High above Los Angeles, where the stars had given up trying to compete with the smog-tinged haze and the city lights below looked like a spilled jewelry box full of cheap rhinestones, ARIA floated.
To anyone who might have seen her—which, obviously, no one could, because she was wrapped in that subtle light-bending fuckery that made her invisible to every camera, drone, and nosy astronomer on the planet—she would have looked like she was meditating.
Legs folded beneath her in perfect lotus, massive wings spread wide to catch nonexistent air currents at this altitude, body suspended in flawless stillness against the velvet black of the sky.
But then you'd notice the details.
Her chin was resting in the palms of her hands. Her elbows were propped on her knees. Her mismatched eyes—one swirling purple-white galaxy soup, the other a literal captured red-gold sun—were half-lidded and distant, staring at nothing and everything at once.
This wasn't meditation.
This was contemplation.
