The medallion had rung again today as it had rung before. Whenever the Directrix wanted him, the thing vibrated, and theoretically he was supposed to poof his ass to what should have been his home, the Sanctuary. He’d ignored the summons. As he had the other two.

He didn’t want to hear what he already knew: Five months without sealing the deal on the Primale ceremony was pushing it.

He thought of Cormia holed up in that guest room next door, keeping to herself. No one to talk to. Away from her sisters. He’d tried to reach out to her, but he made her jumpy as hell. Understandably.

God, he had no idea how she passed the hours without going mad. She needed a friend. Everyone needed friends.

Not everyone deserves them, however, the wizard pointed out.

Phury turned and headed for the shower. As he passed by the wastepaper basket, he stopped. His drawing had begun to unravel from the ball he’d wadded it into, and within the crinkled mess, he saw the ivy overlay he’d added. For a split second, he remembered what was underneath, recalled the upswept hair and the wisps that fell on a smooth cheek. Wisps that had the same curl as a rose’s petals.

Shaking his head, he kept going. Cormia was lovely, but-

Wanting her would be appropriate, the wizard finished. So why in a million years would you go down that road. Might ruin your perfect record of accomplishments.

Oh, wait, that would be fuckups, mate. Wouldn’t it.

Phury cranked up Puccini and hit the shower.

As the shutters lifted for the night, Cormia was very busy.

Sitting cross-legged on the Oriental rug in her bedroom, she was fishing around in a crystal bowl of water, chasing peas. The legumes were hard as pebbles when Fritz brought them to her, but after they soaked for a while, they became soft enough to use.

When she’d captured one, she reached to the left and took a toothpick from a little white box that read, in red English letters, SIMMONS’S TOOTHPICKS, 500 COUNT.

She took the pea and pushed it onto the end of the pick, then took another pea and another pick, and did the same until a right angle was formed. She kept going, creating first a square, and then a three-dimensional box. Satisfied, she bent forward and attached it to one of its brethren, capping off the final corner in a four-sided base structure about five feet in diameter. Now she would go upward, building floors of the latticework.

The picks were all the same, identical slices of wood, and the peas were all alike, round and green. Both reminded her of where she was from. Sameness mattered in the Chosen ’s nontemporal Sanctuary. Sameness was the most important thing.

Very little was alike here on this side.

She’d first seen the toothpicks downstairs after the meals, when the Brother Rhage and the Brother Butch would take them out of a slender sliver box as they left the dining room. For no good reason, one evening she’d taken a number of them on her way back to her room. She’d tried putting one in her mouth, but hadn’t liked the dry, woody taste. Not sure what else to do with them, she’d laid out the picks on the bedside table and arranged them together so that they formed shapes.

Fritz, the butler, had come in to clean, noticed her machinations, and returned some time later with a bowl of peas soaking in warm water. He’d shown her how to make the system work. Pea between two picks. Then add another section and another and another, and before you knew it you had something worth seeing.

As her designs got bigger and more ambitious, she’d taken to planning out in advance all the angles and the elevations to reduce errors. She’d also started working on the floor so she had more space.

Leaning forward, she checked the drawing she’d done before she’d started, the one she used to guide her. Next layer would decrease in size, as would the one after that. Then she would add a tower.

Color would be good, she thought. But how to work it into the structure?

Ah, color. The liberation of the eye.

Being on this side had its challenges, but one thing she absolutely loved were all the colors. In the Chosen’s Sanctuary, everything was white: from the grass to the trees to the temples to the food and drink to the devotional books.

With a wince of guilt, she glanced over to her sacred texts. It was hard to argue that she’d been worshiping the Scribe Virgin at her little cathedral of peas and picks.

Nurturing the self was not the goal of the Chosen. It was a sacrilege.

And the visit earlier from the Chosen’s Directrix should have reminded her of that.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, she didn’t want to think about that.

Getting up, she waited for her light-headedness to clear, then went to a window. Down below were the tea roses, and she noted each of the bushes, checking for new buds and petals that had dropped, and fresh leaves.

Time was passing. She could tell by the way the plants changed, their cycle of budding lasting three or four days for each bloom.

Yet another thing to get used to. On the Other Side, there was no time. There were rhythms of rituals and eating and baths, but no alternation of day or night, no hourly measure, no change of season. Time and existence were static just as the air was, just as the light was, just as the landscape was.

On this side, she’d had to learn that there were minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years. Clocks and calendars were used to mark the passings, and she’d figured out how to read them, just as she’d come to understand the cycles of this world and the people in it.

Out on the terrace, a doggen came into view. He had a pair of shears and a large red bucket and he went along the bushes, clipping them into place.

She thought of the rolling white lawns of the Sanctuary. And the unmoving white trees. And the white flowers that were always in bloom. On the Other Side, everything was frozen in its proper place so there was no trimming needed, no mowing, never any change.

Those who breathed the still air were likewise frozen even as they moved, living and yet not living.

Although the Chosen did age, didn’t they. And they did die.

She glanced over her shoulder to a bureau that had empty drawers. The scroll the Directrix had come to deliver sat on its glossy top. The Chosen Amalya, as Directrix, was issuer of such birth recognitions and had appeared to complete her duty.

Had Cormia been over on the Other Side, there would have been a ceremony as well. Although not for her, of course. The individual whose birth it was received no special due, as there was no self on the Other Side. Only the whole.

To think for yourself, to think of yourself, was blasphemy.

She’d always been a secret sinner. She’d always had errant ideas and distractions and drives. All of which went nowhere.

Cormia brought her hand up and put it on the windowpane. The glass she stared through was thinner than her pinkie, as clear as air, hardly any barrier at all. She’d wanted to go down to the flowers for quite a while now, but was waiting for… she did not know what.

When she had first come to this place, she’d been racked by sensory overload. There were all kinds of things she didn’t recognize, like torches that were plugged into the walls that you had to switch on for light, and machines that did things like wash dishes or keep food cold or create images on a little screen. There were boxes that chimed with every hour, and metal vehicles that carried people around, and things you ran back and forth across floors that whirred and cleaned.

There were more colors here than in all the jewels in the treasury. Smells as well, both good and bad.

Everything was so different, and so were the people. Where she was from, there were no males, and her sisters were interchangeable: All Chosen wore the same white robe and twisted their hair up in the same way and had a single teardrop pearl around their necks. They all walked and talked in the identical quiet manner and did the same thing at the same time. Here? Chaos. The Brothers and their shellans wore different clothes and they conversed and laughed in separate, identifiable patterns. They liked certain foods, but not others, and some slept late and others didn’t sleep at all. Some were funny, some were fierce, some were… beautiful.