Again and again the fourth dimension went crazy at that particular moment and the time portal spewed him out wrong minutes or parallel hours earlier or later. He recalibrated his warp-watch time and again; he didn’t have the additional gravitational compensators on him, and he was afraid to search for them unless he be carried away in the ever-splitting flow, dragged off by routines set to him by the source mind craving complexity.
Clari’s fingers ran along the dots of the book. Ze paused pondering over the word. Carmine, the dots said. First, it was the usual definition hir mind suggested: bright red colour, pigment, hex code #D70040 – empty notions ze had learnt by heart in false hope it would give hir orientation. Then suddenly, where a week ago there was the uniformity of blackness, a fountain of juicy vividness spurted up in hir imagination.
The fifth phalanges of Teh-Mi-Ja’s first and second opposed fingers bent to twist the card. She paused millimetres before the picture would be revealed and allowed herself to guess.
I woke up on the beach, my body stiff and stinging from the salt. As I rose on my elbows, the crystal shell encapsulating me began to fall off.
I picked up a burnt rock and weighed it on my palm. The wind ruffled my feathers…
I looked up at Aidan, his bearded profile dark and bulky against the white hospital wall. He had never seemed that big to me before.