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Jenny stands at the base of the tower, wondering what in the world she’s thinking.
Objectively, climbing to the top of a steel-lattice radio tower is a terrible idea. The night is cold and windy, though clear, and if her grip fails past a certain point she will most assuredly fall to her death. Even if she manages to reach the top, her plan will require her to let go of the tower with both hands to retrieve the telescope from her backpack, and even if she somehow survives both that process and the head-tilting and loss of situational awareness associated with looking through it, the odds that someone will spot her are—much like the tower itself—distressingly high. More than likely, if she makes it to the ground in one piece, she’ll be immediately arrested.
She knows all that. She also knows that she’s going ahead with her plan regardless.
She’ll probably die, or at best go to jail. But if she doesn’t, she might die anyway. Even if the longing ache deep in her bones to get up there into that gorgeous starry sky doesn’t kill her with its sheer intensity, sooner or later it’ll drive her insane. She knows that as surely as she knows that even climbing to the very top of the tallest object she could find won’t make the slightest dent in the distance between her and the stars.
Knows it as surely as she knows that the source of the trouble is the book tucked into her backpack next to her portable telescope.
Dammit. She’s doing this. There’s no room for whether or not she wants to, no room for whether or not she should. Just the knowledge that she will, that she is, as she grasps the metal rails through the grippy gardening gloves she’s wearing over the woolen ones (the rails are so much thinner than she expected, digging into her hands and feet even through her double-layered gloves and the thick soles of her running shoes) and begins to climb.
She found the book on a visit to the planetarium. Jenny goes to the natural history museum near her home as often as she can manage, and the planetarium has always been one of her favorite things to do there, but she’d never seen the book before. In fact, she was fairly certain when she found it (just inside the door on her way out, hidden in the shadows such that she wouldn’t have seen it at all if some odd feeling hadn’t told her to look) that it hadn't been there on her way in. It was clearly an old book, old enough that she’d almost been too nervous to touch it for fear it might fall apart in her hands. The same pull that had drawn her eyes into the corner where it had been tucked away won out, though, and she’d picked it up and carried it home, not even stopping to ask the planetarium attendant if it belonged to him or to anyone else who might have been there.
Jenny pulled her hair back in a ponytail before she left on this absurd venture, but the wind is whipping it into her face anyway, into her mouth and eyes, blocking her view of the rails she needs to grasp. She’s operating mostly by feel, at this point. Which is a problem, given that she’s barely twenty feet off the ground and her hands are already starting to go numb.
When she got the book home, she spent all night at her computer, trying to figure out what it might be. Yet, after a night spent perusing dusty corners of the Internet and (carefully) the pages of the book itself, Jenny found herself more perplexed than ever. The book was thin, bound in leather, apparently untitled, and composed of handwritten Latin script, tables, and what appeared to be representations of the Solar System on faded and worn-looking but oddly sturdy paper. Inside the front cover, an incongruously modern bookplate declared it “From the Library of Jurgen Leitner”—not a name she could find anything on by typing it into a search engine, and, if the book was as old as it looked and he’d stuck his nameplate in it, clearly not someone who’d cared much about its potential historical worth.
Then again, judging by the way it’s been affecting Jenny since she found it, maybe its potential historical worth isn’t the most important thing about it. The rare book expert who dropped it like it had burned him the moment he saw the Jurgen Leitner bookplate and told Jenny to take that horrible thing away from him before running her out of his shop certainly didn’t think so.
Jenny is nearing the top of the tower. The book in her backpack feels like both a heavy weight dragging her backwards off the metal frame she’s clinging to and the lit fuse of a rocket waiting to launch her into the endless void between her and the stars.
Still. She can’t leave it alone, and after days of near-constant research, she thinks she knows what it might be. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, the seminal work of Nicolas Copernicus, laying out his heliocentric model of the universe—but not the final version. By all indications, this looks to be one of the early manuscripts Copernicus gave his closest friends, decades before allowing the book to be published. Jenny doesn’t know how or why or when it was bound, if that’s the case. She doesn’t know where it’s been in the intervening centuries, or how it got to the planetarium, or what the explanation might be for some of the odd discrepancies she’s noticed between the illustrations in her book and those from the finalized version she was able to look at online.
But she knows, as she reaches the top of the radio tower, that it was always going to find her and bring her here. All her life, this book has been waiting for her to get close enough for its gravity to pull her into orbit. Now that it has, she can do nothing but obey its laws—but not those of the book, any more than gravity itself is mere numbers on a page. Jenny doesn’t know yet exactly what’s caught her, what force the book represents, but she knows that it’s pulling on her too strongly for any chance of escape. She passed the event horizon the moment that force tugged her gaze into the shadows where the book was waiting for her, specifically, to pick it up and take it home.
