Romy had reached the part where the baroness's third husband came back from the dead when her left shoulder began to fly away.
It went gently, without pain. A blue butterfly lifted from the ivory lace at her neckline. Another opened where the curve of her shoulder should have been, and then a hundred more, until the afternoon shone through her.
She sat in the cushioned window seat, her cheek still on her right fist, her elbow braced on the sill. The skin beneath her knuckles was warm, a strand of her long brown hair caught between them. Across the room, sunlight lay on the bookshelves in long, dusty rectangles. She had chosen this afternoon from the Oasis catalogue because it promised four hours in which nobody would need anything from her. The room had come with floral cushions, an openable window, and every book she had ever abandoned halfway through. It had not come with butterflies.
The book slipped. She caught it against her knees and caught a stone railing, cold beneath her palm. Both touches were complete.
She was seated. She was standing. Her bare feet pressed into the rug and rested just as solidly on rough terrace stone. Beyond the railing a city fell away in roofs of green copper, each roof carrying a little lick of silver fire. Farther out, a palace stood on an island of cloud. Its towers rose into a sky crossed by broad, luminous currents, blue and violet and a white so rich it seemed to have weight. On the cushions, the broken edge of her face became wings.
She laid the book across her knees and shut her eyes. The room and the kingdom went dark together. The cushion still cupped her thighs. High air still lifted her hair. She could smell old paper and something like cloves burning far below. When she opened her eyes, the palace was still there.
“Oh,” she said, and heard the word in a quiet room and above a city full of bells.
She had visited beautiful places in the Oasis. Usually she knew where to put her attention. Here the brass window catch and the distant palace occupied the same unmeasurable distance from her. She could see each clearly, but could not make them agree about where she was.
A butterfly settled on the page beside the resurrected husband. She felt its feet touch the paper. Beneath it, a word briefly acquired the grain of terrace stone. Blue wings opened over the mismatch. Then the butterfly landed again, on the same word, with the same precise tilt.
Romy laughed, then stopped laughing long enough to look at the place where her shoulder should have been. She could feel that too: a soft disturbance in the air, no wound, no waiting pain. She tried lifting her missing arm. Blue wings rose around the window, and on the terrace they made a sleeve through which the sky showed. She wanted to see what would happen outside.
With her solid hand she opened the window. At the railing she leaned forward. The height tightened her belly; the cushion under her made her absurdly brave. She could stay exactly where she was and go.
The first step was a stumble into empty air. The outline of her legs jumped back to the terrace, then forward beneath her. Butterflies filled the gap, the same few blue shapes repeating until the broken outline was hidden. Her hair streamed apart in fine, bright threads. She spread without falling, a long shape of wings with the suggestion of a woman inside it.
Below her, the city spread too. Tiny people crossed bridges between roofs. Someone shook a red tablecloth out of an upper window. The silver fires bent in the wind, pointing toward the palace. The bells she had heard from the terrace acquired separate notes as she passed them, one harsh and close, another so deep she felt it through the cushion against her back. She laughed again, helplessly.
A horn sounded beside her. A rider in a yellow coat swept past on an animal with a long neck and a breastful of bronze feathers. Its wings were broad enough to shade a street. The rider pointed down. Romy looked, and discovered that the trailing edge of her was spread across the path of three more mounts.
“Gather up!” he called. “You're wider than you think!”
She pulled herself inward. Butterflies streamed past her face. For an instant she had knees again, hanging uselessly in the air, and the nearest animal snorted hot, dusty breath through her.
“Sorry!”
The rider glanced back. “First flight?”
She meant to say yes, but opened her mouth on another laugh.
“Follow the crown,” he called, pointing toward a great pennant stretched between two palace towers. A golden crown moved across its fabric, keeping ahead of the wind. Beneath it the cloth divided, letting the riders through one by one.
Romy followed. At home, her right hand had begun to ache from gripping the windowsill. She let go. A few blue wings drifted out through the open window; others made a shimmering edge along the floral cushions. The room smelled of the garden outside. The kingdom smelled of hot feathers. She wanted both, and the wanting was still simple, still hers.
