Midway between. Balanced between the lion’s world-spanning wings and the sear of cosmic rays; she should be dead. Colleen marvels: she should be dead. Through vacuum exposure, through radiation.

They find space soothing, the two of them. There is little here, so little to number, to count. The great lights in the sky are many, but are slow-moving targets. They need make no constant comparisons, do not need to scrabble after the numbers, always the numbers. Here they count atoms, measure volumes. Peace far from the hectic grandeur of Earth’s crowded reification, far from the unknowable chaos of the nuclear court.

Still. She counts the stars, names their names for absent friends. Antares, Sargas, Shaula, Girtab, Alniyat, Lesath. Hell is nowhere, Heaven everywhere; they journey on, their passage mapped by no equation, following no sane trajectory. Their king, mighty rationalist, lies always and forever beyond the realm of reason, exiled into nonsense.

Colleen stood in the back with the rest of the quislings and shivered with a more than natural cold. The lake of ice spread for hundreds of miles in all directions; a black smudge on the horizon might be the black cliffs she’d come down a week earlier, or might not. Directions and distance didn’t work the same way down here. She’d gotten used to always knowing which way she was facing, and the disorientation made her sick.

“Pretty good crowd,” she said to the Brahmin Kapila, who swam heavily in his vast tank. The fish rolled over and looked at her with its monkey head.

“There are,” it burbled, “thirty two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-eight demons present, plus an additional five hundred and twenty-four thousand, two hundred and eighty-eight humans with non-voting shares.”

“More humans than demons?”

Dog head looked at her sorrowfully. “It was always thus.”

The great pot began slowly to roil. A great voice cried, “Mic check!” and the feeble army of hell grew silent at last.

On the hundredth night and a night the Devil returned in the guise of an old woman and pulled Colleen from the bottom of the reservoir. Air was a slap in the mouth; she spent several minutes just sucking it in and reveling in the heady, exuberant novelty of it. Nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide. She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to keep from shaking apart. Cold didn’t touch her the way it used to, but her body remembers it, and responds.

The Devil watched her with cold, clear eyes. “And what have you learned, my sweetness?”

Memories, of the distribution of raindrops, of traffic patterns along the path to the museum, of the discreet shifts of light as the clouds swirled and thinned but never broke. “Many things,” she said at last, and spoke of the $356.23 in change that had been thrown into the nearby fountain and the way each coin’s fall had echoed sympathetically through the reservoir; of the twenty varieties of water fowl that had rested, however briefly, above her head; of the way words bounced around and through the water.

When Colleen was dry of words, the Devil took her hand and drew her through the air. Three and a half million conversations, arguments, songs, poems, voices pummeled her, and she let herself lose consciousness. The Devil bore her on, through the night.

Colleen is waiting for a bus, sleek and smiling and satisfied, enjoying the weather. She knows without thinking too much several things: the temperature, the barometric pressure, the predicted weather. She counts the wind as it pushes against her and numbers the leaves as they blow past. The seconds tock against her skin. She draws the traffic against her palm with the nail of her middle finger.

On the bus she sits next to a tall, hunched figure. She counts the seats and the people on the bus and the number of windows before she sits down. When the person next to her reaches forward to pull the cord she grabs hir wrist where it’s exposed between glove and sleeve. It’s covered with scales, and even as she marvels she knows how many there are.

“Hello,” says the person. Hir voice is low and pleasant. When she looks into hir face xie smiles, too wide, sharp yellow lion’s teeth dangerous in the sun.

“Sit down,” said the woman, in a voice that could be either a low alto or a high tenor. There was only one chair in the room, exactly under the sharp glare of the single light. Colleen hesitated, vaguely troubled by the etiquette of the situation.

“Are you sure you don’t want to–” she started.

“No. Sit down.” Colleen sat. She could just make out the men in the echoing emptiness of the warehouse, so many TRUTHs catching the light.

“Why’ve they got TRUTH tattooed on them like that?” There was always time for questions, always time for answers. She was learning, and her blood rattled the bars of her veins.

“I don’t know,” said the woman. “Is that what it says? I wondered.” The lie was tidy and polite; there was no curiosity in her voice, in her face.

Colleen tried to keep the new fear hidden, didn’t quite succeed. “Who are you?”

“Now that’s a story worth hearing.” The woman circled Colleen, her steps long and feline. “But there’s questions in that question, and questions in those questions, all the way down to the atomies; do you want my name, do you want my business? Do you want my history?” As she talked her voice quavered, now low, now high. Colleen started to stand up and there was a hand on her shoulder pushing her back into the chair. “I was born on the slopes of a mountain in Asia Minor…” Off in the distance a flute started playing, and a drum, and cymbals; the hand on her shoulder tightened and promised everything but the truth.