Between bare backs and suit backs Leander pressed, pushed gently against a body in a wool jacket, a woman's outflung arm, a man's wayward elbow.

Too steady light blanketed everything so none of it cast a shadow, not so much as a penumbra, and the thick concert audience crush of bodies seemed unending.

Progress slowed. Music blasted a rest of silence and a blare of noise and dancers pushed back. Deja vu of pulling Daia by the calloused and unresponsive hand through to the stage, only then lights had flashed, gone out, erupted back in. Daia never cared how close they got but he'd wanted her to. As if fulfilling an unfulfilled desire of life he struggled one shoulder through and then the other. At some point the crowd's resistance to let them in always became enough that Dianthea would halt where she was and press down the heels of her boots, he couldn't pull her forward any further when she dug her heels in stubborn like a horse being pulled by a weak human. Odd that one society would banish the flashing lights and another lived for them.

Death's a lot like sleep, Louis Reveur had said. Maybe for him. If this was death it felt like waking. 

Perception amped high, he felt his breath enter and exit from his lungs. Silk sleeves wrapped his arms to the wrist, the collar around his neck, artificially warmed air against his cheeks. Never felt so alive, like every molecule sent a distinct message to the brain.

Never felt so awake, brimming with energy as if he drank too much coffee but without the jitters and without the fog in the first place the caffeine was meant to lift. The feet in his shoes stiff laced too tight, getting sore fast, the pressure of the patio floor pushing up against his soles as gravity tried to drag his body through it. He elbowed someone on his way through, feeling solid. 

Muscle, bone, skin, hard and powerful.

Like a sleepless insomniac night, like trying to sleep, forcing dreams to come with open eyes. What he wanted was to sleep, if sleep meant the real world, if it meant gray morning slipping through the fog and between the blinds in his apartment bedroom and slogging cereal down like a grownup boy child before straightening his uniform and crowding on the bus with everyone else. As if he were trying to fall asleep through insomnia he begged his mind to return to the best bus seat, aisle directly behind the second pair of doors, as long as the window seat was taken by a passenger, as long as the passenger didn't smell, so he wouldn't have to get up, preferably if his stop was before the stop of the person in the window seat. If he could press his mind back to that place, he'd be minutes from the best part of the day. Like none of this had happened. Clean slate. Wasn't he supposed to have three chances? No one even gave him a second chance.

As if insomniac, his eyes stayed open; instead of the fingertip smudged metal and beige plastic and faded bus advertisement his field of view filled with black night and high saturation colors, masks in deep magenta, blue and emerald, the colors those bus ads had maybe been a year and six months ago when first printed.

He tried to go back to San Francisco anyway, like trying to fall asleep, if you didn't think about it too hard it would happen, but you had to let the mind relax. His mind didn't relax. He had orders to follow. His brain refused to let go of the orders, he pushed his way through bodies politely with his objective firmly in mind, mind racing with options on how to achieve it, and you could never sleep like that.

Against his will, which was struggling to land his consciousness back in his bus seat moments before the beginning of a fresh Monday, he found himself asking for directions. "Excuse me," he said, taking one woman in a silk and beaded magenta mask aside and whispering so her friends wouldn't hear, "I'm looking for Mr. Ilan Potestas." It was as if someone else were steering.

"He's there, the one without a mask," said the woman, and she leaned around Leander and pointed with a long outstretched finger. "I wouldn't bother him though. Bad temper."

Leander came out the other side into an open space. The clearing could have given the crowded crowd more personal space if they had spread into it, toward equilibrium like osmosis. A dark skinned man on a raised balcony sipped a drink that he rested on a floating bar top. Not wearing a mask, must be the boss. Leander was six steps from the man. Could introduce himself, tell him Louis sent him, tell him the truth — security had confiscated the firearm Louis had been trying to return, but it should find its way back soon. Tell him Doctor Louis Reveur's message — about the company takeover the boss would not like.

Self-preservation kicked in, though what could it matter if he died here where he had nothing and nobody? If he died could he go back home? These thoughts were muted in the back of his head as a more desperate message that sounded like a thought but maybe came from something external to him told him to be careful, to survive. What he yearned for, he the real him, the way it should be, was nothing but to go back to where he came from, to right the mistake that had been made and get his second chance, but there was a pull too to do as Louis said; it felt as if the pull was on the strings of a puppet version of himself that had no reason to give a flying fuck.

Leander drifted along the edge of the backs toward Potestas. It might not be safe to introduce himself to the boss, Louis hadn't warned against it but seconds from corporal punishment he might have had other things on his mind. Might be a better idea to eavesdrop first, learn what kind of missteps would lead to incarceration or execution.

Floating surfaces, ageless faces, shadowless atmosphere like a blurry new planet surface, bending light around every obstruction, following its own new laws. It would feel like sleepwalking if it didn't feel so real.

