by Michael H. Payne
“Mom!” Fluor looped her hornglow out to grab her saddlebags from their spot in the front hall. “I’m heading over to Taylor’s!”
Mom’s usual first question came as always from behind the partially opened door to her office. “Have you finished your homework?”
Fluor didn’t even bother rolling her eyes. “Yes, Mom.”
Which of course led to Mom’s usual second question. “Have you got your pack?”
And as much as Fluor wanted to answer, No, Mom. I’ve suddenly gone stupider than a box of frogs, she just said, “Yes, Mom” again. She did let her eyes roll this time, though.
“Fluorescence?” Mom asked, and the way she pitched her voice made Fluor’s ears fold. “Would you care to answer that question less snidely?”
How Mom could hear eyes rolling, Fluor had no idea. Mom’s special talent, marked by her soul sigil—a stylized trio of fireflies on her flanks—had to do with how well she dealt with electricity, so super-sharp hearing didn’t figure into that. At least, Fluor didn’t think it did…
She shook her head. “I’ve got my pack, Mom,” she said without a hint of a sigh. “I refilled my thaumazine dispenser and checked that all the scratch patches are fresh and sealed.”
For a long, long instant, Fluor didn’t dare take a breath. But then Mom said, “Be home for supper.”
“Thanks, Mom!” Slinging her saddlebags across her back with her glow, Fluor flicked a tendril of it at the doorknob and couldn’t keep from galloping outside. The spring afternoon sunlight slathered her gray-white hide, slicking through her lemon-yellow mane, and Fluor was outta this boring little nowhere!
For the rest of the day, at least…
Slowing a little, Fluor cantered down Cherry Street to the corner where it met Portal Avenue and couldn’t stop from rolling her eyes. Because, yes, taking a right on Portal sent her trotting toward the big white building that held the portal from Hevosenvalta to Earth, but calling it Portal Avenue? That was the best they could do?
Whatever. For Fluor, it was the Road to Adventure. The blocks flew by, magical foundries and tool shops behind the chain-link fences on both sides of the road. But Fluor only had eyes for the black glass doors past the loading dock of the building ahead.
Since Mom worked to maintain the Hevosen side of the portal, Fluor got to use the industrial entrance here instead of the passenger entrance on the other side of the building. There were always more folks over there, more waiting and more questions and more paperwork and more everything. Over here, though?
“Hi, Mr. Stacks!” Fluor called to the griffon at the loading dock’s console.
“Afternoon, Fluorescence,” he called back, not looking up from the console. “I’ve got a pallet of orichalcum ingots in transit, so two minutes maybe, and I can send you across.”
“Thanks!” It took some effort not to start singing, but Fluor made that effort. Spontaneous musical numbers were so totally Hevosen, and she was getting out of Hevosenvalta.
And yes, again, it was just for the rest of the day. But, oh, what a great rest of the day it was gonna be!
First, she would check the messages on her phone, something she could only do on Earth. Phones used scientific principles, after all, so they were just little flat rectangles of metal and glass in Hevosenvalta. Fluor always had a ton of messages, too, since a lot of humans thought that Fluor could help them contact her mom.
A lot of humans were idiots. But then so were a lot of Hevosens.
At least Taylor was okay with keeping Fluor’s phone, and not just because they’d been best friends forever. Knowing Fluor gave Taylor a lot of clout at school and on social media and everything, and Taylor was really good at dealing with that stuff. When the news cameras and reporters and bloggers crowded around—which they didn’t do so much any more, thank Harmony—Fluor got a little jumpy. But Taylor could go from cracking a joke to proving a theorem to laying down the law with her fellow humans as smoothly as fresh-churned ice cream.
Taylor called it being her handler. Just ’cause she had hands, Fluor figured…
But after she and Taylor had gotten the messages sorted through, that was when the good stuff started. Hanging out with Taylor, sure, but Taylor was as much a science geek as Fluor was, and since their moms both had so much to do with running the portal, Taylor had a lot of books and stuff on her computer and her phone about how the portal worked.
And since all that stuff was based on science instead of stupid old magic, the two of them could experiment with it. Not like here on Hevosenvalta where—
“Fluor?” Mr. Stacks called. “You got your pack?”
“Yes, sir!” Perking up, Fluor turned sideways to show him her saddlebags.
He crooked a claw to the big black doors, and they began trundling open. “Reckon we’re ready for you, then.”