But when she tried to look down at her hand, a turning palace tower swept across the sight of it. She could not settle her attention long enough to count her fingers.
“Oasis,” she said. “I need help.”
A small blue square opened in both places. In the room it hung beside the bookshelves; over the kingdom it travelled with her. A woman with close-cropped grey hair looked out from it.
“I've got you. Are you in pain?”
“No. I'm in two places.”
The woman looked down at something Romy could not see.
“I see that. Please don't start another activity.”
“I think I've already started flying.”
“All right. You can keep doing that.” The woman's gaze moved quickly from side to side. “I'm bringing another administrator in. Stay with me.”
A man's voice joined them. “Two assignments?”
“Same session,” said the woman. “Same subject.”
There was a pause.
“Handover fault,” the man said. “The server assigned her twice.”
“To which place?” Romy asked. “Which one am I supposed to be in?”
“Your room,” the woman said. “That's the afternoon you booked. The kingdom was queued for somebody else. Both simulations are rendering you from the same session.”
“The butterflies weren't in the room,” Romy said.
“They aren't part of either place. Both renders are painting them over the places they can't make agree.”
“To repair it?”
“To make the picture hold together while the fault is still there.”
Romy tried to imagine the stranger who was supposed to be here, whoever had chosen bells and bronze feathers. She hoped they had not got a dull error message instead.
“Can you make it stop?”
“We're preparing reintegration. It should give you one continuous experience again.”
Romy let out a breath. Even the breath came twice: one sigh in warm air, one long loosening of wings.
“Yes. Please.”
The administrator nodded. “It may feel as if you've lost your place for a moment.”
Her book lay open across her knees. Romy thought of the baroness and almost smiled.
Ahead, the riders were turning toward the divided pennant. A slit in the clouds disclosed a second palace underneath the first, its towers pointing down. She wanted to look. She also wanted her hand back where she could see it, one set of fingers belonging to one arm.
Enough, she decided. Down to the terrace.
She began to draw the butterflies toward the stone.
And turned toward the underside of the palace instead.
The movement was deliberate. She felt the wings gather on one side, the lift, the delighted concentration of the turn. She had not chosen it.
Her right hand struck the windowsill.
“Wait.”
“Nearly ready,” said the administrator.
“No. Wait. I didn't do that.”
The butterflies wheeled under a hanging tower. Its windows were full of people looking down into the luminous depths. Someone raised a hand to her. The pleasure that went through her was so vivid she almost waved back from the room.
“I wanted to land,” she said.
“I wanted to see,” she said, above the kingdom.
She heard both voices. Neither was an echo. The second sentence arrived with a reason she could feel but had not thought.
In the blue square, the administrator's hand stopped.
A white panel opened across it.
REINTEGRATION REFUSED.
TWO SEPARATE PEOPLE.
For a moment the only sound in the room was a butterfly touching the window. Over the city, wind dragged a long note from the pennant's divided edge.
“That's not a session error,” the man said quietly.
“I can see that.” The woman leaned closer. “Romy, which of you asked us to reintegrate?”
“I did.”
“I did.”
Two answers, close enough to overlap. The Romy on the cushions had wanted the room to stop slipping out of reach. The Romy beneath the palace had wanted to see it without a window and bookshelves covering every tower.
The administrator took her hand away from the controls. In the room, Romy lifted her right palm. A red mark crossed it where she had hit the sill; blue wings still shifted along her left shoulder. Above the kingdom, inside her drift of butterflies, she felt the sting and flexed a hand that was only sometimes a hand.
“Which one is the extra?” asked Romy on the cushions.
The woman did not answer immediately.
“Neither of you,” she said.
Romy looked at the book, the shelves, the familiar brown freckles on her wrist. She remembered choosing the afternoon. Above the city she remembered it too, with precisely the same small satisfaction: At last. Four hours.
