The wind rushing past Anneza's face grew stronger and stronger as she accelerated, her hair ceasing to whip about her face and streaming behind her in a single mass. The air began to feel more like something she was pushing through, even with her small profile.
It couldn't be long now, could it? She'd seen this in movies, she knew you could only go so fast before the atmosphere just burned you up. Burned like the books, like the pictures - the end of Anneza Karaz, alone and forgotten...
Laughing madly, she pushed on, shutting her eyes tightly and pushing forward with all her might. Don't stop, don't stop... But to her surprise, though she wasn't slowing down, the wind began to feel less intense - and before she knew it, it was gone altogether. What...what just happened?
Anneza opened her eyes to be greeted with a vast starfield like none she had ever seen before. It couldn't be night yet - it was hardly even twilight! How could the stars be out - and in such force! Confused, she drew her legs up, bringing herself to a stop, adopted what was more or less a standing position, and looked around.
It took a moment for her to actually process what she was seeing. The stars...she had once run across a phrase from some book she'd never read - "thick as daisies on an uncut lawn" - it seemed the right description, though her lawn was more overrun by dandelions, and only because the guy she was paying to cut it had turned into a mermaid and moved to the coast a week after the sun changed.
They bloomed all around her, many times more numerous, far clearer, thousands of individual pinpricks of light that the Earth's atmosphere normally blurred into wavy, indistinct patches, from one horizon of her viewpoint to the other. Below them, there loomed a blue-white mass that it took her a moment to realize was the Earth itself.
The world she called home, the entire frame of her existence up until now, was a single, discrete entity here, a vast blue sphere that spread out below her, the curve of its far horizon arcing up almost to the midpoint of her field of view when she looked directly forward. The horizon itself was a bright, thick band along the edge of the disk, lit up brilliantly by the sun, which from this height was only just obscured by the planet. She could see the edge of one colored region slowly giving way to another - she wondered who on the other side of the horizon was seeing that light for the first time.
It was around the time Anneza was looking down at the most of North American continent that she was suddenly struck by the realization that she was out in space. She had been so caught up in some of the component facts that the larger picture had escaped her notice entirely. Why wasn't she dead?
She figured that being in a vacuum might not be the kind of instant-explody thing she'd seen in movies, but...it couldn't be good for you, could it? Wasn't it supposed to be cold, if nothing else? Yet here she was, not freezing and definitely not exploding. Was this normal, and her popular culture-fueled assumptions were just way off-base? Or was this just another facet of the bizarre, physics-defying madness that was her new body? Or perhaps a bit of both?
In any event, she seemed more or less fine - beyond some tiny ice crystals forming at her tear ducts, there was no indication that any of this was something she should be concerned about. She was floating what had to be ten or more miles above the surface of the Earth, and yet she felt no danger at all.
Strangely enough, there was also an auditory component to this breathtaking vista. She could hear noises, strange whistles and hums and other tones that seemed simultaneously alien and familiar. These were no Earthly noises; they were the sounds of the stars and the planets themselves. Any one of them, if she listened to it isolation, sounded strange but meaningless, but when she simply opened up and listened to the whole...
It was music. Not in any conventional sense of time signatures or scales, but it was disparate sounds joined harmoniously in complex rhythms that evoked emotional response...it was the "music of the spheres." Not that Anneza knew very much about music theory, but she didn't have to - it struck the same instinctive response in her that any other music did, at the same time that it stunned her with its beauty.
How could this be? There was no sound in space, she knew that much - there was no air for it to travel through. Were these...what, radio signals, maybe? How was she hearing them? She thought of the antennae that grew from her forehead - that couldn't seriously be the answer, could it? That was the most-
Wait, no air?
She realized with a start that she was not, in fact, breathing. She had a solid lungful of air, but she was neither inhaling nor exhaling - which was good, considering there was nothing to inhale here. She felt a little bit of internal pressure in her windpipe - obviously the gas in her lungs wanted to equalize with the vacuum outside them, but she seemed to be having no trouble holding steady.
Still, despite the fact that her body was giving no alarm signals, she knew she had to go back down, to descend back into the world she'd briefly left. She didn't know exactly how long a single lungful of air could last you, but it couldn't be that long - and she'd already completely lost track of how long she'd been out here.
On the way back down, she stopped to visit the clouds - it had been a long time since she'd played with them.
Har...ry sighed to herself. It wasn't that she minded having half a day off school, although the brief crisis had certainly been unsettling. But she had been looking forward to another session with the band, trying to get further settled in as a real part of the group. And now they wouldn't be meeting again until Monday...
Or would they? Gah, she'd been intending to ask whether they practiced on the weekends, but she hadn't gotten the chance. Well, maybe she could call Ken and-
Oh God, that's right! She was going to meet Ken for the movie tonight! Haru glanced at the clock in a panic - no, okay, she had a good half-hour before he was supposed to pick her up. She sighed in relief, then wondered briefly if she should bring anything.
She walked down into the kitchen, where her mother was just putting on coffee, having gotten out of bed only a little while before. "Mom?" she said. "I'm going out to a movie with a classmate of mine - sorry, I forgot to ask you..."
Her mother smiled. "That's all right," she said. "Who is it?"
Haru smiled shyly. "Uh, you don't know him - his name's Ken."
Her mom's smile widened. "I see. Have you thought about what you're going to wear?"
The three-eyed girl frowned. "Huh?"
