The New Voices of Science Fiction

TOPPERS ^{JASON SANFORD}

WE BE TOPPERS. Toppers we be. Hanging off Empire State as cement and limestone crumble and fall. Looking down the lines and pulleys strung between nearby buildings. Eying the green-growing plants and gardens on the tall tall roofs.

And below, the mists. The ever-flowing mists. They wait, patiently. As if time is theirs alone to worship.

I was born in a slug, an insulated bag of canvas strung to our high-rise’s limestone facade by people without the power to live inside. Momma always said life in a slug was the closest we toppers came to being free, and I believe that. But too much freedom is also bad, so Momma stitched our slug with care, making it last when others fell during winds or storms.

Momma was good. Even though she’d opened herself to the mists while pregnant with me, she resisted their siren call. Kept me safe and near fed until I was old enough to climb.

One day, like a true topper, she announced her time had come.

We climbed the stairs to Empire’s old observation deck and stood on the deck among the vegetable gardens and potato bins. As the gardeners eyed us to ensure we didn’t steal their precious food, I begged Momma not to go.

Momma hugged me tight. She whispered how her father had visited Empire State when he was a child, back before the city left the Days-We-Knew. He’d climbed to this very spot and saw the cities and oceans and lands of that now-gone time.

“He claimed it was the most beautiful sight he’d ever witnessed,” Momma said.

I leaned over the railing and watched the mists rolling into the city from the flat, endless horizons. No matter what my grandfather believed, nothing could look prettier than the mists on a sunny day.

Momma kissed me on the cheek before jumping over the railing and disappearing into the mists below.

Instead of the thump of her body hitting ground I heard a contented sigh rising on the wind.

As comfort, the gardeners gifted me with a tiny potato and a sickly carrot.

Blessed be the mists.

Curse their ever-waiting grasp.

That was then. This is me in the morning of now, the sun warming the slug’s canvas and waking me to dreamer-happy thoughts.

“Hellos,” I say, leaning over the slug’s canvas siding and facing the mists far below.

Hellos to you, Hanger-girl, the mists whisper back. Will you join us today?

“Might… if the Super sticks me on another shit detail.”

The mists circling Empire giggle at my joke—they know I’ll never willingly join them. For a moment my momma’s voice rises above the others, whispering her love for me. I smile, glad a piece of her is still around.

“Who’s she babbling to now?” Old Man Douger mutters from the slug next to mine. I hush, angry that he heard me. No one else in Empire hears the mists’ words or knows they talk. If the oldies like Douger suspected I talked with the mists, they’d toss me over the edge. Oldies hate the mists. They remember what it was like to live on the ground with trees and grass and cows that mooed as you cut them into hamburger.

Not that we don’t have burgers. But oldies always moan for cows, saying squirrel and rat don’t taste the same.

I listen as Old Man Douger begins his morning prayers, asking the Days-We-Knew to save us. “We’re still here,” he prays. “We’re still waiting for you to find us.”

I snort. Only fools believe the Days-We-Knew will save us before Empire State dies. Like all high-rises in the city, Empire is aging badly with chunks of cement and limestone cracking off each day. Toppers whisper that the mists are slowly eroding the buildings, with two nearby high-rises collapsing in the last year alone. Even strong buildings like Empire and the distant Chrysler—which beams its point-metal roof to the skies like the rocket it is—are weakening.

But that’s merely mist talk. If I want eats and water I must climb down and work.

Wiggling like a cement worm, I squirm through a broken window into Empire, passing the better ups and well-we-dos eating breakfast. Warm food scents slap me as I go but I don’t beg a share. It’s too easy for people inside to cut a slug lose as you sleep.

When I reach the building’s core, I climb down the ancient elevator shafts to the fourteenth floor. This is as close to the mists as anyone goes unless sealed in a breathing suit.

Bugdon waits for me, his yellow hard hat cracked down the middle, the names of the five previous Supers who wore the hat scratched on the sides. He’s a decade older than me and a true topper. When Bugdon was a teenager, he forged a path through the mists to Chrysler, opening new trade for food. He likes me because I brave the mists like no one else.

But today Bugdon’s mood is foul, his thin face tight to anger. “Lateness, Hanger,” he says. “No more lateness or you’re gone.”

I start to smart back but stop when I see the deader at his feet. That’s why Bugdon’s angry. I also recognize the body. Jodi. One of our best mist scouts.

“Crank jammed,” Bugdon says softly. “By the time we raised Jodi above the mists, his air was gone.”