As much as she wanted to gallop up the ramp and through the doors, Fluor knew to be careful. The portal had a lot of weird effects, stretching deBroglie wavelengths and letting microscopic stuff like quantum tunneling act on a macroscopic level. At least, that was the science part of it. The magic parts, being magic, didn’t make any sense at all…
Putting her hooves down gently, Fluor walked past Mr. Stacks. “Thank you,” she said even though her brain felt like it was jumping up and down inside her skull. She breathed in, breathed out, and took step after step until she was moving from the concrete of the loading dock to the ceramic of the portal antechamber’s floor. The door slid shut behind her, and that was when the air started smelling of ozone and hot metal. Just the way she liked it.
Fluor couldn’t stop from skipping a little as she trotted into Bay #4, the one with the green light glowing over the door. She’d done this a million times, of course, but she knew better than to take any of it for granted. She was going to Earth now, and that meant science. And science meant that doing things in the right order would cause the right outcomes.
The light above the door turned yellow, the door slipping shut, and Fluor reached into her saddlebags with her hornglow, her thaumazine dispenser right on top. She levitated it up to her snout, and just as the door thumped completely closed, she shoved the dispenser into her mouth, pressed the plunger, and sucked in the minty vapor.
The light above the door went red, and while nothing actually shook, she was always sure she could feel the air shiver whenever the red light came on. Magic and science didn’t much like each other, Mom always said, and this was where things got tricky, right here at the moment when stuff from one universe passed into the other.
But Fluor’s mom and Taylor’s mom and all the equines and humans and other folks who worked for them were really good at their jobs. Fluor was only holding her breath like this because that was the best way for thaumazine to work: undiluted from her lungs right into her bloodstream.
The science of it wrapped around Fluor like a blanket as the yellow light came on and the door slowly started to slide open. That was the right time for exhaling, so she did, imagining that she was puffing the magic out of her. And when she next inhaled, she’d be taking science in instead.
Not that she was, of course. Folks from Hevosenvalta needed the magic in the thaumazine and the scratch patches, and they had to go back through the portal after about six hours so parts of them wouldn’t start turning to stone. Just like humans couldn’t visit Hevosenvalta without taking potassium iodide pills and smearing zinc oxide on their skin. At least humans could stay overnight as long as they slept in rooms with lead-lined walls: there were a couple hotels in Capitolia that had been redesigned especially for human tourists.
Magic and science really didn’t like each other…
But then the door was clicking fully open, the light above it going green. Fluor set a hoof on the ceramic floor outside, one that looked exactly like the one she’d crossed coming into the transit bay, but she knew it wasn’t. It was in an entirely different universe.
It took more effort this time not to break into a little dance. But if she did it here, it would just be her: no music would start, nobody else would join in—or if they did, it would be entirely on their own without them suddenly knowing the words to the song or the steps to the dance! It would be sensible, logical, scientific!
Quickening her pace, Fluor reached the doors to the loading dock, the electrical sensor detecting her movements and triggering the darkened glass panels to slide open. And even better? They would trigger whether it was a gnome or a human or even a cat or a dog or one of the automated carts Taylor’s mom had been experimenting with.
‘Cause that was how science worked! Always the same all the time!
Jumping across the metal tracks of the threshold, Fluor stomped her hooves on the solid concrete of the loading dock and took a great big whiff of the non-Hevosen air around her.
“Don’t say it,” a terrifically familiar voice said off to her right.
Fluor turned and pointed a hoof at Taylor. “People of Earth! Take me to your leader!”
Taylor folded her arms, her eyes narrow behind her glasses. “No more old videos for you.”
That got Fluor’s ears perking. “Even My Little Mythos? You promise?”
“Hey.” Taylor put her hands on her hips. “Mythos isn’t videos. It’s art.”
“It’s wrong is what it is.” Fluor strutted across the loading dock to where Taylor stood.
“Says the unicorn speaking English who’s someday gonna sprout a butt tattoo.” Taylor poked Fluor in the chest with a finger. “Just like on My Little Mythos.”
Tempted to poke Taylor with her horn, Fluor as always restrained herself. “That show’s nothing but an example of quantum entanglement, and you know it.” She moved past Taylor and waved to the human operator behind the console. “Thanks, Mr. Stevens!”
He waggled some fingers at her. “See you two in a couple hours!”
