The hollow wasn’t built for the two of them. Alodia Lightning’s body presses against Misery’s, and within that pressure is her heartbeat, like a small creature struggling to break free. Lightning’s breath whispers across the back of Misery’s neck. “Okay, now what?”

Now what? She’s here. She shuts her eyes and sinks into the well of her body, the pathetic flesh sack with all its weaknesses and limitations and needs. The song of this alien chunk of holystone has been so loud, so anywhere and everywhere, that Misery’s mind is numb to it. It’s background radiation, black noise, a baseline of fatigue. But here, wrapped in its embrace, Misery feels sensation in the core of her being again. At the base of her spine. She presses deep into the glassy stone. There it is. That angry jolt of connection. The stone is eager, so deeply hungry to fulfill its purpose. One push and she’ll be over the edge.

“Don’t let go,” she whispers with her mouth, hoping that it reaches Alodia Lightning in the world of flesh. Then she pushes.

Stone wakes around them. Cold ultramarine keens and glows reactor-blue. It hits them with the force of a thousand gales, a choir of planetary crusts splitting, a hundred thousand stars bursting to life. The stone roars, then flings them into the void.

Misery shatters. The universe forces itself through her, every atom and iota of energy that comprises the cosmos rushing through the fontanelle of the speck she calls a body. In an instant her consciousness spreads across the firmament, a range of infinite light-years from alpha to omega, covering the chasm between galaxies in a blink. To be infinite is to be nothing. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. For an infinitesimal fragment of time Misery is the great void, her humanity vanishing against the vastness of Creation. She is all there is, and this is all she is.

Another light, another presence: the Lady Lee Alodia Lightning. Not supposed to be here. In this infinity space their forms overlap and phase in and out of one another, simultaneously each other’s inverse and also the very composition of the universe. They are a wave, they are particles, they are energy and nothing but, they are two soft bodies and two disparate minds become something else. A unity. Misery-and-Lightning can only cling to each other, become one another, and ride it out.

CHAPTER 19