The Tumble

My panic attack lasts ninety seconds. I know this because I count. That's my trick — has been since grad school, since the first time a proof collapsed at three a.m. and the walls of my tiny office started breathing. Count the seconds. Name the numbers. Assert order onto chaos until the chaos loses interest.

One. Two. Three. My lungs won't fill. Four. Five. The air tastes like ozone and something sweet I can't name. Six. Seven. Diego's arm around my shoulders, solid, warm, the most familiar thing in the universe.

Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine. Ninety.

I can breathe again. Not well. But enough.

"OK," I say. "OK. I'm OK."

"You don't have to be OK."

"I know. But I am. So let's figure out where we are before something eats us."

We've landed in what I'll later learn is called the Tumble — the lowest level of the Concourse, Nexus's main habitable zone. Right now, I don't know any of those words. What I know is this: we're in a market.

It's the most chaotic place I've ever been, and I once spent a weekend at the Shibuya crossing during New Year's.

Stalls — or things that function as stalls — crowd every surface. Not just the ground. The walls. Structures hang from overheads, suspended by cables or floating on principles I can't identify. Beings move between them: tall ones, short ones, ones that walk on more legs than I can count, ones that don't seem to walk at all but drift, their bodies semi-transparent and pulsing with slow light.

The sound is overwhelming. Not loud, exactly, but layered. Dozens of languages I've never heard — clicks, hums, subsonic rumbles that I feel more than hear, something that sounds like singing played backward.