Not looking back, Fluor made for the ramp at the end of the loading dock, but she could clearly hear the rustle of Taylor’s blue jeans and pink jacket as she hurried to catch up. “Yeah, right,” Taylor more huffed than said. “Quantum entanglement’s your answer to everything.”
“‘The portal,'” Fluor said, quoting one of Mom’s papers, “‘is a natural phenomenon—'”
“‘No different,'” Taylor continued the quote, “‘from rain or cell division or nuclear fusion.'” Beside Fluor now, she gave a quick nod. “My mom wrote that paper with your mom, remember?”
“And this is proof!” Down the ramp and across the parking lot toward the employee gate, Fluor unspooled her favorite theory. “Our universes must’ve spawned right next to each other, so we’re parallel but different, entangled but separate! With that cartoon show, the human who came up with it must’ve gotten a glimpse of our world through the portal! I’ll bet it was during the Solstice Celebration, the way she got so much right with the different types of folks and our soul sigils and everything. But all that stuff about Blossom Weaver trying to do magic like it’s science?” She blew noisily through her lips. “Pure fiction.”
“Really?” Taylor’s smile was the smuggest thing Fluor had ever seen. “Just because you can’t get magic to work like science…”
A couple yards from the gate’s guardhouse, Fluor stopped and stared at Taylor. “Are you just being annoying, or have you actually figured something out?”
Her look somehow got even smugger. Taylor spun in her sneakers and ran for the gate. “Come on if you wanna see!”
Of course, they had to stop so the guard could open the gate—they were a lot stricter on this side of the portal than back home. But Taylor refused to give any more details no matter how much Fluor whined and threatened and actually did poke her a little with her horn. “You’ll see,” Taylor kept saying during the fifteen-minute walk out through the houses where the human technicians lived and into the hilly countryside that surrounded the whole complex.
“Taylor…” Fluor hated being the reasonable one. “This isn’t gonna be like last time, is it? I mean, yeah, using Hevosen scratch patches to build a magical battery that would work here on Earth sounded like a really good idea, and yeah, the design schematics looked totally solid. But magic’s way too unpredictable without a living brain involved.”
“Yeah, right.” Puffing a loud breath between her lips, Taylor rolled her eyes. “The only problem with that battery was the housing.”
Fluor stomped the dry grass of the meadow they were crunching across. “It blew up and knocked a big hole in your garage! We both got grounded for a month, and I had to listen to safety lectures from my mom every night that whole time! With quizzes!”
“Me, too.” Taylor stuffed her balled-up hands into the pockets of her big jacket. “And Mom said she was disappointed in me. That was way worse…”
They walked on, the only sound the rustling of the afternoon breeze in the branches of the trees they were approaching and the crackling grass underhoof.
“This time, though,” Taylor said then, everything about her perking up, “I’ve got it all figured out.” She pulled her phone from her pocket. “The problem was using scratch patches.” Taylor started swiping the phone with her finger. “They’re for emergencies, right? Little concentrated doses of liquid mana that stop any cuts or scrapes you unicorns and folks get from turning to stone the way they do without magic.”
Already wanting to raise a few objections but not sure where Taylor was going with this, Fluor just nodded.
“See?” Taylor pointed her phone’s screen at Fluor, and Fluor saw a Cartesian graph—that it had the same name in Hevosenvalta and on Earth, Fluor always thought, proved the whole ‘quantum entanglement’ theory. At the top of the graph was a jagged line stretching out from the ‘y’ axis and more or less parallel to the ‘x.’ At the bottom of the graph, a low, wide bell curve bulged from the ‘x’ axis; it reached about a quarter of the way up to the jagged line, rolled along straight for a good stretch, then curled back down.
“The ‘y’ axis,” Taylor was going on, “is magical energy, and the ‘x’ axis is time. The lumpy line at the top is a scratch patch. It’s strong, starts working right away, and keeps going at pretty much the same energy level till it runs out. That’s why our battery exploded: six scratch patches in there was way too much mana all at once in way too small a space.”
Her eyes wide, Fluor activated her hornglow and took the phone from Taylor. “You graphed a scratch patch’s output?”
“I didn’t.” She made another puffing noise with her lips. “Well, I mean, I did, but I got all the data from one of your mom’s papers. She just didn’t graph it like this.”
“Nobody graphs magical stuff like this.” Still staring at the phone, Fluor wanted to shout it, but she didn’t want to raise her voice, either, afraid that…that—
That talking would draw the magic’s attention? That letting magic know someone was graphing it would be like smashing a glass club over a hornet’s nest that was sitting on a bear’s head, a bad idea in a whole bunch of different ways?
