She emerged into the bright sunshine, some daynight after. She looked up to the sky, some daynight after. The sun looked different, somehow, not doubled, exactly, but there was a too-muchness in the air. And a new color to the shadows on the ground. The shadows were smaller, unfamiliar.
Welcome back to Artemis Rising 3!
Before the war with Apsides, I wanted to be like my Aunt Martha, who at the age of forty five stepped into an abandoned lot near Aurora’s city center, buried her toes in dirt, stretched up her arms, and became a skyscraper. Her legs were steel girders, earthquake-strong, her fingers long iron spires that caught pigeons and kites. Aunt Martha, 101 floors tall, sides aglitter with splendid floor-to-ceiling windows, family’s pride, city’s pride. When I was sixteen, I’d race up her stairwells whenever we visited, trailing fingers along her textured oak banisters up through offices and ballrooms and apartments of Martha’s design that hummed like beehives and smelled of Sumatran coffee. Martha would creak and shift and whisper back, and I knew she remembered me.