As if in response, the floor slowly tilts. I go tense by instinct, expecting to slide away, but gravity keeps me right where I am as if we’re not moving at all. The planet below dips to the side. A line of some sort of metallic debris—huge shards of polished silver—comes into view. The nearest pieces are massive, the most distant appearing as tiny flecks that curve around the far side of Earth, catching the light of the hidden sun as they slowly spin in their orbit.

The Shatter Ring. We’re in the Shatter Ring.

Is that what you call it? asks the voice. The words are tinted with curiosity and feel somehow … azure, as if the feeling of curiosity has a color.

I hesitate, still uncertain of who I’m talking to and whether they’re dangerous. This is the place that births Beings, after all, and it creeps me out even more that this—person?—can apparently sense my thoughts. “What do you call it?” I ask cautiously.

The voice is silent for a moment. The floor tilts again until the earth is below us and the Shatter Ring is barely visible off to the sides. Pieces of my body, the voice says at last, somber and small.

I gape. “Who … what are you?”

The voice seems to fumble. I sense it rummaging through itself, searching for the right words. After a moment, a collection of thoughts and pictures and memories pour into my head. Light. Dark. Colors where you don’t expect them. Something shimmering in an empty place. It’s too much. I clutch my head with my right hand. “Stop!” I gasp.

The thoughts and pictures cease at once, like they’ve been snatched back. I’m sorry, says the voice. Contrition shades into my mind, carrot-orange. It flickers across the floor too, radiating outward before it vanishes, and I get the sense of a person trying to rein in their emotions, trying to hold very still so that a spooked animal won’t run away.

Making me the spooked animal. Which means the voice, whose emotions apparently project across the floor, and whose body is somehow also the Shatter Ring, is …

Holy ever-loving shit. I swallow dryly. “You’re an alien. An … alien ship? The alien ship who showed up during the Fracture.”

Yes, says the voice, a bit sadly. The child in the closet tucks itself a bit farther back.

I hesitate. I recall the images and phrases it tried to show me earlier, when I asked who it was. The colors, the shimmering, the light and the dark. I think it was trying to tell me its name, but it didn’t quite translate. I think of a word that seems to at least mostly match the description it gave of itself—a word I thought of when I first saw the colors on the floor. “Mirage?” I supply tentatively.