Not that magic was sapient or even sentient like a bear or a hornet. But Fluor had been taught her whole life that magic didn’t react well to being weighed or measured. Some folks could do big things with it, but others, using the exact same methods, could barely fold a pillowcase. Magic wasn’t science, and seeing this attempt to make it science set Fluor’s whole body tingling.
“So what?” Taylor was saying, and she snatched her phone from Fluor’s magical grasp. “If no one’s ever done something before, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t! I mean, that’s practically the whole point behind science!”
Something like a hornet’s nest seemed to be happening inside Fluor’s head. “Scratch patches,” she muttered. “They’re, like, impossible, holding a distilled, concentrated dose of magic like that. They don’t all have the same potency, sure.” She waved a hoof at Taylor’s phone. “The height of each patch’s output is going to vary pretty substantially along your ‘y’ axis, but the shape of each line will be pretty much the same…” She had to take a deep breath, realizing how revolutionary those stupid little patches were. Had Mom ever noticed this?
“But their ‘y’ values’re all too high.” Taylor waved her phone in Fluor’s face. “That’s why we hafta use thaumazine if we’re gonna make our battery work.”
Fluor’s tingling spread and sharpened. “You graphed thaumazine, too?” Half a dozen of Mom’s safety lectures sprang to mind. Magic wasn’t like anything else, not like fire or gravity or a big rushing river. But if you weren’t respectful of its power, it could get away from you and do a lot of damage.
Taylor was still poking at her phone, moving the image of the long, low bell curve front and center. “You Hevosens have to take a snootful of thaumazine every couple hours when you’re here on Earth so your insides don’t start turning to stone. It’s a much lower mana level, though, and it loses potency about eight hours after coming through the portal even though scratch patches stay good for, like, years if you don’t open their package. So that means—”
“OK, first?” Fluor shook her head to get her brain working. “Mana isn’t a thing, remember?” She nodded at the phone again. “It’s all about the willpower of the individual who casts the spell to convince the whole cosmos to act like it normally wouldn’t. Magic doesn’t have energy levels you can measure like that. It’s the whole framework underlying the universe.”
“Underlying your universe.” That smug little smile was back on Taylor’s flat pink face. “But my universe is all about graphs and measuring stuff. And my measurements and graphs tell me that thaumazine’s got just the properties we need to make this thing work.” She gestured with her phone at something ahead of them.
Following, Fluor saw a red metal wagon sitting in the dry grass a couple yards from the first of the trees, the wagon not quite as long as she was but about twice as wide. Then she noticed the black box sitting inside the wagon, the black box that looked a lot like the casing of Taylor’s whole exploding battery thing.
She caught her breath. “This is a bad idea, Taylor.”
With a shrug, Taylor held up a single finger. “Potentially a bad idea.”
Fluor gaped at her.
Taylor squatted down, her face even with Fluor’s. “That’s why we’re not in my garage.” She leaned in, sunlight flashing from her glasses, her human scent—a weird mixture of soap and dirt with spiky undertones of ozone and hot metal—suddenly sharper in Fluor’s nostrils. “If it overloads this time, nothing else explodes.”
“Except us,” Fluor muttered, but she had to force herself to say it. After all, experiments like this were what she loved so much about Earth…
“We’ll be fine.” Taylor stood and walked toward the wagon. “The intake manifold runs on an app on my phone. See?” She picked up a length of black vacuum tubing, one end stuck into the battery housing, the other end with some sort of nozzle on it. “You shoot a dose of thaumazine in here, then we twist this valve to close the pipe.” Without looking up from the device, she waved at the trees. “There’s a big flat rock about ten yards inside the forest. We crouch down behind it, I trigger the app, the thaumazine gets sucked into the battery, and voila!”
“It blows up, knocks a bunch of trees on top of us, and while we’re lying there unconscious, I turn to stone ’cause you used up all my thaumazine.”
That got her a squint-eyed look from over Taylor’s shoulder. “Your thaumazine dispenser holds three doses. You took one when you got here, and we’ll use one for this. That leaves you one more, and you won’t even need it ’cause a dose lasts for, like, two hours, and you’re going home before supper, right?”
“A dose lasts two hours under normal circumstances. That doesn’t include getting blown up and having trees fall on me.”
