wound twice around her middle, and reeled her back hard, the whole length of her snapping taut like a kite line in wind.
She didn't see where it went.
The voices are still going when Ribbit walks in.
She can hear them from every direction – the laughing, the flat one, the fast one, the low one underneath – and the small curled shape in the middle of it with its hands over its head.
Then Jax sees her.
Everything stops. The voices, the laughing, all of it – gone, like a fingertip shushing the string of a cello. Just the lamp, the dark, and the two of them.
He stares at her. He doesn't move. You can see him trying to decide which one he is – the one who cracks a joke and watches you get hurt, or the one from all those years ago who let her in and, for about half a second, felt safe.
Ribbit decides first.
She's not going to stand here and wait to find out if he'll have her. Not this time. She crosses the circle of light and wraps both arms around him and holds on, tight, the way you hold something you're not letting get away again.
Jax makes a small sound. His shoulders fall. He brings his arms up, slowly, and holds her back. Weakly, like there’s no strength left in his muscles.
Ribbit holds on tighter.
And the dark starts to change. The lamppost softens and spreads and becomes a window; the nothing fills in around them into walls, a floor, a bed, a desk – her room, the circus one. Light comes up from some toy thing turning in the corner and throws itself across everything in scattered green, dozens of soft drifting points of it, like dawn sifting down through a thick canopy of leaves. It moves over the both of them. It's the most beautiful thing either of them can remember.
They take it in.
"You're okay," Ribbit says firmly. It’s not something she’s leaving up for debate. "You hear me? You're gonna be okay. I'm here now."
Jax doesn't answer for a while. Lets himself be held. And then, muffled, voice cracking:
"...I missed you."
Ribbit pulls back just enough to look at him, and her whole face goes bright, and she points at him like she's caught him doing something.
"HA. There it is. I knew I could get one more smile out of you."
Jax laughs. It startles out of him, almost overexuberant, and much gentler than the laugh he’d use when laughing -at- someone. Ribbit laughs too, and for a second it's just the two of them cracking up in the green light over absolutely nothing, letting the frigidity melt away.
When it settles, she reaches up and takes the bow off her own throat.
She leans in and ties it around Jax’s ear – crooked, because his ear won't quit twitching – and he lets her. In the distance, total silence. Nothing to crack open the moment.
"Your secret's safe with me," she says.
"It looks stupid," Jax says. His voice is wrecked. No, -her- voice is wrecked.
"It looks cute."
They turn and look out the window together, shoulder to shoulder, the bow crooked on her ear, the green light moving over the both of them. Outside the glass there are stars. The digital sky is familiar – the stars are a bit cartoonishly big and few in number. It’s breathtaking. The gentle smiles on their two faces grow at the sight.
When the light cleared, Pomni was on her back on the circus floor, Gangle's ribbons still loose around her torso.
Where the nest once was, the air was full of falling light. The two abstractions had gone up all at once – a single soundless supernova, white going to gold going to nothing. What was left of them was coming down slowly over the whole room, a long quiet fall of glimmering dust, settling on the toppled furniture, melting on contact like snowflakes. On the ruined tower of shapes, on Pomni's upturned face.
In the middle of where they'd been, flat on the floor, there was a framed photo.
Gangle untangled her ribbons. Ragatha helped Pomni sit up. Nobody said anything. Pomni approached and picked the frame up in both hands.
The first thing was that it was wrong. The light in it was flat – hard and even across every surface, no soft edge anywhere – and there was a white highlight in the top corner where nothing in the picture could have made one, and it cast no shadow down onto her hands. It looked cheap.
Then she looked at the photo inside.
Two of them at a window, shoulder to shoulder, stars in the reflection on the glass. Both grinning. Unmistakably, around Jax’s long, floppy ear, the pink bow.
"Where'd they go?" Gangle asked, very quietly.
Pomni looked at the dust still gold on her sleeves. She looked at the photo, at the bow on her ear, at the two of them looking out at all those stars.
"I’m not quite sure," she said. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "But…I think they’re together now."
She kept the photo. She set it next to her bed, the one thing in her whole settled, warmly-lit, properly-rendered room that refused to look right. A hard little square of somewhere else, lit by a light that wasn't hers. That night she got back into the bookkeeping manual, chapter ten, and made her small careful checkmarks down the margin, not really taking in the words on the page.
She slept fine. Somewhere in the night she half-woke, sure she'd heard Jax laughing – the real one, the one that cracks in the middle. Probably it was nothing more than a nice dream. Even still, Pomni had a feeling that Jax and Ribbit were somehow okay.