Jodi lays on the bare cement floor, the helmet off his air-tight suit, his once-lively face frozen in a twist of pain. Bugdon leans over Jodi and taps him gently in the chest—they were friends, and sometime lovers—before he kicks Jodi and calls him a fool.

“Why didn’t you open your damn helmet?” Bugdon asks Jodi’s body. “Let the mists take you?”

I glance around, making no one else heard him. Bugdon could lose his superintendent position for talk like this. When the mists take you, they absorb your mind and body into their strange matrix. How much they absorb is open to debate—or would be if the subject wasn’t taboo—but I figured the mists take a little of you. Otherwise why could I still hear Momma’s voice rising from the mists each morning?

“He’d still be dead,” I whisper.

“He wouldn’t be deader dead,” Bugdon says with a burst of sads. “Part of him might still live.”

I remember the times the air ran low in my suit. How I’d burned and gasped. I’m impressed Jodi went through that and worse without removing his helmet.

Several couriers walk up, so we stop the mist talk. Bugdon orders the couriers to salvage Jodi’s suit and carry his body to the compost rooms. For a moment I consider racing for Jodi’s slug. Maybe he stored extra food or water. But gossip’s fire to Empire and I’d never reach the slug in time.

Besides, Bugdon has a job for me. “Hot work,” he says, handing me an air bottle. “The Plaza. Trade for two bags of seeds. You willing to chance it?”

I glance at the ancient transit map on the wall. The route to the Plaza Hotel was cleared and measured long ago—straight down Fifth Avenue, turn left on 59th. I make a good mist scout because my stride’s a perfect two feet. Makes for easy math. From Empire to 59th Street is 6,864 feet. Since I can’t see in the mists, I’ll walk 3,432 steps to reach the street. Then turn left and a few hundred more strides will take me to the Plaza.

I’ve often gazed across the city at the old Plaza Hotel and wondered what it was like when Central Park was more than a green spot on age-brown paper. But the upper stories of the Plaza barely rise above the mists on good days. If today turns bad, their crank system might shut down, with only their roof safe from the mists. Worse, I wouldn’t have enough air to return to Empire.

That’s why most mist scouts refuse to walk this route.

Bugdon smiles. He took a similar risk when he opened the passage to Chrysler. Risks like this could make me first in line for food and work.

“I’ll do it,” I say, picking up Jodi’s old helmet. I lean close to Bugdon. “But if my air runs out, I’m not gasping to death. I’ll crack my damn helmet to the mists.”

Bugdon nods, approving of such talk.

Here we are, at the heart of our truth: Why are there tens of thousands of people in Empire but so few who walk the mists?

Because in the mists, you walk the darkness. You count steps to avoid going lost. You bet you’re walking straight and not slowly curving left or right into death.

In the mists, lines and string-marked paths break and tangle. Shouts or yells echo and deceive. But numbers and straight walking—those are the truths that never let a scout down.

The initiation for every mist scout is the same—you’re taken to a bare girder at the top of Empire. Twenty feet straight out with nothing below but falling. Bugdon covers your eyes and you walk the girder, going to the end and turning around without seeing or falling to your knees. You navigate based on what you remember. By how accurately you step without seeing.

It’s scary hard.

Try doing it for thousands of feet.

I stride down Fifth Avenue with my helmet’s blinder locked down to hide the mists’ lies. I also listen to the mists’ words, something the other scouts don’t have to endure. I hear my name chanted on the wind. I taste their false promises. That if I give myself to the mists, I’ll live like the oldies in the Days-We-Knew. All I must do is open my suit and let the mists embrace my meat and bones and mind.

Time holds its breath as I walk the darkness. If I stop counting my steps, perhaps time won’t tick forward. Perhaps I’ll be stuck forever between one footfall and the next.

But those are merely the silliest of mist thoughts. I ignore them and walk on.

I’m stepping off stride 3,401 when I’m slammed to the pavement. I gasp, stunned. Rainbow flashes jump my eyes.

Someone has run in to me!

I’ve heard of this happening. Two scouts chancing upon each other in our endless world of hide and seek. “Don’t move,” I shout, reaching for the person’s helmet to steady them—the worst thing to do is panic and tumble, causing both of us to lose track of our steps and direction.

But instead of touching helmet my gloved hands touch face. Nose and mouth and the soft gush of flesh. I roll away and reach for my field hammer as a weapon to ward off this demon. I swing but hit nothing.

The person is gone. A person wearing nothing to protect themself from the deadly mists.

I freeze. Whoever hit me isn’t wearing a suit. Meaning they must see. And breathe. And touch the mists without it taking them. But how can any human do that?