That might be a good thing. If she knows she can’t escape, she doesn’t have to think about whether she’d want to if she could.
Jenny hooks a knee through the frame of the tower and carefully takes her hands away, shrugging her backpack off her shoulders and bringing it around to rest against the frame while she takes out her telescope, then zips up the backpack and puts it back on before steadying her elbows against the steel and looking up into the star-speckled sky.
As soon as she does, Jenny draws in a stunned breath.
Usually, when she looks through her telescope into the night sky, she’s aware of the limits of her field of view. It’s beautiful, yes, but there’s a layer of remove. This...
The stars are alive, bright and vibrant and multicolored, and they are all around her.
She can feel the expanse of the star field she’s drowning in, feel the extent of the space between those bright pinpoints of light that blanket the sky and know they only appear so densely packed in because there are so, so many. She and the planet she lives on are lost in a tiny corner of this forever expanse of universe, utterly insignificant before the sheer scale of it all. It’s enough to leave her head spinning, stomach jolting like waking from half-sleep because you dreamed of missing a step.
It’s as glorious as it is terrifying, until the moment when she realizes with a bolt of pure fear that the sensation in her gut isn’t just in her head.
She’s falling.
...
“—not waking up.”
“She will. She’s healing up now, see? Give it a minute.”
Everything hurts.
“Is that always what it looks like?” Whoever’s talking sounds a bit sickened.
“Actually, that wasn’t bad at all.” A different voice, this one utterly calm. “Sometimes it’s considerably worse.”
“How?”
She was falling.
“You ever see someone drop a watermelon off a roof onto the pavement?”
A revolted groan. “Maybe there’s a reason I go in more for ocean stuff.”
“Ocean’ll do just as well as pavement, if you hit it from high enough.”
She was falling and then she wasn’t, and it hurt. It hurts.
“Shut up, I think she’s—Jenny? Jenny, sweetheart, are you with us?”
Jenny’s eyes flutter open.
A woman with light brown skin and wavy dark hair is leaning over her, silhouetted by the stars. She’s beautiful. She’s saying Jenny, over and over.
“Jenny,” Jenny repeats dreamily. It’s the only thing she can think of to say.
Which is probably why the next thing she says is “fuck, I’m a Pokémon.”
The beautiful woman smiles. Her teeth are shiny. “Well, in that case, congrats on the evolution!”
“What?” Jenny asks through the haze of starlight and shiny teeth.
Another woman leans into view, also beautiful, but in more of a queenly sort of way, with deep smile and frown and laugh lines set into her beige skin and streaks of silver in her long, smooth, braided black hair that remind Jenny of the starry night sky.
“I’m Lynette,” the starry-haired woman says, then gestures to the woman with the shiny teeth. “This is Mariana. We’re here as... well, I suppose we’re here as your welcoming committee.”
“You’re lucky,” Mariana declares. “Most people don’t have anyone to help them right after they change. We just happened to know you were coming because Mike told us his little experiment got a bite.”
“The book?” Jenny asks, frowning as she struggles to sit up. “What experiment? Who’s Mike?”
“Easy,” Lynette says, resting a hand on Jenny’s shoulder and effortlessly keeping her lying down. “Not quite. You can sit up when it stops hurting.”
Jenny’s clothes feel wet, for some reason. It hasn’t rained recently—
Jenny recalls the fragments of conversation she heard while regaining consciousness at approximately the same time she realizes that the wetness of her clothes feels too viscous and slippery to be water.
Feeling sick, she manages to raise a hand into her line of sight. Sure enough, it’s stained dark red.
Jenny tries, for a moment, to fight back the tears welling up in her eyes, but they’re running down her face before she can so much as gather the wherewithal to think of how that might be done. “What happened to me?” She sobs. “Am I dead?”
Lynette lies down on the pavement next to Jenny, slowly putting an arm around her and holding her more firmly as soon as it’s clear the contact is welcomed. “Short version: yes, you died, but no, you’re not dead, because the Power in that book brought you back.” She says the word Power like it’s spelled with a capital letter. “I promise I will explain everything once you’re feeling better, but right now, you just focus on that.”
“Shit,” Mariana interrupts. “Ambulance. Five o’clock.”
Sure enough, now that she’s listening for it, Jenny can hear a faint siren.
Mariana turns to Lynette.“Is she ready to move?”
“Unless we want to vanish an entire ambulance crew, she’d better be.” Lynette sighs. “This might hurt.”
Jenny nods understanding and approval, and Lynette scoops her up in a bridal carry.
“That feels fine, actually,” Jenny says.
Lynette’s warm “oh, good!” is the last thing she hears before she’s falling yet again.