“C’mon, Fluor!” Waving her arms, Taylor spun on one foot. “We’ve got a chance to do something nobody’s ever done before—no human, no unicorn, no anybody! You saw my notes from the other battery, and you said it was a good idea! Well, this is just the same except with a lower-level power source, and then we can have real magic here on Earth where we’ve never had it before!” With her lips set and her chin sticking out, she had maybe the most serious expression Fluor had ever seen from her. “We’re the only ones who can do this, Fluor.” She moved her hand back and forth between them. “You and me.”
Silent alarms still clanged in Fluor’s head, but… “Show me this rock we’ll be hiding behind.”
It was a pretty big rock with a clear line of sight to the wagon between a couple trees. But it was Taylor’s big grin and sparking-ozone scent that made Fluor’s mind up. “Fine.” She drew the word out till it had three or four syllables. “But we’re gonna do a dry run of the whole process before I sign off on anything.”
If they’d been in Hevosenvalta, judging from Taylor’s squeal, Fluor was sure she would’ve launched into a musical number. Instead, they spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes going over the design and the procedures as well as the revised schematics for the battery.
Fluor’s tingling had slowly been changing from fearful to excited, and she couldn’t help nodding. “This is way sturdier than the first one.”
Taylor’s grin got even bigger. “So it’ll either hold together better, or there’ll be bigger chunks of shrapnel to dodge.” She held up the nozzle. “Give it a spray.”
Activating her hornglow, Fluor flipped open her saddlebag and floated her thaumazine dispenser out, the fine hairs at the base of her mane standing up. Not daring to breathe, she levitated the dispenser to Taylor’s nozzle, gave her a nod, and squeezed the plunger.
It gave the right sort of little hiss, and Taylor quickly closed the end before returning Fluor’s nod. “OK,” Taylor said, and it came out with such a burst of air, Fluor realized that Taylor’d been holding her breath, too. “Now, we head back to the rock, and—”
And the device gave a loud click.
A heartbeat passed with no other sound, then Taylor said, “Uhhh…” And while nothing exploded—Fluor had to give it that much—the battery housing buckled along the top and all four sides as if five big invisible hammers had slammed into it all at once.
“What?” Fluor heard Taylor ask. “A vacuum?”
And then, with a massive crack like a lightning strike, the whole battery crumbled in on itself. Fluor took a step back, the black powder that had once been the housing swirling in a little whirlpool above the bed of the wagon. Then it spiraled inward, gave a pop, and vanished.
An instant later, though, the air split into a crack as jagged as a hydra’s mouth, and wind began tugging at Fluor’s mane. Taking another step back, she noticed Taylor still kneeling next to the wagon. But when she gaped her jaw to yell, the suction, getting stronger and stronger, seemed to pull the words out. Taylor’s dark hair was streaming toward the gap, the wind howling now, Fluor lighting her horn, reaching out with her glow to grab Taylor—
But Taylor was already tumbling forward, any sound she might’ve made smothered in the roar pulling at Fluor. And before Fluor could do anything else, the crack sucked Taylor inside, slammed shut, and vanished.
The wind cut off immediately, the shrieking gone like someone had thrown a switch; Fluor staggered forward into the complete lack of a force pulling on her. “Taylor!” Jumping to the wagon, she lashed out with her hornglow, wedged it into what she could see, a spot no bigger than a pinprick, gritted her teeth, and just plain wrenched at it.
Her horn throbbed like a nail pounding into her forehead, but she didn’t let up, straining at the spot till it stretched to the size of a keyhole, a coin, a dandelion sandwich, the wind growing the whole time. Bracing her hooves, Fluor shouted, “Can you hear me?”
“Fluor?” The whisperiest little trace of Taylor’s voice tickled her ears. “I’m okay!”
Relief wanted to wash through Fluor, but she didn’t let it, kept her muscles clenched. “Where are you? What can you see?”
“I’m on a hillside with grass and trees and air I can breathe!” The words stopped, and Fluor clenched her neck tighter, tried to force more magic through her horn despite this whole universe. “Fluor! I think I’m in Hevosenvalta!”
That had been Fluor’s first guess, but she needed more information to confirm the rest of her theory. “Where exactly? What’s around you?”
“Hey!” Taylor called back. “You remember the first time I visited? We spent the day stomping around Springvale, and I forced you to take me to the apple orchard outside town ’cause in the cartoon show, one of the main characters ran it! I think I’m there!”
