This wasn’t Seven’s idea of getting away from it at all, and something else happened that had never happened before. The sentences that he heard now came in different languages, so that “This is the beginning” came in every language at once, and so did all the other sentences. He saw the letters mentally also. Before he got used to this—and the sentences switching to all of their language versions—the letters themselves grew bleary and began to shift and break away from each other, turning into waves and particles of light. Now and then one would explode, and the light from that fragment would turn all of the other particles into waves. But in the next moment they’d be particles again, like mosaics, glimmering in the universe, with darkness all around.

Seven blinked: The darkness wasn’t at all stationary, but kept slivering off and falling into all of this particle and wave activity, until some of the letters were made of a glowing, brilliant darkness.

“There was light and there was darkness,” Seven thought, or thought that he thought. How could there be light-darkness or darkness that was light? That would mean—But before he could finish, the light fragments and the dark-shining fragments changed places or turned into each other. Seven screamed with dismay and shouted with utter amazement all at once. Because suddenly he was on the other side of … what? His mind (or what was left of it), he thought (or tried to think), was different.

He’d been traveling far faster than the speed of light in usual terms, but now he discovered that once this happened, there was a sense of complete stillness that existed inside the incredible motion. He calmed down. He was lolling.

When everything went so fast that you could hardly follow, there was a new quiet plateau within or above the speed—if that was the word. Because now all the letters and sentences that he’d heard before just went lolling about too, like clouds, only they were broad waves now, shining, separated, flowing past each other without a care in the world.

Now who thought that last sentence, Seven wondered, and what world did it come from? He didn’t recognize it as his own, or as anyone else’s, for that matter. He was simply intrigued, watching all of the gentle motion, which he discovered had a slight sound, like the breaking of light into music or the notes that music comes from—and he suddenly felt himself doing just that.