Before I can think on that, fear runs me. I don’t know where I am. I’m lost in my suit’s black. I gasp hard, remembering Jodi strangling on bad air.

No! Think. Think! I smack the side of my helmet as the mists whisper to relax. To open myself to them.

No!

The person knocked me backward. That I know. Spun me a half turn around. Maybe. I also rolled once or twice. If I pivot back a half turn and add three steps for being knocked down and rolling, I should be back on the right path.

Maybe.

I breathe deep, panting, near panic. Afraid I’m lost. Afraid the demon or whatever will return. To calm myself, I crank the CO₂ scrubber on my suit. But that won’t help much when I’m low on good air.

The mists urge me to accept their help.

Instead, I walk on.

I don’t run in to a building. I’m still on the street. At 3,432 steps I turn ninety degrees to the left. This is the test. I begin walking the remaining steps to the Plaza.

A few seconds later I’m knocked to the ground by a rumbling explosion.

Debris smacks and pings my suit and even without seeing I know one of the ancient high-rises around me is falling. I stand up to run but I’m thrown sideways like a quivering slug in a storm. I roll hard against what feels like a fire hydrant and wrap myself around it, afraid to move.

By the time the rumbling and shaking stop, my suit’s air tastes metallic, burning my throat. I gasp for breath, my body shaking, begging for air. I have no idea which way to walk. I think of Jodi. How he felt at the end. I don’t want to die. Not like Jodi.

“If you look,” the mists whisper, “you’ll see the Plaza.”

I stand, shaking and gasping. Momma looked into the mists once and survived what she saw. She went bat-bat, but she survived.

If I don’t look, I’ll never find the Plaza. I snap up my helmet’s blinder….

…and see Central Park rolling green before me.

I step from the fire hydrant and stare at the park. Before me adults and children laugh and play, chasing balls and frisbees across green grass and hiding behind giant trees. Everyone looks well fed. The park is a picture of happiness snatched from an ancient magazine or book.

I want to scream. I want to ask how this is possible. I want to play in the park with the well-fed people. But I don’t have time because my air’s strangling me. I turn and see the Plaza. The main entrance to the beautiful stone hotel is only a dozen yards away. I stumble toward it.

Someone shouts my name. A voice I know so well.

Momma.

“You go, Hanger-girl!” Momma yells. I see her standing beside a lake in the park, waving at me.

“Remember the mists,” Momma shouts. “But don’t give yourself to them until you’re ready.”

Even though I’m only a few feet from the Plaza’s entrance, I almost run to Momma. But she’s too far away. I’d never reach her before I die.

Stumbling through the Plaza’s entrance, I see the small lift basket. Praying this isn’t a mist trick, I collapse into the basket and tug the bell.

I rise into the sky as Momma’s voice again calls my name.

“Well done, Hanger,” she whispers. “Well done indeed.”

I live for three days with the people of the Plaza—drinking and sleeping and stuffing myself with more food than I’ve ever seen. There are only a few hundred toppers at the Plaza and they grow too much food to consume in a thousand wannabe-days.

And me, I’m a hero. A lucky hero. I survived a close-by high-rise collapse and made it to the hotel’s doorway after losing count of my steps. They celebrate me even as their Super asks more questions than I can answer. Her name’s Estelle—a weird name, but she’s older than the mists. Perhaps weirdness was more common back in the Days-We-Knew. She sits in a chair with wheels, a blanket warming her legs and lap.

Estelle invites me to her room on my last day at the Plaza. She lives several floors below the roof, only a few feet above the mists. Glancing out the window I see the thick white fog rolling by so close I could twirl my fingers in it. The mists often rise and fall unexpectedly and being this close is nerve-chilling.

Noticing my concern, Estelle chuckles softly. “Don’t worry, Hanger. The mists warn me before they rise.”

“The mists speak to you?” I ask, trying to hide my excitement. Maybe I’m not the only one who hears the mists talking.

Estelle nods as she rolls her ancient chair across the room. We stare through the window at the mists and the ruins of the collapsed building several hundred yards away. A single corner of the destroyed high-rise pierces the mists like a middle finger insulting the sky.

“You ever opened your suit’s blinder while inside the mists?” Estelle asks.

“I’m not a deader,” I mutter nervously, wondering if she suspects. Not only is it taboo to see the mists’ lies; the mists’ sights often drive people bat-bat. While Estelle seems nice, she’s still a Super and could have me tossed to the mists.

“I won’t harm you,” she says. “You’re free to return to Empire. But if you saw something in the mists, I need to know.”

I want to tell her what I saw, but I’ve never known a life where discussing the mists wasn’t taboo. I glance nervously at Estelle’s people standing outside the room. Will they throw me off the roof? Or maybe this old hotel will collapse like that nearby building. I wonder how many people lived in that building.