And the tastes. Deep fried cheeses and fluffy flatbreads surprised his pallet with new flavors and textures he didn't expect his brain would have been able to invent. Like molten lava rosemary. Gold nugget salt. Chocolate jasmine. Bright petrichor pastry dough. A cart of rocks glasses filled with cocktail hovered its way past Leander and he took a drink. In contrast to the strange local delicacies, it tasted roughly like rye oughta taste. This body felt like a newly hatched clone. Feels like mine but newborn, devoid of scars like the one on my left ring finger near the nail where I cut it with a chef's knife when an onion overturned beneath my hand. A clone newborn with functioning musculature. Strong, flexible, responsive, not weak and atrophied from lack of use, like the time I spent a month in a hospital bed from a staph infected knife wound.

It's my body but rebuilt. Like hitting restart. And the bullet hole. Like it was never there, chest flesh and skin whole. And so loose, flexible. Swinging within bulky black jacket arms, catching left elbow with right arm for a quick stretch, no pain, all stiffness gone, as if I never spent an eleven hour day sitting in a desk chair. Strong but not yet knotted. Soft, yielding shoulder muscles as if recently massaged by a professional.

The small city beyond the roof ended at a frozen body of water, a winter wilderness broken up by another light-abusing civilization's impressive skyline, this one obsessed with architectural flight. It made Leander think of starships with thrusters pushing them up against the pull of the earth. Fresh pure air like mountain air entered and exited his lungs as if he weren't in the center of a metropolis where there should be dirty smog. From the look of the weather out there, it should have been colder up here; maybe the taste too, the fresh air he had the privilege of breathing, was a magic spell. Warmed to not pierce his lungs with ice cold, and filtered of pollution.

And too real to be a dream.

Noise blared, but not too loudly for Leander to overhear. He was trained for gathering intel. Enjoying his 'rye,' he turned his head, his ears toward nearby guests who were shouting over the music. And each other. He let his eyes unfocus as if he were staring into space. Real casual, as if he weren't paying attention when in reality he focused every joule of his focus on perceiving the words.

"Don't think I don't know that survey in your head has all fifty board members ... tallied." This said by a tall black boy with a shy waver in his voice even when pronouncing an accusation, as if frightened by his own daring.

"I didn't say Sunyin Aura has ..." a ginger shouted back, the second half of her sentence obscured. Her next words came out louder: "Either one of them could win. Especially with strategic voting. A few dozen voters could ... agree to one or the other. Either of them could unseat President Solin."

A third man joined the argument. "Nothing's going to change. Just like every year. Tomorrow you'll feel silly for all the time you wasted pondering a different outcome. Every year someone predicts a world-changing shift will occur—"

"And every year," said the woman, "the same people who say nothing will ever change vote for Gaia Solin again, and again, and again. It's like, I don't know ... like a self-fulfilling prophecy?" She smirked.

Leander's ears were perked for a personality profile of Ilan Potestas, but all night he heard the name 'Gaia Solin' over and over. As he had pushed through the crowd, snatches of conversation had centered on her too. "Solin's supposed to make an appearance," one man said. "It's getting late though. Might have been just a rumor."

"Galavanting at a political stronghold would not be the best optics," his friend had replied.

The next cluster Leander had pressed past discussed Gaia Solin as well. "If I wanted to plunge from ten thousand feet I'd take skydiving lessons — from a professional. Solin could put a stop to this. Just because a building can be made to float doesn't mean it should be made to float. And no magic permitted at the party? I have no magic connection and therefore no means to protect myself should the floor fall out from under me."

"Well, technically, if you had a connection, it would be to the same router which channels the magic to keep the building in the air, so if that were to fail, causing the penthouse of Potestas Tower to fall, your connection would fail too."

A man chuckled. "If Ilan Potestas wanted to kill us all, he would only have to flip a switch. Turn the router off and let us all fall to our deaths."

Leander had shifted closer in hopes of overhearing further commentary on any murderous proclivities the powerful man might have. Instead, the topic of conversation became entitled complaints about the party — the heating lamps were too low, the lighting disorienting and tacky, the flatbreads tasted bland and the rest of the food too salty. Leander had left them to it.

Ilan Potestas stalked the hovering balcony with a forcefield a dozen meters in circumference between himself and the partygoers. Even if the boss wasn't going to lock Leander up, he could use an introduction. He spied on these three another minute before he did hear Potestas's name. "It could be as few as three centuries, depending on the strength of the candidates who might replace him. Should Stephen blossom into the ideal Potestas protege, it could be as little as just one," the woman said and laughed, loudly, tilting her head up toward the night sky. 

Leander allowed his eyes to linger on her; it would have been more suspicious if he didn't. Like a magnet the woman drew attention, and he sensed that was her intention. Her abhorrent laugh and confident, loud voice accompanied exactly the level of beauty he expected. The part of her face not hidden by the mask revealed pristine features, a thin delicate nose as if carved out of glass and high sharp cheeks that could cut. Her long, exposed neck. The red smile that expressed enjoyment of the debate as she turned back and forth between her two companions and laughed at everything they said.

