LOST Chapter 19: How Nao Moves

Read chapter 19 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The question nobody has asked me is: how do you know where to go. Not how do you cross, which people ask regularly, in various phrasings, with various degrees of urgency depending on what they want to use the answer for. Not how does the crossing work, which is a different question and one I answer partially and with the omissions appropriate to whoever is asking and what they will do with the information. The question nobody has asked is the one before both of those, the logistical one, the one that should occur to anyone who thinks for a moment about the practical problem of moving deliberately between parallel worlds rather than falling into them by accident. If you want to cross to a specific world, at a specific location, at a specific time, how do you arrange that. What is the mechanism. What is the skill, and how did you acquire it, and why do you have it when other people who have crossed many times don't. Nobody has asked. I have been waiting for someone to ask for three years because the answer is the kind of answer that requires the question to arrive first, that cannot be given unsolicited without sounding like something between a boast and a warning. The answer changes what people think is possible, and what people think is possible changes what they attempt, and what people attempt in this situation has consequences that are not evenly distributed between them and me, and I am careful about consequences that are not evenly distributed. But the answer is also the thing that will make what comes next possible, and what comes next is why I am in this version of Misakiura at all, and so I have been waiting for the question with the specific patience of someone who knows they will need to give the answer soon and would prefer to give it to someone who has thought to ask for it rather than someone who hasn't. Sai will ask. He is a few days from asking. I can feel the question forming in him the way I can feel ruptures forming, not the same mechanism but the same quality of approach, something that has a shape before it has a surface, a pressure before it has a location. He is working through what he knows and mapping the edges of what he doesn't know and the question about how I navigate is at the edge of what he doesn't know, and he moves toward edges methodically. In the meantime I can think about the answer. The skill developed over time, which is the first thing to say about it, because skills that develop over time have a beginning and a process and the beginning and the process tell you something about what the skill actually is rather than what it appears to be. The appearance of the skill is: Nao knows where ruptures will open before they open. The reality of the skill is more specific and less magical than the appearance and also, in some ways, stranger. Ruptures have precursors. This is the thing that is not widely known among Threshers, even the ones who have crossed many times, because most Threshers cross reactively, finding a rupture that has already opened and going through it, which means they have no experience of the period before a rupture opens and no reason to develop sensitivity to it. I crossed reactively for the first several years, which means I have experience of both the reactive and the anticipatory approach, and I can tell you that they are not the same experience at all, which should be obvious and which people somehow find surprising. Before a rupture opens, the air in the immediate vicinity changes. Not dramatically. Not in a way that would register to someone who was not specifically attending to it, which is why most people don't notice it and why I did not notice it for the first several years and why, once I started noticing it, I could not stop, which is the particular property of certain kinds of attention, that they cannot be unlearned once learned. The change is in pressure and in what I can only describe as the texture of the air, the way it feels against the skin of the face, w