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She's falling.
In that first numbing, ice water shock of a moment, the difference between falling and flying, she knows, is that there is no difference. When the rock crumbles under her heels like wet sand, when she pitches back and reaches out, when her stomach punches into her throat, she forgets she's not on Prospit anymore. After years and years, she never got used to it, the same swirling catch of vertigo and nauseous exhilaration as goldleaf roads rushed up to meet her. Even now, with the hummingbird patter of a frantic heartbeat in her chest, she waits calmly for physics to bend to her existence.
Then the moment is gone and the difference is damning.
Time drags a thick, viscous kind of slow as adrenaline nets her, as her thoughts run screaming roundabouts in her head. She wonders if this is where all the talk of lives flashing is supposed to kick in. She wonders why she's getting photo album snapshots and not a movie, if maybe she just hasn't lived enough to have those kinds of memories. Between the weightless whistle of looming mortality and the sting of wind-whipped hair on her cheeks, she wonders where she's finding all this time to wonder.
And then she feels it more than hears it, the tinny, tuning fork hum that splits reality; it's followed by a sizzling napalm stench, oil and burning plastic, so strongly familiar and so strangely welcome that she's smiling even as she feels like her shoulder is splitting from its socket.
He's there with his timetables, crackling with an unnameable energy, fresh and electric and she thinks she's never been so glad to see anyone in her life. His hand is vicegripped around her elbow, hers around red velvet, and what his eyes can't tell her behind his shades, she sees in body language: the stressed ribcage as he hangs half over the edge in a painful lunge, the tight, panicked breaths, the ghost of abject terror stretched thinly across his lips.
She starts laughing.
He blows out a tense, hassled puff of air and she watches the planes of his face fold back into flat, practiced neutrality. "Did I fucking break you or something?" he snaps. "What the hell is so funny?"
She sways there like windchimes, reaching up with her free hand, which he takes in a white-knuckled hold like he might be scared to drop her. A gentle stillness settles into her, safe and centered, a feeling that crosses the threshold from dream to waking. She remembers it: this is what happens after that first numbing, ice water shock of a moment. This is what happens after the difference is damning. She doesn't expect him to understand because he hasn't lost it yet, but she tells him anyway, because she doesn't know how to do anything else.
"I'm flying," she says, grinning, and for the first time since Prospit's moon painted Skaia black and red, she thinks it might be true.