Estelle’s wrinkled hand gently takes my own and squeezes tight. “You must stop being so afraid, Hanger.”

I slap her hand away in fury. How dare this old fool reassure me? She didn’t grow up with precious little food or water. She hasn’t spent her whole life doing dangerous jobs. She hasn’t learned to keep her mouth shut because the alternative is to have your slug cut or be thrown to your death.

The people outside the door step toward us, worried I might hurt their Super. Estelle waves them off.

“It’s a simple choice,” Estelle says calmly. “Join the mists or stay apart. All your life you’ve heard why you should stay apart. But you know so little about why you should join.”

As Estelle says this, the mists whisper our names in voices sounding like the sizzle of pigeon eggs on good breakfast days. Like the hopeful taste of fresh air replacing bad.

From the window I see the mists rising. The people outside the room flee for higher floors but I can’t leave Estelle. I grab her wheeled chair and push but the wheels won’t turn. Estelle grips them tight, refusing to budge.

“Don’t fight it,” she says as the mists flow into the room.

As the mists rise, I wonder what it will feel like to die. Will the mists speak in Momma’s voice as they take me?

But instead, the mists ease around us without touching our bodies. I stand beside Estelle’s chair as the mists rise to the ceiling. They croon my name but I can’t see anything—merely a white wall of everything and nothing.

Afraid, I lean toward Estelle, but a slice of mist stabs between us. It rises over Estelle until I can’t see her. I scream her name. The mists whisper for me not to worry, speaking calmly like Estelle did moments before.

The mists seem to surround me forever, the hours in my mind merging to days and years before falling back to mere seconds. I find myself reliving a moment from several days ago, when I woke in my slug and greeted the mists below. I also see my life from years in the past, when Momma kissed me on the cheek before jumping off Empire.

Then as quickly as the mists rose, they flow away, falling through cracks in the floor and walls until they again rest a few feet below the windows.

Estelle smiles at me from her chair.

“Why didn’t the mists kill us?” I ask.

“When you’re in the mists, does it ever seem like time plays tricks with you?”

I nod, remembering how I felt a few moments before. Or how I’ve walked the mists in a suit and almost believed that if I lost focus, I’d become stuck between one moment and the next. “I once mentioned that feeling to Bugdon,” I mutter. “He said the lack of vision in a mist suit squirrels with people’s minds.”

“I’m sure it does. But this isn’t sensory deprivation—the mists actually play with time. Most people can’t sense it. But I can. And so can you.”

Estelle’s words ring a memory in me. I remember Momma— right before she dived off Empire—telling me her time had come. But while those were the words she’d spoken, I’d also felt more. A sense that Momma was playing a role she’d already played many times before in her life, ever since she’d opened her suit’s blinder to the mists while pregnant with me.

For a moment, my life folds in on itself. As if I’m a forever loop of time stretching from before my birth to this very moment and returning to when Momma was pregnant with me.

I stagger and, to keep from passing out, sit down hard next to Estelle’s wheeled chair. She gently pats my shoulder.

“I felt the same way when the mists first exposed me to their truths,” she says. “I worked at Rockefeller University back in the Days-We-Knew. We were attempting to open tiny doorways through time. Instead, we… changed something. Ever since I’ve heard the mists speaking. Perhaps some similar event in your life gave you the same ability.”

Momma, I think. Pregnant with me when she became lost in her mist suit and opened her blinder to find her way home. But I don’t tell Estelle. That’s too personal to share.

Instead, I ask, “You gave us the mists?”

“Accidentally,” she whispers with a grin. “Few others know—wouldn’t be safe to tell too many people, would it?”

Estelle speaks the truth. Even though she’s a Super, most toppers would toss her from a roof if they knew.

“It happened unexpectedly,” she says. “I was staring at my experimental portal when suddenly the world blinked. Or more accurately, the city blinked, taken from the Days-We-Knew to this… place. Or time. Or place without time.”

I nod. Everyone knew our city had been taken, even if they didn’t know why or how it happened. That’s why Old Man Douger and the other oldies still prayed for the people back in the Days-We-Knew to find a way to save us.

“What are the mists?” I ask, excited to finally ask such a taboo question of someone who can answer.

“The mists are time itself, or at least time as it exists here. Does that make sense?”

I remember Old Man Douger’s stories about those fearful first hours. Where before the city had been firmly entrenched in the Days-We-Knew, suddenly endless empty horizons surrounded the city. Time flickered and failed and reappeared, as this place was unsure if one moment should still pass into the next. People found themselves living one moment in the past, the next in the future, and the next spread across an eternity of their own life.