Again, Fluor didn’t let her relief relax her. “That means you’re the same distance and direction from our portal complex as we traveled here!” Images of the countryside back home flickered in her thoughts. “Head east-northeast, and you’ll hit the Valley Road! Or if you see any workers in the fields, everybody knows Mom! Tell them you need to get to Lightning Jar’s house as quick as you can!”
“Damn.” Taylor’s voice shook with worry. “‘Cause I don’t have sunscreen or potassium iodide pills or…or anything. I’ve got, like, half an hour before exposure starts burning my—”
“Hold on!” Without letting herself think, Fluor stretched her hornglow, undid her saddlebags, and dumped everything onto the grass. Not sure if she could clench her muscles any tighter, she did anyway, pouring magic out till the hole had stretched to about the size of two human fists side by side and the wind was threatening to tip her over frontways. “Stand back!” she shouted, and shoved the saddlebags at the ragged opening.
The empty cloth jammed into the hole, hung there suspended for maybe half a heartbeat, then with ripping sounds that made Fluor wince, the whole bundle disappeared.
The hole tried to collapse like before, but Fluor shoved her aching hornglow at it. “My bags!” she yelled at it. “They’re specially treated to keep the magic inside! So if you wrap ’em around yourself so the outside’s touching you and the inside’s touching the air, that should help shield you a little!”
“Right!” came the faint reply. “But…what about you? How’ll you carry your scratch patches and stuff?”
“I’ll be fine!” Fluor lied. “I’ll take my last dose of thaumazine, then I can levitate my stuff the whole way back to your house! So go! I’ll see you in, like, an hour!”
Her magic sputtered out, the hole sealing shut with a sound like a cork coming out of a bottle. Everything around her went instantly cold, and Fluor dropped to where she’d dropped the thaumazine dispenser. With her magic drained, all she could do was wrap her front hooves around the little curved tube. Shoving the end into her mouth, she braced her fetlocks against the ground and pressed the thing.
Nothing happened, the leverage all wrong. She gave it another couple tries and managed to get the barest puff of minty mist into her mouth. Sucking it down, she didn’t let herself think about Mom’s safety lectures, about the unicorns who’d made first contact with the humans twenty years ago, about how they’d all almost died when the lack of magic had started turning them to stone, about Professor Amber actually losing a leg when it had shattered in their mad scramble back through that first portal. She didn’t have time to think about any of that.
What little thaumazine she’d gotten sprinkled its warmth through her, and she pushed herself onto all fours. Sparing a glance at the dispenser and the heap of scratch patches on the ground—running was gonna take all her effort right now; no way could she levitate anything—she turned and galloped back toward town shouting, “Help! Anybody! Please!”
A couple minutes got her across the field and back to the road, her mind a tangled mess of worry about Taylor, about herself, about what damage her scratch patches might cause if some Earth squirrel or fox or something tore open one of the packages…and about what their moms were gonna do to her and Taylor when they found out about all this.
A couple humans in their scanty, brightly colored outfits were jogging along the road ahead. “What the Hell?” the male asked, both him and the female pulling to a halt and staring.
“Please!” Fluor gasped, skidding off the grass to stop in front of them. “My name’s Fluorescence! I’m a unicorn from through the portal! I need to get to Dr. Samantha Stuart’s house right away! It’s an emergency!”
Not that these humans could carry her to Taylor’s house, and she could probably cover the distance just as fast as they could. But—
“Have you got a phone!” With each panted breath, she was sure she could feel the cold seeping back into her. “Can you call and tell her to meet me halfway? Or…can you run with me and call while we’re running?”
The male and female—man and woman, she suddenly remembered, were the polite words—glanced at each other, then the woman pulled a phone from the little pouch around her waist. “What’s the number?”
Fluor started off at a fast trot but not a full gallop: she didn’t want to risk losing the humans. They both kept up, though, and she gave them the number, the woman dialing before moving the phone to a spot beside Fluor’s head. Then the phone was buzzing, and Taylor’s mom’s voice was saying hello like it was a question.
And Fluor blurted the whole story out. ‘Cause science was all about getting the facts right and the details in the proper order. “So,” she finished up after what seemed like half an hour but couldn’t’ve been more than a couple minutes, “Taylor’s got my pack wrapped around her and is running for my house back in Springvale, and I’m here with these nice people running to your house before my thaumazine wears off and I—”
Her right front knee cracked, pain bursting through her, and Fluor couldn’t keep from crying out, missing a step, losing her balance, stumbling sideways. The whole world flipped around and slammed hard against her shoulder, more pain tearing along her flanks.
