The Altonevers Read Online Free Page B

resists, then
sips it down, tasting to her like chilled raspberry mint tea, with
a warm sensation leaving her muscles loose like untied ropes, while
slowing her movements and relaxing her mind.
    “ I think I'm going to blow
chunks,” she slurs. The bellhop looking conductor blows his whistle
and reappears at his post under the split-flap board showing
departures and arrivals.
    “ Who's chunks?” Cider
laughs, “how was it?”
    “ A little bit like
honey.”
    “ You didn’t have to do
that.”
    “ WHAT? Then why?” she
shouts.
    “ Deary or doe, he gave you
a clue. C'mon, we should catch that train, this Alto is done for,”
he says making for the last silver subway car in the line of a
hundred, or a thousand.
    Beep Boop.
    “ NOW!” he shouts, she
quickly follows, until feeling an electric pulse surge through her
brain. Stopping her in place as the doors close on her, squeezing
her and opening to squeeze her again.
    “ Oh that's right. It's your
first time. It could be a bit, overwhelming,” he says loudly so the
other passengers don’t see her as strange for holding the doors on
them. This being her first step out of her own Alto and into the
Altonevers is a bit of a shock to the senses. Everything to her
inside the train car is haloed in its shape by an aura of blue
light. Her mouth dries as her ears are invaded by a low vacuous
waaaaaaaaaaa-ing noise. Her body numbs and pulsates the sensation
of pins and needles through all of her senses at once. Anna splashes into the seats with heavy heaving
breathes next to him. Each melting in relief on a two seat bench
next to the conductor’s quarter, opposite the closing doors. A
massively dense map of infinite depth showing the infinitely
intertwined Altonevers stations is behind their tired heads. That
she leans against, away from him and sinking into the seat,
exhaling until she deflates herself and sits, stirring in the shock
of surviving.
    “ We made it. How do you
feel?” he asks.
    “ Alive, thanks,” she says
pecking him on his cheek, and resting her head on the map. He
slumps against the pole as the doors clunk mechanically closed.
Their shoulders sway and her head is tugged to the wall, as outside
the train, pillars and light blur past her line of sight, looking
like looking through fast spinning fan blades. Before blending into
a solid blue gray as the train immeasurably accelerates and
vanishing into a lightless tunnel. Depriving her of almost all
sensual orientation, but for her and the other passengers popping
out of this reality and into the shadowless black like a raindrop
rejoins a puddle. In an instant they're gliding along the curves
and angles of the nacreous amber rails, the only thing glowing
through a scentless, empty black.
    The lights flicker,
eventually coming on to show the interior of the train car and its
window light echoing reflections. A moment later the black is swept
away, unveiling a colossal churning nebulous wave of metropolitan
matter cresting toward the ruptured sun beaming from high above.
The amber rails surf along its curving surface, splashing in and
out of the cataclysmic wave’s trough. The vague shapes of the
city’s skyline are splayed across its vaporous surface, as though
stretched specters projected up the face of the celestial sized
tidal wave facing them. The turbulence
lasts for seconds, minutes or hours, as they sit unmoving,
unbothered by any gravity or physical sense at all. Numb to
anything but the silent sight of coming completely un-tethered from
the reality they're watching form into a wave of all matter
rendered to Anna's memories. All she's ever known reducing to
effulgent vapor rushing by a foot from the windows. The train rides
the wave a little before four o’clock, then sways, banking heavily
to its left. Sailing away from the curling atomic ocean like wave
of sublimation. Escaping its velocity and careening into starlit
space faster than can be formulated using the known forces