it's no secret that the stars are falling from the sky (john coffey)
River padded to the bedroom window on bare feet and pulled back a purple curtain with a motion far too graceful to be believed in any one else.
As she watched, the building across the street waivered, then sort of imploded and grew back slowly, out of the ground, like a plant on Miracle Grow. Her eyes went wide and dark and shiney, and there were not, by far, enough Mandarin curses for this.
She bounded down the stairs, past Alice Liddell's door and outside, not really sure where she was going.
Everything in the City was a silent scream. She clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes, standing in the middle of the street and almost getting hit by a taxi driven by a cabbie who stopped to gawk at the rearranging cityscape to his left.
Amidst the cries in her mind, and knowing for sure now, beyond anything reasonable, that there was no making sense of this, River heard one train of thought, loud and clear and steady, like a metronome.
And she made her way toward it, navigating around the buildings that waxed and waned and fluxed, calculating, as she went, the odds of one shooting her up into the sky like a star in reverse, should she step down in the wrong spot.
When she found the man she was looking for--not, she mused to herself with a smile, her brother or her sweetheart, not this time--she tapped him gingerly on the shoulder.
"Is it roaring in your head, too?" River asked, eyes looking up at the skyscraper across the street that suddenly ceased existing. She smiled, then, a big gentle smile for the man that had made things in her head less like a car crash and more like a working consciousness.