A ripping sound filled the synthetic dark as great wounds gaped in the fabric of unreality.

Multifaceted eyes stared through diamond slits, and spider legs clawed the void. She called on her Craft, forged chains of light to stitch the cut universe back together.

When she was relatively certain she wouldn’t die in the next few minutes, she searched for the problem’s source.

She didn’t have to search long. She recognized the scream.

Abelard had taken shape in the nightmare half a mile beneath her, spinning over the Body, arms pinwheeling in a futile attempt to steady himself. The glowing tip of his cigarette trailed circles around him.

She stopped his spin with a thought and a slight tweak of the dream’s parameters.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“How you get used to that, I will never know.” He brushed stray hairs back into his tonsure, and straightened his skewed robes. “Um. I seem to be upside down.”

“Gravity’s relative to your body here. Your modesty’s safe. You really should go.” She righted him with a twist of her forefinger.

“I hoped we could talk,” he said when he recovered.

The stitches with which she sealed in the sky surged as the Things beyond adjusted their attack. “This isn’t a good time.”

“What are you doing, anyway?”

“Looking for evidence,” she said. A stitch gave way, and a tendril of shadow wormed into the dark. She shredded it. “I wanted to see how Kos owns the sky.”

He pointed up. “What are those?”

“Demons. Don’t worry about it.”

“Sounds like I should.”

Vines of light wound about the wound, and sharp darkness tore her bindings from within. “I’m running a lot of poorly structured data through the system. Too much of that and the nightmare snarls. Demons are like us, really—but their worlds work on different logic than ours. Points of divergence let them cross over without a summoning contract, without limits. You have to work hard to make one of those in physical space, but analytical engines aren’t continuous. If I break the simulation, they can get in.”

“That sounds bad.”

She swooped toward the body, and brought him with her. “Annoying, mostly, here in n-space. If they breach, we pull out, shut the simulation down, start again. So long as we don’t bring them back to the supposedly real world with us.”

“Is that possible?”

“I’m warded, so they can’t crawl into me—not without a fight. You, though—”

There came a massive pulse against the curvature of nothing. Her stitches distended and the wound opened like a mouth, only instead of teeth it was full of eyes.

“Hold on a second,” she said. “I’m almost done.” Great tubes sprouted from the god’s body, vessels bearing His power, His blood out into the world. The city formed around them, like the impression of a body beneath a rubber sheet.