Her impressions got a little tangled after that, voices shouting and machines screeching. Hands grabbed her and lifted her, but she couldn’t quite get her eyes to focus, her whole body throbbing from boiling hot to biting cold. Then warmth squished soft and soothing against her torn-up side, and the temperature fluctuations leveled off. Something round touched her lips, and Taylor’s mom’s voice touched her ears: “Fluor, honey, you need to open your mouth and breathe as deep as you can when I count to three, okay? Ready? One, two, three!”
Knowing it had to be a thaumazine dispenser, Fluor managed to part her teeth, and she hardly choked or coughed at all inhaling the minty spray. It decreased the pain everywhere, which was nice.
And that was when she realized. “Thaumazine.” She wasn’t sure if it was loud enough for Taylor’s mom to hear, but she had to try. “If we combine its spell with the spell that makes scratch patches, it’ll make the patches mild enough to store in the casing Taylor designed. And then we can reverse the valves, blow air over the patches and out the hose, and it’ll make the whole thing into a mist projector that we can set up in special rooms to let us Hevosens stay overnight on Earth.”
Fatigue was spreading through her now that she didn’t hurt so much, but Fluor struggled against the dark fuzziness settling over her. “Dr. Stuart?” she asked, but she wasn’t sure she could even hear herself. “We need to talk to my mom, see if she thinks that’ll work. ‘Cause I bet it would…” The fuzziness licked at her like a big dog’s tongue: not a terrible thing, but not really what she wanted right then. “My mom’ll know. My mom…my mom…my—”
A scent tickled her nose beyond the mint of the thaumazine, a warm but crackling scent she knew better than any other in any world. “Mom?” she managed to mutter.
A hoof stroked her neck. “I’m right here, Fluor.”
The fuzziness whisked away at that, and Fluor opened her eyes to see Mom’s snow-white mane and orange-yellow face smiling down at her. Behind Mom, though, wasn’t any room she recognized. The walls and ceiling looked like cloth, for one thing, sort of wrinkled and droopy, and for another, the air carried the definite aroma of thaumazine. “Where are we?” she asked.
Mom was still smiling, but Fluor couldn’t miss the shadows under her eyes, dark trails matting the hide of her cheeks. “Samantha’s basement,” she said. “We’re safe.”
“Samantha?” It took Fluor another blink to recognize the name. “Dr. Stuart?” And that tightened her whole mid-section. “Taylor! Is she okay?”
“She’s fine.” A twitch pulled the corner of Mom’s mouth and her smile kind of wrinkled. “She’s been worried sick about you, Glowy: we all have.”
Her brain seemed to be waking up more with each moment, and Fluor glanced around the weird little room. “We’re in a tent, a tent with thaumazine getting pumped into it. Then…Dr. Stuart heard me when I was passing out?”
Mom nodded. “She broke just about every traffic law getting her van out to the edge of town after dumping in maybe three-quarters of the planet’s entire supply of scratch patches. She was cracking them open and laying them out on the back seat while Eric and Cindy—they were the joggers you met—picked you up and set you down on them, and she heard what you were saying about blowing air over thaumazine patches. She got you back to her place and had just finished rigging up a tent and a filtration system when Taylor and I came charging in.”
Fluor glanced around at the walls again, and Mom laughed. “This is the second version of the tent: she and I built it so I could fit in here with you.”
“Second?” Fluor had to swallow before she could ask, “How long was I out?”
This time, Mom glanced away, her hornglow lifting a cell phone from among the cushions that covered the tent’s floor. “Just over fourteen hours now.” When Mom looked back, her eyes were shimmering. “So you’re now the first Hevosen to ever have a sleepover on Earth.” She leaned forward and wrapped Fluor in a hug, and for all that Fluor felt like she’d been run over by multiple yeti, hugging Mom back, she wished Mom would squeeze her even harder.
But then Mom was straightening and wiping a fetlock across her eyes. “And you’ll also be the first Hevosen to ever celebrate her soul-sigil ceremony on Earth.”
“My—?” Pain forgotten, Fluor leaped up, swung her head around, stared at her flanks, and saw a heart there, such a dark red it was almost black, with three little ellipses encircling it. Like the old-fashioned human drawings of atoms Taylor had shown her from back before they had any idea just how weird atoms really were, but this one had the heart in the middle instead of the nucleus…
Mom’s voice was a whisper. “I’m so proud of you, Glowy.”
