There was no sensation of impact, no violent force dragging Sezon from the driver's seat. The screaming, the sunlight, the pressure of the seat belt against her chest, even the feeling of her own mouth struggling to finish its final word disappeared at precisely the same instant.
For a moment, she couldn't understand what had happened.
She remembered the freeway. The approaching darkness. Her desperate attempt to open the car door before the enormous sphere reached her. Yet there was nothing around her now to confirm that any of it had been real.
She tried to open her eyes wider.
Nothing changed.
'What...?'
There was no difference between having them open and closed. No faint light, no suggestion of nearby objects, not even the vague impression of darkness she sometimes experienced when waking in an unlit room.
She tried to turn her head away from the direction she'd last seen the approaching sphere, but couldn't determine whether she'd moved. There was no sensation of her neck turning, no change in what she could see, and nothing to suggest that her attempt had accomplished anything at all.
'Hello?'
Sezon attempted to speak. She expected to hear her own voice, or at least feel the familiar movement of her throat.
Neither happened.
'Hello?!'
The second attempt was more desperate. She tried to scream, to force every bit of air from her lungs, but couldn't feel herself breathing. There was no pressure in her chest, no movement in her jaw, and no sound to indicate that she'd accomplished anything.
She couldn't even hear her heartbeat.
'What the fuck is happening?'
She remembered the collision. Had she struck her head? Was she unconscious somewhere, lying in the wreckage of her car?
Perhaps this was what dying felt like.
The possibility sent her thoughts racing. She tried to recall the last thing she'd experienced before everything disappeared, searching for some indication of what might have happened to her.
The sphere had reached the freeway. She'd seen the people outside vanish from sight as its boundary overtook them. Then it had reached her, and every sensation she'd ever known had stopped.
'Did it kill me?'
She waited, although she wasn't certain what she expected to happen.
There was nothing by which to measure the passing of time. She couldn't feel herself breathing or count her pulse. Even the familiar discomfort of sitting too long in one position was absent. She tried to move her legs, then her arms, but received no indication that either had obeyed her.
Her thoughts were the only evidence she had that she continued to exist.
'No. I'm still thinking. That has to mean something.'
She attempted to calm herself, though the effort felt ridiculous. There was no pounding heart, no trembling hands, no tightness in her chest. She remembered what fear felt like and understood perfectly well that she was frightened, but her body offered no response.
'Think, Sezon. You were in the car. Find the steering wheel.'
She concentrated on her hands, imagining them reaching forward to grasp its familiar shape.
Nothing.
'Come on.'
She tried again, attempting to remember the precise movement of her fingers closing around the wheel.
There was no resistance, no reassuring contact with leather or plastic. She couldn't tell whether her arms were moving, whether she still occupied the driver's seat, or whether the vehicle itself existed anymore.
The realization frightened her in a way the approaching sphere hadn't.
At least she'd been able to see that coming.
Here, she couldn't even determine where here was.
She tried to remember the position of her body before the darkness reached her. Her left hand had been near the door handle, her right had remained on the steering wheel, and her foot had been pressing against the accelerator.
She could remember those sensations perfectly.
But remembering was all she could do.
'Please. Just let me feel something.'
She concentrated harder, searching for the feeling of her fingers, her legs, or the pressure of clothing against her skin.
Nothing returned.
Eventually, she abandoned the attempt to move and concentrated on the idea of contact itself.
Not reaching for something. Not turning her head or moving a hand.
Simply feeling.
For a while, nothing changed.
Then, at the very edge of her awareness, something registered.
A slight pressure.
Sezon seized on the sensation, afraid that if her attention wandered, it would disappear.
'Wait.'
There it was again.
Something had touched her.
Or at least, she thought it had.
She tried to determine where the feeling originated, but the familiar references were missing. She couldn't associate it with a fingertip, a shoulder, or any other part of her body.
The sensation faded when she began searching for those familiar locations.
'No, come back.'
She abandoned the attempt to locate it and concentrated solely on the pressure.
Slowly, the feeling returned.
Something small and coarse rested against her. She couldn't identify it, although it reminded her of the faint scrape of a grain of sand against glass.
Then there was another point of contact.
Sezon tried to understand the distance between them.
She expected to find some relationship to her body, perhaps one sensation against her hand and another against her leg. But the more carefully she examined them, the stranger they became.
They seemed remarkably close together.
The pressure shifted slightly, and she concentrated on following it.
For the first time, she became aware of a surface.
A smooth, uninterrupted curve, so small that the points of contact seemed to occupy a considerable portion of it.
Sezon searched for her fingers, her palm, her wrist.
