Marketplace

Elarylk had not expected the smell to find him again so exactly, diesel exhaust, heavy and warm, rolling in off a side street in Guangzhou where the night traffic still moved even past midnight. Guangzhou was the city where he kept his closest circle: a loose, long-running gathering of a few beings who checked in on each other's lives, argued gently, and occasionally said something true enough to change the shape of a week. The smell went past the ordinary channels of thought and dropped him back to a recent morning there, when four of them had sat together. Noreir, who ran lighter and more open than most people he knew; Kaekrar, who noticed things in others before they noticed them in themselves; and Tradynt, quieter, steadier, rarely the one to speak first. They had talked about small things, probe results, the weather of fortune, nothing that should have mattered. Then Elarylk had said, almost without planning to, that he wanted something unreachable, and that he had once reached for it anyway and something had answered him from outside himself. He had not meant it as a performance. It had just come out.