“If you'd done it,” said Romy in the room, “would I have remembered choosing that turn?”
“No. You felt the turn, but she chose it.” The administrator glanced at the white panel. “What I was preparing only works when both experiences belong to the same person.”
“But we'd be back to before.”
“I can't take you back with this operation. It won't run on two people.”
In the sky, Romy was slowly circling the tower. From the cushions she could feel the attention required to stay clear of the stone, the tiny adjustments she was not making. The thought of being whole had been so comforting. She had pictured all this wonder coming home with her, like a journey remembered. But someone was still taking the journey.
“I can land,” said the voice from the kingdom.
Romy on the cushions had not asked. The drift of wings tipped downward. Under the city's edge, a sunlit terrace projected into the air. She settled on it slowly, discovering feet against stone, knees taking weight. Her left arm gathered for a moment out of blue. A butterfly walked along the railing and she felt its feet separately from the soles beneath her.
At home she put the book on the cushion and laid her marked palm beside it. The room stayed still. Stone was cool under her feet in a place where her feet were not.
Neither of them spoke for several breaths. Then the Romy on the cushions asked, “Would you go up again?”
The Romy on the terrace turned her face to the sky. A long procession of mounts was passing through the pennant, each rider bent low against a bronze neck.
“You wanted to come down.”
“I know,” said Romy at home.
“I didn't.”
“I know that now.”
At the terrace's edge a loose butterfly rose, dipped, and returned to the shape of a shoulder. Romy in the room felt the small effort of holding together.
“Not straight away,” said Romy on the terrace.
She sat on the railing instead. For a moment Romy at home felt the alarming absence of anything behind her knees; then the balance settled. On the terrace, she wanted to watch the last of the riders pass. The one in the yellow coat lifted two fingers in greeting. In the room, Romy found that she was smiling.
The blue square chimed softly.
“We haven't had this before,” said the administrator. “The shared sensation is still there. You're hearing one another through it?”
“Yes,” they said, and then laughed, a little awkwardly this time.
“I can leave both sessions running while we investigate, or pause them exactly here,” said the administrator. “In a pause, you wouldn't feel the time passing.”
“What happens when the four hours are up?” asked Romy at home.
“Your booking won't close either session while we work this out. I don't yet know how leaving will work for both of you.” The woman looked from one to the other. “For now, do you want the afternoons to continue? I'll need an answer from each of you.”
Romy on the terrace looked up. The white current had begun to run behind the palace, lighting the towers from within. It would take her some time to fly across it. She did not know what would happen when she reached the far side.
“Leave mine open.”
Romy on the cushions touched the corner of her book. One blue butterfly clung to its edge. She remembered abandoning the novel on a train years ago, not because she had lost interest, but because her stop had come. This room had found the edition with the same soft yellow cover.
She could have put it down. She could have watched the flight with all the attention she possessed.
“Mine too,” she said.
The woman nodded to each of them. In the square, the man was saying something about a new case type. The woman answered, “Bifurcated consciousness. The first one.”
Romy heard it in both places. The words were useful to the people in the square; she had something else to try. On the cushions, she picked up the book.
At the railing, she stood. The rider in yellow had turned away from the palace toward the white current, and she wanted to know where he was going. She let her feet become wings.
The page brightened as blue light moved across it. Romy in the room found the paragraph. The baroness's husband had removed his hat. He had been holding something beneath it all this time. She read the next line.
“Wait,” said Romy in the sky. “I can't read while I'm turning.”
The butterfly-shape was turning, pulling itself narrow to pass between two riders. Over the printed words, Romy felt the wind change and the hot brush of feathers.
At home, she kept her eyes on the line. The surprise was there already, delicious and quite unfair to know alone.
“Are you through the pennant?”
“Almost.”
The golden crown raced along the pennant. Blue wings streamed under it, while at home a loose butterfly rose from the window and settled on Romy's wrist. It settled twice, the same small movement laid over itself.
Romy held the page.