She couldn't find any of them.
'...What?'
She attempted to pull away from whatever was touching her, instinctively trying to withdraw her hand.
There was no hand to withdraw.
Only that strange little surface remained, with something coarse pressing against it.
Another faint contact appeared on the opposite side.
Then another.
Sezon desperately searched for some part of herself that could explain what she was feeling.
Nothing matched.
The surface was curved in every direction she could perceive.
And somehow, impossibly, every point of it belonged to her.
'Where...'
Her thoughts faltered.
'Where did my body go?'
Something shifted across the curve.
She concentrated on the movement and gradually became aware of several tiny objects pressing together against her surface. One moved, scraped against another, and settled into a slightly different position.
The resemblance was unmistakable.
'Sand?'
For the first time since entering the darkness, she had something resembling an answer.
Although it made absolutely no sense.
She'd been sitting in a car. Where could sand have come from? And why could she feel individual grains against what seemed to be a tiny spherical body?
She tried to move one.
Nothing happened.
She imagined reaching for it with her fingers, then remembered that she apparently didn't have any.
'Right. That's going to be a problem.'
She concentrated on the point where a grain touched her surface.
There was contact. There was pressure. Somewhere beneath that pressure was a peculiar awareness of the boundary separating herself from the object.
She tried pushing against it.
The sensation shifted.
Sezon immediately lost her concentration.
'Did I do that?'
She waited until the grain settled, then tried again.
Nothing.
Another attempt produced the faintest movement.
The grain rolled a short distance before coming to rest against several others.
Sezon would have smiled if she still possessed a mouth.
'Okay. I can work with this.'
She hadn't the slightest idea what she'd done, but for the first time since the darkness overtook her, she'd managed to influence something outside herself.
It was a single grain of sand.
A rather pathetic achievement, considering her circumstances.
But it was hers.
Unfortunately, doing it a second time proved considerably harder.
Sezon discovered that whatever had allowed her to move the grain wasn't something she could reproduce simply by thinking about it. She tried directing her attention toward another particle, imagining it rolling away from her, but nothing happened. When she attempted to force the movement, she lost awareness of the grain altogether.
She spent what felt like an absurd amount of time trying to reproduce that first success.
Eventually, she noticed that concentrating on the grain itself was less useful than concentrating on the place where it touched her. There was a peculiar sensation at that boundary, one she hadn't experienced with her original body. If she attended to it carefully enough, she could feel something responding beneath the pressure.
Something that seemed to belong to her.
She tried extending that feeling.
The response was immediate.
A tiny portion of whatever constituted her surface seemed to stretch outward, following the grain as it shifted away from her. The sensation startled her, and she instinctively attempted to withdraw.
The grain resisted.
'What?'
She concentrated on the connection.
The particle was no longer resting loosely against her. It seemed to have become attached to something extending from her surface.
Sezon tried moving it again.
This time the grain followed.
She brought it closer, pushed it outward, and then repeated the movement several times, increasingly fascinated by the strange connection.
'So that's how you do it.'
She was beginning to understand that she wasn't moving the sand through any familiar physical force. Something from within her was reaching into it, creating a connection where none had existed before.
When she concentrated on that connection, the grain responded.
When she withdrew her attention entirely, it eventually became loose again.
The discovery raised more questions than it answered, but Sezon was in no position to complain about having too many questions.
She had finally found something she could do.
The next problem was figuring out what to do with it.
She experimented with attaching additional grains, discovering that she could extend the same peculiar sensation from one particle into another. Each new connection required effort, although the first was consistently the hardest. Once several particles were linked, she could influence them together.
They also behaved differently.
Loose grains shifted and rolled against one another. Connected grains resisted that movement, holding their positions with a firmness she hadn't expected.
She pressed against the little collection.
It stayed together.
'...Huh.'
She tried pulling it toward herself.
The grains moved as one.
For a moment, she thought she had finally made something useful.
Then her concentration slipped.
The connection dissolved, and the particles settled back against her surface as though nothing had happened.
Sezon attempted to sigh.
'Of course.'
She tried again.
And again.
Eventually, she stopped counting.
There was no sunrise to announce another day, no hunger to interrupt her experiments, and no sleepiness to tell her when she'd been working too long. She couldn't even determine whether she was becoming tired in the ordinary sense.
But maintaining the connections gradually became harder. A strange heaviness developed somewhere within her awareness, and the more grains she attempted to bind, the more pronounced it became.
For the first time, Sezon began to suspect that whatever she was using had a limit.
She released the grains and allowed herself to rest.
The heaviness remained.
'That's... not good.'
She attempted to examine the sensation more closely.
