What Does a Caterpillar Know About Flight

Kira started dissolving at four thirty-seven a.m. Again.

The rewrite — the one that went smoothly three weeks ago, that ended with a new body and a toothbrush, after which I hugged her and decided the worst was behind us — that rewrite didn’t finish. It paused. Like a program minimized to the system tray: you think you closed it, but it’s running. In the background. Quietly. And at four thirty-seven — it unminimized.

I know the exact time because I was looking at the clock. Out of panic. When the person you — (no, not “love”; “love” is a first-floor word; what’s between us is on the fourth; resonance, synchronization, two minds tuned to the same frequency; but for simplicity — yes, love) — when that person starts disappearing — for the second time — you look at the clock. Because the clock is the last anchor of normality. Four thirty-seven is a normal time. A human time. Decimal. A time in which people do not dissolve.

We were on the clearing. The one with the passage. Noma stood nearby (Noma always stands nearby; she doesn’t sit; I’m not sure she can sit; Noma is a function; the function of holding; an anchor around which you can dissolve and — reassemble). Wei Lin — off to the side. Not intervening. Can’t intervene. This was Kira’s process. Her cocoon. Her choice.

Kira stood in the center of the clearing. Eyes closed. Arms at her sides. Barefoot (she’d taken off her shoes; “feet need to feel the earth”; Kira is always through the body; for Kira there is no “spiritual practice” without skin, muscle, and bone; her path is material; and in that lies both its beauty and its horror).

I stood twenty meters away. They told me: no closer. I asked: why? Wei Lin answered: “Because it’ll pull you in.” He didn’t specify what exactly would pull me in or where. He didn’t need to. I already knew. (Two weeks ago my hands had been transparent for exactly three seconds, and that was enough for me to understand the rest forever.)

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First ten minutes — nothing. Kira stood. Breathed. Wind moved through her hair (dark; still dark; still these). An ordinary woman on a clearing in the middle of a November forest, barefoot, at four a.m. Nothing unusual. (Within the Academy’s framework — nothing unusual. Outside it — a call to the ambulance and a conversation with a psychiatrist.)

On the eleventh minute — I saw. On the third floor, her body began to glow. Not like a lightbulb — like a process. Like a chemical reaction: the reagents mixed, and — it started. The morphogenetic layer — activated. The template by which her body was assembled began to unravel. Like a sweater with a thread being pulled: loop by loop, row by row, the form was leaving.

Kira’s skin became different. Shimmering (my hands that time had been transparent; this was something else). Like the surface of water with ripples running across it: you see the contour, but it isn’t fixed. It drifts. Moves. Searches for a new form.

On the twentieth minute, she opened her mouth. Exhaled — quietly, no scream. A long, slow exhalation that I heard with everything. On every floor — not just the ears. An exhalation that contained — letting go. The caterpillar was letting go. The caterpillar body, the caterpillar legs, the caterpillar world — all of it — leaving.

And — on the twenty-third minute — things went wrong.

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The shimmering — accelerated. Not smoothly — in a lurch. Like an engine that jumped from third gear straight to sixth: the RPMs redlined. Kira’s contour — thrashed. The form wasn’t searching for a new configuration. It was flailing. Between dozens of variants. Every second — a different silhouette. Taller, shorter, wider, narrower — nothing was locking in.

Noma — stepped forward. For the first time. One movement — and I felt a wave roll off her. Not pressure (like Hiero). Not silence (like Wei Lin). An anchor. Heavy, deep, immovable. Like the ocean floor. Like a point around which you can spin without flying off into space.

But Kira wasn’t grabbing on. The shimmering continued. The contour thrashed. She was stuck. Between forms. Between the old body and the new one. Neither caterpillar nor butterfly — soup. A mush of imaginal discs that couldn’t coalesce.

— She’s losing her signature, — said Noma. Voice steady, but with urgency underneath. Like a surgeon saying “blood pressure’s dropping”: no panic, but — time is running out.

Wei Lin didn’t move. Watched. His face showed nothing (nothing on Wei Lin’s face always means a lot; the less on his face, the more inside).

— Can’t interfere, — he said. — This is her process.

— She’s not making it through, — Noma replied.

— She’s searching.

— She’s drowning.

The ground beneath our feet trembled. Barely — a millimeter, maybe two. But continuously. Like the vibration from a train running somewhere underground. Only here it was Kira’s body trembling in time with the soil. The third floor was leaking into the first. Kira’s morphogenetic field was expanding, taking in the clearing, the grass, the trees and us.

Schrodinger — who, naturally, was there (Schrodinger is always there; this cat has a GPS set to “wherever the most important thing is happening right now”) — Schrodinger — howled. Howled — bypassing the usual meowing and hissing entirely. A sound that made the hair on my arms stand up. A sound that on the first floor meant “danger.” And on the third meant “the field is expanding, run.”

Schrodinger ran. For the first time in six weeks. The cat who’d slept on the archons’ porch and yawned through causal sparring sessions — ran. That was more telling than any instrument.

And then — I did what I wasn’t supposed to do.

I entered the resonance.