And through it all flowed the mists, devouring each person they touched. They flung peoples’ lives into the air so everyone around them tasted their births and loves and happiness and sads before those lives exploded into a new cloud of mists.

Eventually time returned to a semblance of normal. Lives were again lived from beginning to end. But many oldies like Douger questioned this normality, saying the mists were merely giving us a brief reprieve while they plotted to kill us all.

“What do the mists want?” I ask.

“They don’t have desires like you and I. The mists exist both in our timestream and outside it. It’s hard to explain. Imagine if each moment of your life could come alive and exist alongside who you are right now. That’s essentially what the mists are—countless moments from the lives of millions of people.”

I grin, happy to understand a little more about the mists. I tell Estelle what happened to me in the mists. How a person not wearing a breathing suit ran into me. How I opened my blinder and saw long-gone Central Park. How the mists saved me. How my momma cheered me on. I even tell her how I talk with the mists like she does.

Estelle listens without speaking, smiling occasionally as if she already knows what I’m going to say. When I finish, she sits silently for a few moments before reaching into her pocket and pulling out a necklace. The necklace is a series of small glass globes strung one after the other on a golden wire. Each globe has a curl of mist rising and falling inside.

Estelle hangs the necklace around my neck.

“So what do we do?” I ask.

Estelle smiles. “I don’t know,” she says. “But if you listen to the mists, I’m sure you’ll discover a path.”

Because of the collapsed building I take a new route home, a spare air bottle slung over my shoulder so I can make it. I’m tempted to again raise my helmet’s blinder to see if Momma will reappear. But in the end I walk home in darkness, afraid of what the mists might reveal.

Bugdon is ecstatic when he sees me, and more so when I hand him the two bags of seeds I received in trade. Everyone thought the building collapse had slapped me dead.

For the first time at Empire I eat my fill and drink a full bag of fresh water. Bugdon even offers to move my slug inside. But I’m happy where I live. Bugdon nods, satisfied with my answer.

When I finally shinny up to my slug, it’s well after midnight. Ignoring the wasp-buzz racket of Old Man Douger’s snoring I lean out of my slug and stare down below at the white glow of the mists.

I try to see the different spots of time. The different moments of my mother’s life spread across infinity. But instead, I see only a blurry whiteness.

I want to ask so many questions. Do the people who became mists like what they’ve become? Where exactly is this place, or time, or whatever it is?

But instead of asking those questions, I settle on another. “Hellos,” I whisper.

Hellos to you, Hanger, the mists whisper back, their many voices merged into one gasp of sound carried on the wind.

Old Man Douger snorts loudly and I hush up, afraid he’ll hear me talking. After hearing nothing but snores from him for a few minutes, I whisper my question. “Why don’t you simply take us all? I know you can do it.”

The mists don’t answer, and I don’t ask again, afraid someone will hear and cut free my slug and I’ll fall and fall until I have no choice but to discover the truth about the mists.

In the following weeks Bugdon works me hard. He sends all the mist scouts out seeking new trade routes or bringing in fresh seeds and supplies. I think he’s worried about more building collapses cutting off our food lines.

Lots of work means I’m well fed, but it also means there’s not much time to think about what I saw in the mists. And the funny thing is I don’t feel bat-bat. Not like Momma after she saw the mists.

So I sleep, and live, and walk the mists.

Ordinary life, plus mists.

Until Chrysler collapses.

I watch the building fall from my slug. The wind is howling, blowing so hard that Empire moans and shakes and dances like the building is drunk. I poke my head outside my slug to stare at the dull gray morning. That’s when I hear and feel the collapse. I grab my binoculars and watch people screaming as the oh-sobeautiful rocket of a building collapses into a cloud of white dust.

That morning Bugdon calls an emergency meeting. The people of Empire cram into the old visitor’s center on the eightieth floor to hear him speak.

“We can’t trust Empire to last forever,” Bugdon says. “Maybe a few more years, maybe a decade or two. The mists are eroding all the buildings and we’ve gone too long without the serious maintenance and repairs Empire needs to live.”

Everyone nods.

“Maybe we have plenty of time, but we can’t take the chance. I propose we move some of our people to safety.”

As Bugdon says this, people smirk and roll their eyes. After all, there is no safety. There’s nowhere to go but the city and the high-rises.

Turns out Bugdon’s not joking. He points to an ancient transit map on the wall, where someone has circled a spot near what used to be the East River. “I’ve heard rumor of a mist-proof building in Rockefeller University,” he says. “It’s a hangover from the Days-We-Knew.”