At the center of everything she could perceive was a concentrated presence that seemed inseparable from her consciousness. She had noticed it before, but only vaguely, while trying to understand the small spherical surface that constituted her existence.
Now she could distinguish something else within it.
A reserve.
She didn't know how to describe it more accurately. It wasn't a physical weight or a pressure against her surface. It was closer to the awareness of having strength available, except she could sense that a small portion had been spent.
Every connection she'd established with the sand seemed to have drawn from it.
'So I have some kind of battery.'
The comparison was crude, but it was the best she could manage.
'Wonderful. Do I come with a charger?'
She waited for the sensation to recover.
Nothing changed.
She tried resting longer, although without any way of measuring time, she had no idea how long she remained inactive.
The reserve didn't seem to replenish.
A considerably less amusing possibility occurred to her.
'What happens when it's empty?'
She had no desire to find out.
For a while, she restricted herself to manipulating only a few grains at a time, attempting to understand the process without wasting whatever remained of her limited strength.
She discovered that the connections could be maintained with less effort if she stopped trying to control every grain individually. Instead, she could establish a connection between several particles and allow them to hold one another in place.
The resulting structure was surprisingly stable.
It felt almost solid.
Sezon tested it by pressing against one side, then the other.
The little formation resisted her attempts to deform it.
'Okay...'
She concentrated on extending the structure farther.
More grains joined it.
And more.
At some point, the individual particles became too numerous for her to distinguish without deliberately narrowing her attention. What had begun as a handful of tiny contacts developed into something resembling a continuous surface.
She could feel its shape.
It extended from her in one direction, narrowing toward the end, although its proportions were awkward and uneven.
Sezon considered what she had made.
'A stick.'
It was an extremely unimpressive stick.
But she had made it out of sand.
She attempted to bend it.
The structure resisted.
She applied more effort, and the entire formation shifted against her before several connections abruptly gave way.
The extension broke apart.
Sezon recoiled from the sudden loss of sensation.
'Fuck!'
She waited for the scattered grains to settle before examining what remained.
Apparently, holding a structure together and allowing it to move were two different problems.
She would have to solve both.
And so she began again.
Time lost whatever meaning it had once possessed.
Sezon occasionally attempted to count, but the numbers became increasingly useless. She had no way of distinguishing a moment from a minute except through the thoughts that occupied it, and whenever she became absorbed in an experiment, she lost track of where she'd started.
She might have spent days learning to manipulate the sand.
Perhaps weeks.
Eventually, she stopped trying to guess.
Her little constructions grew more complicated. Some collapsed the moment she attempted to move them. Others remained intact but proved too rigid to be useful. Several times, she expended so much of her strange inner reserve on an experiment that she had to abandon everything and wait, desperately hoping the uncomfortable depletion would subside.
It never returned as quickly as she wanted.
She became more careful.
Rather than creating one enormous structure, she experimented with smaller collections of grains, binding them together in separate sections.
The difference was remarkable.
A completely rigid extension could resist considerable pressure, but it couldn't bend without breaking. A structure formed from several connected sections, however, could move if the connections between them were allowed to shift.
The first time she successfully bent one of her creations, Sezon was so pleased that she immediately tried to repeat the movement.
The whole thing disintegrated.
She spent what might have been hours cursing herself.
Then she rebuilt it.
At some point during these endless experiments, an idea began to take shape.
She had been trying to move sand as though it were an object separate from herself.
But every time she established a connection, she could feel the particles as part of a larger structure.
What if she stopped treating the structure as something she was holding?
What if she made it part of herself?
Sezon considered the possibility.
'That sounds completely insane.'
Then again, she was apparently a conscious sphere buried in sand.
She'd passed the point where insanity was a particularly useful objection.
She started with a small extension.
Instead of concentrating only on keeping the grains attached, she attempted to distribute her awareness throughout the structure.
The sensation changed.
Where previously she had perceived the extension as something connected to her, she now began to experience a faint continuity between her own surface and the grains surrounding it.
The distinction was difficult to understand.
It was almost like discovering that an object she'd been holding was actually part of her hand.
Sezon attempted to move the extension.
It shifted.
She tried bending it.
The movement was awkward, but the structure held.
'Oh.'
She repeated the movement.
A little farther this time.
'Oh, you beautiful little thing.'
For the first time, the shape responded in a way that reminded her of moving a limb.
It wasn't much of a limb.
It had no joints she could recognize, no fingers, and certainly nothing resembling the smooth coordination she'd once taken for granted.
But it moved because she wanted it to.
And that was enough to change everything.
She began working toward something considerably more ambitious.
A body.