“Oh. Apologies,” said Palamedes Sextus. “Misread the moment. Let’s call it cabin fever. Nonagesimus, is Camilla—”

“She sent me,” you said, wringing out your wet hem. “She is alive and well and living.”

He whistled a sigh.

“Oh, thank God,” he said a little unsteadily. “Thank God for that mad, stubborn, lovely girl. Speaking of. Harrowhark, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

You frantically clapped your hands to your exoskeleton, but knew as your fingers touched the representation of bone that it was no good. There were no letters there; they could not transfer when you did not know their contents–and there had never, in any case, been a letter addressed to Sextus. The previous Harrow had never bothered to think of it. You knew full well she had seen Hect and Sextus dead; why account for one’s reappearance, but not the other’s? This was a mystery you had no answer for; you were utterly on your own, in this nonsensical miracle of a room.

You said instead, “A projection. A projection in the River?”

“I’d call it on the bank, though that’s not accurate either,” he said promptly. “I couldn’t anchor myself to my body properly when I was about to render myself down to my component parts. So I established a kind of bubble attached to the Riverbank and anchored it to myself at the cellular level—not one thick rope, but lots of tiny little strings. Like a spiderweb, I suppose. As long as anyone could find any bit of me, be it never so small and soggy, there’d be a couple of strands still clinging to it, and me on the other end. Or that was the hope. Couldn’t test it, of course.”

You said: “I have been inside the River, Sextus, multiple times, both in spirit and in flesh. You cannot build a bubble there.”

“Okay, wrong word, perhaps, but—”

“You cannot build in the River! It is a dimension of perpetual flux—defined space is nonsense here—you might as well try to wall off time with bricks and mortar.”

“Yes. Sort of. But by our very presence in the River, we briefly exert space on non-space. Think of how, when you blow air into water, you make bubbles. The water can’t be where the air is. It’s like the air temporarily enforces its own rules over a localised area. If you were in one of those bubbles, you could do things under air-rules—like talking, or lighting a fire—that water doesn’t permit. Like water rejecting air, the River instinctively rejects what lies outside it—it doesn’t want any here in its hereafter. So you can impose your own rules on it, to a very limited extent … I could write at least six very good papers about this, Harrow. There’s so much work to be done.”