Leaping sideways, Fluor gave Mom another hug, then she leaped the other way, frantically trying to find— “The door! Where is it? I’ve gotta show Taylor!”
That got a burst of Mom’s raspy laughter and a stretch of her raspberry-red hornglow. “The Velcro tab’s here,” she said, her magic peeling a part of the wall away with that familiar ripping sound. “Then there’s a zipper, and—”
“Got it!” Fluor reached for the zipper’s tab, slipped it up just far enough to jump outside, and found Taylor right there, her arms spread, her grin huge, white cream dotting her face.
“Butt tattoo!” Taylor shouted, and Fluor flung herself up onto her hind hooves so she could catch Taylor around the middle like a human would.
“You’re just jealous!” And Fluor would’ve gone on, but two loud throat clearings folded her ears.
In the doorway of the tent, Mom was standing with the sort of tight-lipped look that always got icicles clattering along Fluor’s spine. And behind Taylor, Dr. Stuart had her arms crossed and an expression so much like Mom’s that Fluor could suddenly understand how they worked so well together.
“You girls,” Taylor’s mom said, each word as sharp as a pin, “almost died. Is that a fair assessment, Lightning?”
“More than fair, Samantha.” Mom stalked out of the tent like one of those lions in videos Taylor had shown Fluor. “So while we’re both very proud of you, we’re also determined that this sort of thing is going to end.”
Fluor felt Taylor’s arms tighten around her, and she realized she was tightening her grip as well. “Mom,” she said, “and Dr. Stuart, we’re really, really sorry about what happened, and—”
“It was my fault,” Taylor more coughed than said. “Fluor tried to tell me it was a bad idea, but I didn’t listen. So please don’t punish her for backing me up.”
“Punish?” Mom practically rolled the word around in her mouth as if she really liked the taste of it. “That rather depends on your point of view, I suppose.”
“In one hour,” Taylor’s mom said, holding up one finger, “you girls may have shown us a method for artificially inducing a portal to open and may also have pointed us toward a method whereby Hevosens can remain on Earth for more than six hours.”
“And…” Fluor looked back and forth between Mom and Dr. Stuart, “those are both good things, right?”
Mom gave the slightest possible nod. “They’re both high-level things,” she said. “And with you getting your sigil, Fluorescence, it looks like it’s time to move you both up to a higher level as well.”
“Which is why,” Taylor’s mom continued, “you’ll be interning from now on after school with the Portal Development Team, an organization Lightning and I created just last night.”
Fluor caught her breath. “Science?”
“Magic?” Taylor asked at exactly the same time.
More throat clearing. “Both,” Mom said, “and neither. We need to move beyond our compartmentalized way of thinking about these topics and see the multiversal picture if we’re ever going to understand and work with the whole portal phenomenon.”
“So.” Taylor’s mom clapped her hands and rubbed them. “We’ll be gathering the finest minds and equipment both universes can offer to see if we can stop you girls from punching any more holes in space-time and each other.” She cocked her head. “Interested?”
“Yes!” Again, Fluor and Taylor shouted the words together.
“Great!” Mom came up beside Fluor, and Fluor couldn’t for an instant figure out why she had to look down at Mom smiling. Then she remembered that she was still on her hind legs hugging Taylor, and she dropped back to all fours so she could tuck her head under Mom’s chin.
“Now!” Taylor’s mom gave another clap. “We’ve got cake and ice cream from both sides of the portal upstairs to celebrate, and if even half of what Lightning’s told me about Hevosen confectionaries is true, I expect to experience a sugar rush to beat all sugar rushes.” She motioned to the stairway. “Shall we?”
Without even having to measure it, Fluor was sure that the grin on Taylor’s face matched her own in every respect, and they dashed together for the stairs and for the future.
* * *
About the Author
Michael H. Payne’s short stories have appeared in magazines ranging from Asimov’s to Zooscape while his novels have been published by Tor Books, Sofawolf Press and upcoming from Fenris Publications. His poetry shows up in Abyss & Apex, the Rhysling Award anthologies, and in his chapbook Two Strikes and I’m Out from Island of Wak Wak Press, and he’s been posting pages of his webcomics on various sites for more than twenty years. Check hyniof.com for further details.