The threesome chatted longer on the subject of Ilan Potestas retiring and Leander gathered that the tall younger man was Potestas's son, and that to deliver Louis's message, the best course would be to ask the shy, quiet son for that introduction.

He didn't want to. What he wanted was to find himself getting up from his seat on the bus at his stop, wobbling on morning stiff legs, his practiced balance standing in the moving vehicle keeping him upright, pushing politely past passengers blocking the door and extending one leg down, the other bending, stepping in his well worn-in oxfords, soft and molded to the shape of his foot, down the steep metal stairs, then tripping gracefully down to solid cement sidewalk ground, blinking in the sudden 7:30 a.m. brightness. He would squint his way to the shop with the good coffee, grabbing super-sized boiling hot tubs for his partner and himself.

Daia would roll up, complaining about lack of parking, bags under her eyes begging for caffeine, to which he would oblige no matter how cranky she was that day. Mornings she was at her best, or maybe it was that mornings were an acceptable time of day for lethargy and gloom. In the mornings her crankiness amused him. How she took the double paper cup and whined that it was too hot, how she alternated between wordless grumbling some days and garrulous swear filled rants under her breath on others. How once in a while he made her laugh, usually on the darkest overcast mornings; on bright days the harsh light lit up his dumb jokes. She said she liked gray skies best. Loved rain, preferred cloud cover, fog, mist, stormy skies. On a gleaming day when sun bounced off the water everyone expected her to be cheery and wondered what she had to frown about. When the world suffocated under tight thick sheets that felt as if they would never let the sun in again nobody looked twice at her grumpy scowl.

She would burn her tongue on the first sip without fail. She would glare away contenders for a bench and took her coffee in a seated slouch. She tapped chic matte onyx nails on the double paper cup. When it was full she held it with both hands as if it was heavy. She said thank you every time, but never good morning. She teased him for his commitment to duty and its extension to supplying his deadweight partner with rocket fuel, as if it was a magic potion that would transform her into good police. She would glare at him through caked black lashes and dare him to leave her to flounder. Found his sharing of rocket fuel and cases closed suspect but never voiced a suspicion of why — as if it never occurred to her — but instead mocked him mercilessly and took all the credit, on high energy days taking the lead, on point, filling the air with preposterous motives and conspiracy theories and daring him to tell her she wasn't a world-class sleuth. It was all a game to Daia and all he could do was wait for the morning she showed up and realized it wasn't. He waited for her to snap out of it. In the meantime, the woman was hilarious. And mesmerizing. He thought one day she would let him in on the joke, if he was patient, if he was cool enough.

He would never, apparently, get another shot.

Not ready to accept that, he tried to dig his heels in, stubborn, rebelling against his orders and the loud train of thought in his head focused on planning and orchestrating a strategy to present himself to Director Ilan Potestas while the real him slinking underneath wanted nothing to do with anything — wanted to process, wanted to wallow, wanted time to himself and some space. 

Instead, he found himself talking. It was as if he was drunk and the inner monologue had ceased to let the thoughts tumbling out of his mouth do the thinking, no filter. It just came out. He was asking the son to take him to Potestas. As if someone else were steering, as if his mind was silent except to observe what his body was doing, as if he was a robot responding to inputs with outputs but not conscious inside. "I had been given a gift from Doctor Louis Reveur to present to Mr. Ilan Potestas as proof that he sent me, but it was confiscated by security. Until it can be recovered, I hoped you could introduce me to your father."

Had he been calling the shots he would have decided to make up a better story — though maybe that would have been a bad idea. The new world looked and sounded so much like the old, he was falling into the trap of thinking he knew how to get around in this place. It would be easy to make an unforeseeable misstep. So far his calculations told him this young man wouldn't deliver him to a violent end, but to anything else about this place, he was in ignorance. He tried to remind himself of that, despite the last sip of rye in his glass that tasted the same as home.

The red-haired woman seemed amused by his request. She laughed and touched the tall young man's arm. "Who is Doctor Reveur?" she demanded.

Stephen looked bewildered. "A friend of my father's. He runs a private psychiatry practice in Invernali. What did he want to give my father?"

"It was only a token to identify that he had sent me," Leander white lied. Or perhaps that was true.

A mischievous look crossed the woman's features. "Doesn't the boss look like he could use some company? Introduce him, Stephen."

The young man agreed, and began to lead Leander away. When he glanced back toward her, the glee was gone from her expression and she wore a pensive frown.

Then she caught him looking and into his eye contact she beamed a friendly smile that went all the way to her eye holes and resumed talking animatedly to her remaining companion. Leander got the sense that she was skilled at pretending to be a wallflower, but that she was watching everyone and everything. If he hadn't caught that serious look, he wouldn't have thought twice about how badly she had wanted to know who Louis Reveur was.

The significance of that fact was at this point well beyond Leander's understanding of 'Invernali.' 

But he had caught her.

If you had a good time, please leave me a star. And don't leave without having a drink! Try the Suditrolo, it tastes just like rye oughta taste.