I wonder if Bugdon knows that’s where Estelle worked when she accidentally blinked the city to this place. Even if such a building exists, it’ll be suicide to try and reach it. The path to Rockefeller University has never been cleared. But Bugdon is the Super, so people merely nod agreement when he says we’ll send a scout to investigate.

I try sneaking out of the meeting, not wanting to be the scout sent on this death mission, but two of Bugdon’s goons grab me. They escort me down to the fourteenth floor, where we wait until Bug-don arrives.

“Go jump the mists,” Bugdon tells his goons, who tense at the insult but quickly back away before Bugdon makes them do the deed.

Once we’re alone, Bugdon grins. “You’re not volunteering for my mission?”

“It’s a deader’s death. Merely to give Empire false hope.”

“Maybe not.” Bugdon leans close, whispers. “What if I said the mists told me to do this?”

I shiver. Does Bugdon also hear the mists talk? Or is he trying to trick me into admitting that I hear them? “If the mists said to do this, then you do it,” I say.

“No can. The mists want you.”

I want to yell coward. Fake-topper. Scared-ass Super. But Bugdon simply smiles. “I know you didn’t get lucky making it back from the Plaza—the mists helped you. But why? That’s what I don’t understand.”

I stare at my boots, afraid to speak. Bugdon points at the necklace Estelle gave me, which peeks out from under my jumpsuit. Bugdon opens his shirt to reveal a twin of the necklace, with a similar wisp of mist swirling inside each of the dozens of tiny glass globes.

“When did you meet Estelle?” I ask.

“I’ve never been to the Plaza.”

“But the necklace….”

“… was given to me by someone you know,” he says. “This person said the mists want you to do this. That our time is running short.”

I want to run for my slug and hide, but Bugdon hugs me tight and whispers in my ear. “There’ll be no more Supers after me,” he says. “Empire won’t last. But even if the building doesn’t collapse, we can’t keep living like this. You’ve seen it. We’re dying. Our people are merely passing time until we die.”

I nod. I’ve long thought this, as I’m sure others have even if we never speak such heresy aloud.

“Maybe you’ll die,” Bugdon says, “and based on how the mists play with us, you likely will. But if there’s a chance….”

“I’ll go. But if the mists take me, I’m coming back. Gonna haunt you until you do the big swan dive.”

Bugdon laughs as only a true topper laughs. “If the mists take you, I’ll do exactly that.”

How do you divide the mists? How do you divide past from present from future?

As I walk toward Rockefeller University, I imagine myself on that paper map back in Empire, my path separating the mists from what they’ve been and what they are and what all of us might have become if we’d never been pulled from the Days-We-Knew.

I walk blind, using a tap-cane to feel my way through streets which have never been cleared of rubble. I asked the mists to direct me, but for once they don’t speak. I want to raise my blinder but I’m afraid of what I’ll see.

The route to Rockefeller University dances in my mind, but counting steps is impossible because of the rubble. So I feel my way as I drag a sled of air tanks and plug in new air every few hours. It takes me twelve hours to go a thousand feet. Another day to go half again that.

Eventually I’m exhausted and nap for a few hours. I dream about what Momma told me, that I should only join the mists when I’m ready. I wake to bad air and immediately plug in a new tank before stumbling on in a delirium of not seeing.

As I walk, I wonder what our city was like in the Days-We-Knew. A city with countless Empires of people sleeping and dreaming and eating and dying and moving through life. Were they like me? Did they talk but barely understand each other? Did their lives touch on each other but never truly penetrate to the core of who each of us could be?

Instead of each moment of my life shattering into a million living instances of me, what was it like living with so many millions of other people?

By the fourth day I have only have a few air tanks left. Based on what I know of the route, I suspect I’m near the university. But my air will run out well before I find it.

With a sigh, I know what I must do. I’ve known all along I would do this. Maybe that’s why the mists and Momma have been silent. They’ve been waiting for me to make this choice.

I raise my blinder and look.

Around me stands the city as if we’d never left the Days-We-Knew.

Crowds of people walk by me, a few staring in disgust at my smelly suit and strange attire. Most, though, flow around like I’m not there. They step by as if I’m merely an obstacle in their path.

As my gloved hands rise to my helmet, I find I’m no longer afraid. I remember Momma jumping off Empire and, like her, I’m eager to see what happens next.

I twist open my helmet and breathe deep. As the clean air reaches my lungs, a deep pain slams me. A pure white-fire pain. A pain like every muscle in my body cutting away at my bones and blood.

