The car stops. It's electric; it runs on water.

Of course, that could describe almost everything in the vicinity. This is the Grand Coulee Dam, the largest electric-power producing facility in the world. To stand before the titanic concrete structure, to feel the hum and roar that goes up from the whirling turbines and the chained spirit of the King ( Read more... )

The dream doesn't start here, but the remembering does; she's in a square, at a bonfire, a heap of paper and wood and white-gold and gems, a fortune for anyone who doesn't mind losing a hand to the flames, and the once-purple Cricket is parked by a track that isn't asphalt but some kind of corduroyed surfacing she doesn't have a word for; something ( Read more... )

The first thing she knows, before she sees or hears or feels anything else, is the sense of presence. She's felt it before, one year agoThere's darkness; not the darkness of todash or a tight spot but the red-tinged dark behind her eyelids. She's sitting on a bench, and someone is sitting beside her, close enough to brush against her as they breath ( Read more... )

It's the first time in a week Rose has had to face the world of White Plains fully conscious; not a gradual sinking back into her own reality, as she had gradually anchored herself in Mid-world (if she had one foot in both worlds, then one of them was in quicksand), but a brutal headfirst dive. At first it's hard.

This world moves fast. Her laptop ( Read more... )

"Mordred. Mordred, I'm sorry, I have to go ( Read more... )

Each empathic vampire has its own unique nature; yet all empathic vampires share certain traits, intrinsic in their natures. They are the takeen, the mortal shadows of the can-tak, the big gods, living blazes of thought and emotion. They are lesser, as the taheen are lesser than the can-tah, the animal spirits that both guard and menace the human ( Read more... )

"Nn. Morning."

"Good morning," Mordred says. There's something else he doesn't say.

She stretches. "Ugh. What a long day."

"Think this one is going to be longer," he says wryly.

"You say true." Sigh. "Let's do it."

***

"You expect us to do what?!" Horace Smith is quite literally livid, his bronzed face a purpley-red. At least, Rose thinks, ( Read more... )

Mordred doesn't get much sleep. He curls up near the fire and watches the place where his sister was, and tries to think of a plan. It's hard; his mind keeps straying to Rose and her world. He wonders what it would be like to live in it with her; if he, too, had an other life. He dreams--he understands dreams. In his dreams the world is dark and ( Read more... )

( my mind's made up to pacing across the floor )

There's nothing like wanting really badly to sleep for keeping you awake ( Read more... )