Aerovoyant: The Industrial Age, Volume One by P.L. Tavormina

Author:P.L. Tavormina [Tavormina, P.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-21T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

For more days than she cared to count, Myrta needed Ephraim’s gas to trigger her vision. He’d spray her; she’d fall in a fit of vertigo and do her best to contract the muscles he said were so weak. Ardelle insisted on being present every single time.

As soon as her vision shifted she’d feel well again, and the office air transformed into colors.

Pale green, like springtime grass, suffused every corner of the room. According to Ephraim, this was nitrogen gas. Mixed with this was pale red, like the horizon at second sunset. That was oxygen. Silver, like suns-light glinting on a frost-covered field, edged through and settled in a mist. Argon.

These—green and red and silver—made up the space around her, but they were faint. The barest trace of any other chemical blazed through in brilliant intensity. Carbon dioxide hung in cobalt blue around everyone’s face, pulsing from noses and mouths. Water vapor, purple, lay on their breath too.

Ephraim sometimes played a game with her. He’d spray his different canisters of gas into the air and she’d learn each one. Methane, ozone, and too many sulfur gases to count. She learned all of them by sight.

After weeks of this, one morning Myrta managed the switch on her own, painlessly and without any need for Ephraim’s gas. “Oh!”

Ardelle stood abruptly from the desk. Ephraim snapped his attention from his case to her temple. “You did it.” There was no uncertainty in his voice, none at all.

She laughed. She’d finally done it on her own, just tightened the muscles there, and her vision flipped.

He snapped his case shut and put it away. He strode over and felt the sides of her face. “Switch it off.”

She did.

“Your muscles are stronger.” He chuckled low. “Turn it back on.”

She screwed up her face and flipped it, and the air shifted again. She couldn’t stop laughing, and Ardelle smiled too, big and beautiful.

Myrta stuck her head into the hallway. “Odile, I did it!” All on her own, she had flipped the trait on.

Behind her, Ardelle murmured to Ephraim, “It’s just the first step. And it’s taken too long. We’re in a stuffy little room.”

Myrta turned back to them, switched her trait off and on again. It was easy. “Why does this help me again?” Then she waved her hand through her breath, entranced by the blues and greens swirling around her fingers and didn’t care why—air was gorgeous, filled with every color she’d ever seen, shifting and mixing and changing right in front of her eyes.

Ephraim leaned back against the desk and crossed his feet. “Imagine, Myrta. Imagine you know the position of every person standing in a five-mile radius, in a twenty-mile radius, simply because you see the pulses of their breath. From twenty miles. Imagine you know which shops in Collimais are running mechanation and which aren’t because of their fumes. Picture yourself in the hills and able to spot the chemical signatures of lakes, herds of animals, stretches of forest—because of the changes they make to the air—from twenty miles or more.

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