I scream and fall to my knees. I try to beg the mists to help me but words refuse to leave my mouth.

But the pain passes quickly, leaving me gasping and shaking. When I’m again able to stand, I blink back tears and look around.

I stand on a rubble-free sidewalk as cars and buses pass in the street beside me. While I’ve seen pictures of such vehicles before, and touched their unseen remains while hiking the mists, it’s still shocking how big they are and how fast they move.

But even bigger are the buildings. High-rises line the street, all of them gleaming in unbroken glass and metal and stone. In the distance I see Empire State. But not the Empire as I knew her, covered in slugs and missing large pieces of limestone. No, this is the Empire as she was always meant to be. Perfectly maintained and wholesome and taller than all the other high-rises around her.

And the sounds! A moment before all I heard was the air hissing in my suit. Now I hear cars grumbling and people muttering and an entire city speaking at once.

I stumble backward and collapse against the side of a glass storefront. The glass begs for Dry Cleaning. I can’t begin to understand how cleaning could ever be dry.

“A lot to take in, isn’t it,” a familiar voice says. I look up to see Momma standing beside a strange cooking stand on wheels. The man cooking there hands Momma a bottle of what looks like water and some type of a bread and meat food.

Momma walks over and hands me the water and food. “It’s called a hot dog,” she says. “Better than anything we ate on Empire.”

I haven’t eaten in days and I tear into the food, not caring if it’s mist dreams or not. Momma’s right—it’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I also drink the entire bottle of water.

Feeling better, I look around. The people passing Momma and me on the sidewalk are purposely not looking at me. I see my reflection in the window beside me and know why. My hair’s matted, my face dirt-streaked, and my suit stinks. Compared to these people’s clean, neat clothes, I’m a wreck. Even Momma looks beautiful, wearing something called a dress. At least, I think that’s what Old Man Douger called the old pictures he once showed me of the clothes people wore in the Days-We-Knew.

The man who’d cooked the hot dog for Momma brings over another, along with more water. He whispers to Momma that it’s good she’s helping me. “If you need anything, let me know,” the man says before returning to his cart.

“He thinks you’re in trouble,” Momma says. “Now that the people here can see you, all they comprehend is a dirty girl in a strange outfit.”

“I don’t understand.” I look around. I need the mists to return. I need my suit’s darkness to protect me from this batty world.

“This a mist dream?” I ask.

“No. You talked with Estelle at the Plaza, right? She told you what the mists are, and what happened when we left the Days-We-Knew?”

“We’re somewhere without the passing of time and the mists are people torn apart by that change. Every moment of their lives somehow came alive.”

“Mostly correct. The people who became the mists gained immense power even as they were torn apart. With those powers they stabilized and created a world for the rest of us to live in. And yes, each little part of the mist is one unique moment in someone’s life. But it’s also much more.”

Seeing that I don’t understand, Momma taps the necklace she’s wearing. The same necklace I wear. She runs her fingers over the dozens of tiny globes, stirring up the curls of mists inside them. “Imagine each of the globes in my necklace is a different time in someone’s life,” she says. “When they’re looped around my neck, it’s impossible to know which is the first or the last.”

Momma reaches around her neck and unclasps the necklace. She dangles it from one end, creating a straight line of globes. “The people you grew up with believe time’s a straight line, like when I take off this necklace. Suddenly we have a beginning and an ending. But there’s a downside to such beliefs….”

Momma grabs the bottom globe and yanks, causing all of the globes to slide off the golden wire and smash into the cement, where the wisps of mist dissipate and vanish.

I grab my own necklace, not wanting Momma to break it. But a moment later the world around us blinks. People who had been walking past are a few steps back from where they’d been. Cars and buses have jumped backward. And Momma again holds an unbroken necklace.

She reaches around her neck and clasps the necklace together so it’s again an unbroken whole without a beginning or an end.

I look around, tricking myself into believing I understand. “Is this a different time from where I lived in Empire?”

“What we’re experiencing is the intersection of the individual times and moments within the mists. You can only come to places like this when the mists merge with your life.”

I look again at the hot dog man and at the people passing me on the street.

“The mists are tricking me,” I say. “This isn’t real.”

“It’s as real as your life on Empire. When the mists take someone, that person becomes every moment of their life. All the time they’ve lived. Each moment of your life coming alive but still held together. Like the molecules of your body joining together to create something larger than themselves. Or these glass globes creating a never-ending necklace.”

I nod. I can feel this, now that the mists have taken me. I feel all the moments of my life. It’s not like remembering my life—not like memories at all—but instead as if I could open up any moment from my past and relive it. Could enter that moment’s separate and unique time and again snuggle with Momma in our slug. Could again feel excitement and fear as I walked that scary girder on Empire and became a mist scout. I can even taste future times I’ve yet to live.

