Flux Wanderrift's Arc

Chapter 11 of 18

Aldric was gone. Flux held the swarm in cupped hands. Inside it, the copied letter waited, every stroke of Pembroke's crime lifted onto a thousand fleas. But a copy meant nothing if it stayed here. Flux had one night. By morning Aldric would take his quiet vote, and the council would seal the scandal shut. Flux needed to send the letter across every walled dimension at once. They had no way to do it. They folded a portal home, back to the grey dust space they shared. Celestine stepped through behind them. The room held two beds and one woven rug, red and blue, the map to the council's fold still hidden in its threads. "You have the copy," Celestine said. "You have no throat to shout it through." She stated it flatly, no comfort in it. "I'll open portals," Flux said. "One dimension at a time." "You'll open forty and drop before the fifth." She was right. Flux's jester companion sensed portals, but too many portals wore it flat. It sat slumped in a corner now, three eyes half shut, spent from the day. Flux looked at the rug. Then they understood. "The swarm reads woven patterns," they said. "It read the map in these threads. It read the letter. It can carry both." Celestine tilted her head. "Explain." "The rug maps every seam the council walled. Every door they shut." Flux knelt and pressed the swarm to the woven lines. "I let it read the whole map. Then I let it split. One face for every dimension. Each piece carries the letter to its own door." "You lose the swarm," Celestine said. "Scatter it and it does not come back." Flux's hands stilled. The swarm had worn Celestine's face to pass the guards. It had copied a fading map. It had followed them since the vault. It was the last piece that made the plan work, and using it meant losing it. "I know," Flux said. They opened their hands. The swarm read the rug, line by line, until it had every seam. Then Flux bit down on the telepathic thread one last time. Go wide, they told it. Every door. Now. The swarm broke apart. It poured off the rug in a thousand streams, each one wearing a scrap of the letter, each one bound for a different walled dimension. The streams found the seams in the air and slipped through. In seconds the room was empty of them. Celestine watched the last flea vanish. "By morning every dimension reads it," she said. "Aldric's wall comes down whether he votes or not." Flux sat on the floor beside the sleeping jester. The rug lay bare now, just wool and dye. The plan was spent. The letter was loose across the whole council's map, and no vote tomorrow could pull it back. "It's out," Flux said. "They can't bury it now."