If she finds a label for herself that I can also wear, then we may lay waste to all who stand before us.

⊙

This shard’s March runs madcap across a cityscape where up isn’t always above and things don’t always move in straight lines.

She leaps from the side of a building, one gloved hand and one foot brushing against the building’s surface as she plummets. Two shadows appear above her.

One is a young man with a heavy syringe and a crafted outfit that augments his movements. Seeing the syringe reminds of a past cycle. A fleeting moment—recalled because the facet of this shard is focused on timing, and that cycle came ‘down to the wire’, as this shard’s little March would say. A civilization of molluscoids that fashioned means of locomotion. When they interacted with another species on their third moon, they emulated that species with the shells they built around them. In a low-gravity environment, they wore bodies of metal that each stood a mile tall, narrow, each with a lone individual, pairing, or family of molluscoids within. These spindle-limbed forms waded through gas, heads above the thickest of the gas, limbs ending far below, where they could harvest from the deeper, higher-pressure environment.

The fluid in that syringe almost aborted that cycle. To facilitate adaptation between the two different worlds, the molluscoids created nanofluids that impacted friction, chemical bonding, and temperature, among other things. When the cycle closed on the moon, the molluscoids modified the fluids and did what they could to prevent access to the planet’s core.

The boy doesn’t know the power he wields. Neither does their March.

A nudge draws their March’s attention to the fluid.

Now she’s somewhat aware. A feeling.

The boy has his own feelings. He seems to feel there are stakes of some meaning. His limbs skim the wall as he falls, as our little March’s do. The exoskeleton he wears pumps fluid from the syringe at his back to arms and legs, then to hands and feet. Peach-colored fluid streaks the wall where he touches it, and rather than create drag, accelerates him. He speeds down, faster than falling velocity, closing the distance on their March.

“Careful, Withdrawal!” a woman shouts. “She’s dangerous! She set that thing off to the west!”

The west. The mayor. The first one from the time bubble. The blackout that had followed had bought March the chance to slip away, take another angle of attack. It was occupying a good portion of the defending forces. Worms were crawling out of every crevice and hole, binding together into bigger things if not cut down fast enough.

Too many places were sealed away, nestled in between buildings with no gaps to slip through. She needed to find the space warper.