Momma smiles. “You feel the potential, don’t you? But most of the people back in Empire and the other buildings are still limited by their linear view of time. They’re afraid to embrace what the mists could give them.”

I remember Momma pulling the last globe off her necklace and all the other globes smashing to the sidewalk. I imagine the countless different moments in the lives of Bugdon and everyone in Empire doing the same when our building finally collapses.

I look at the people passing us in this city. I look at the hot dog man. Each is their own mist-cloud of time. They’re the same as me. I look across the street and see Rockefeller University. As I reach out with my senses I can feel Estelle inside. She’s about to open her hoped-for portal in time.

Suddenly I’m puzzled. How can I sense Estelle here when she’s also sitting in a wheeled chair in the Plaza? Then I feel her cloud of time. A tiny part of Estelle is in the university right now, but there are also countless parts of her life leading from here to the Plaza Hotel in the times I knew, along with strings of her life in every other conceivable time and place.

I hear Estelle laughing in joy at my understanding.

“Yes,” Momma says, watching the university with me as we wait for everything to happen. “Estelle’s been working hard to fix all this.”

There’s a sudden burst of light as Estelle’s portal opens—or more accurately, a sudden burst of mists, as the timestream of the DaysWe-Knew falls apart. The hot dog man screams in pain as he loses his grip on time and becomes mist. Passersby in the street do the same. Time falls apart.

The city blinks again, going back to a sunny day where everyone is happy. The hot dog man, acting as if he hasn’t just turned to mists, again walks from his wheeled cooking stand and tells Momma she’s doing a good thing by helping me.

“I brought us back a few minutes in time,” Momma says. “You know the rest of what happened. The people who became mists stabilized the world and kept everyone else from changing. They did it out of mercy, not wanting others to feel the pain and fear they’d experienced. But that decision created a worse existence than they ever imagined.”

Momma’s right. In my times my city is dying, and people are hurting far more than the pain brought on by a brief moment of change. I survived the pain of becoming mist. Others could easily do the same.

I eat another bite of hot dog. Is this real? A mist dream? A new timestream created as my life broke into countless individual moments of me?

Maybe it doesn’t matter which account is true. It only matters what I do with the times now open to me.

“You want me to convince people to join the mists,” I say. “You want people to join them before all the buildings fall.”

My mother nods.

I laugh. There’s never been a topper prophet. But if there’s got to be one, might as well be me.

I strip off my suit and helmet, strip off my dirty clothes underneath, even though the hot dog man and others stare at me in shock. Momma kicks a fire hydrant with more strength than she should have and it shatters, revealing a rising rain of water. I scrub and clean myself. Momma joins me and we hold hands and dance around the geyser of water.

I then tell her I’m ready. I shatter the moments of my life and rearrange the infinite times I’m created of until I again stand in the mists back in my city.

Except the mists have cleared from around me. And walking toward me is myself. A myself sealed in an air suit with the blinder hiding her from what the mists reveal.

That’s when I know this is truth. I look at the mists that swirl by my body. Each drop of mist is a moment of my life. The drops shimmer and spin and squeal in happiness at what I am.

I laugh. I giggle and yell. I run my hands through the mists, feeling my lives and the lives of everyone I’ve ever known—and the countless people I never got to know—swirl through my consciousness.

I must share the news. I must tell everyone.

But first I run at myself and knock the other me down. As her gloved hands touch my bare face, I remember her fear. I step back and reach out to the mists around me, find the living moment of that fear. Experience it again. I am fortunate this fear didn’t define all of who I am.

I watch my suited self stand back up and walk onward. So funny to think a mere suit kept out the mists. So silly to think closing my eyes kept out the truth.

When I return to Empire, I sneak in and find Bugdon. He stares at my naked body and asks what happened.

I tell him.

“I can’t accept this,” he stammers.

“It’s your choice, but if you give yourself up to the mists, they’ll reveal more of yourself than you’d ever believe. Empire won’t last. But if we can convince people to join the mists….”

“It’s impossible. It’s simply impossible.”

I grin as I take off my necklace and hand it to him. “The other part of me will return in a few days. Then you’ll know. I’ll be back to tell you what we must do to save everyone.”

Bugdon looks at me like I’ve gone bat-bat, but before he can call the guards to catch me, I run back into the mists.

I can already taste Bugdon’s future understanding. It dances before me like a drop of mist in the air.

We be toppers. Toppers we be.

Because in the end, what else could we become?