I don’t know why part of me expected Coppersands to have walls around it. Just a vague idea about history, I suppose, which this world didn’t really resemble more than superficially. In retrospect, walls were built to protect the city and, maybe as a secondary benefit, regute traffic. There was nothing here to defend against except mosslings and zombies, which avoided crowds, and trying to control traffic seemed unlikely considering what I’d seen so far.

  Coppersands might not have walls, but it was certainly a much rger settlement than Quailbrook or Iguana Meadows.

  It did seem to be id out on a neat grid, which I knew personally and intimately was not the case with my own home city, and I’d had conversations with other first responders cursing the chaotic youts they had to deal with sometimes when trying to get to an emergency quickly.

  The architecture had changed again. Buildings didn’t rest directly on the ground, but on stone pilings that elevated them half a meter above it. Stone was, simirly, used for the ramps up into them, and they were all ramps, not stairs. Above that, walls were wood, but roofs came in many hues and had a vertical ripply look, which might mean they were tiled with ceramics or something. The roofs also extended out farther from the walls than the wooden shingle roofs in the Forest had.

  Still chickens and geese in the usual colours, white or red or mixed and white with or without grey, respectively. Still cats in every colour. Still dogs, but the breed had changed again, some beagles and leggy hound-types and a few collie-types but quite a lot of what could only be standard poodles. They’d been clipped in as many different styles as there were colours. I also saw a few massive shaggy dogs that made me think of Newfoundnds, some bck, some white with bck or chocote or warm deep grey.

  Still a mixture of people. It was clear well before we reached the city proper that there was still a high proportion of felids even here at the border between Forest and Shallows. There were humans, and cervids, and there were lots of those tall androgynous colourful people like the pilot of the ferry.

  Clothes were still highly individualistic. Everyone I saw had a bag of some sort, though no two seemed identical in size, style, colour, and decoration.

  After some discussion, I’d chosen to stay in my felid form for this leg of the trip. It hadn’t been an easy decision.

  My centaur form felt comfortable, with calm confidence I badly needed when dealing with a culture I still didn’t entirely understand and definitely didn’t feel like I belonged in, and I liked having those healing abilities right there in easy reach. On the other hand, I was rger than a cervid and it was somewhat awkward in tight spaces, as I’d discovered in Iguana Meadows, and even though Serru and Aryennos assured me that I would be neither a freak nor an inconvenience, it still made me nervous.

  My felid form made me feel like I was hopped up on caffeine, but I was reasonably sure I could keep myself from doing anything impulsively that would get me in trouble, and it was smaller and simpler and I did really like it as well.

  Serru was clearly familiar with the territory: she led us past many shops, several of them with signs bearing variations of the five-petalled flower I remembered from Quailbrook. I tried to pay attention, but it grew increasingly difficult.

  There were just so many sounds—people talking, carts rumbling by, a thuddy banging in short but frequent bouts that might be someone hammering something, all the domestic animals making their respective noises along with the ever-present birdsong background. So many scents, the people and the animals and food being cooked and flowers in windowboxes and countless others I couldn’t even identify, all mingling together into one overwhelming miasma in which I couldn’t distinguish individual components any more. So much motion on all sides of me, my eyes kept flicking to each new trigger but there were far more than I could possibly keep track of, even just in my immediate vicinity and even though people were actually remarkably polite about personal space. The roadways between buildings were broad and should not have felt custrophobic at all, but walls bounced sounds back towards me and people near me were starting to look at me less in curiosity, more in concern, but they were all so strange to me and...

  I hardly even realized I’d turned and fled; vaguely, I thought I heard Serru call my name in arm, but the only thing that mattered was escaping from the overload.

  Near the edge of the town there was a neatly-pnted grove of fruit trees with berry bushes between them, presumably someone’s small orchard. I darted around the bushes, pulled one arm out of my backpack straps so it could fall to one side, and slid my back down one of the trees, so I could just sit with my arms wrapped around as much of me as I could. My heart was thumping so madly it would have been hard to count and I couldn’t quite seem to catch my breath.

  It felt like an eternity before my heart began to slow from its frantic dance. Something like normal awareness began to drip back into my head, something other than the fear and a monstrous thing that was like pain but wasn’t pain.

  Someone very close to me was singing, very softly, something that sounded like a lulbye—a gentle repetitive melody and soothing words about wind and moonlight and sleepy animals. I recognized the voice, that was Aryennos.

  Which meant my friends had found me, and I was safe.

  I tried to concentrate just on my breathing and on that song, then the next and the next, and the scales gradually tipped further back towards a more normal state. Not all the way there; I felt exhausted and shaky, disoriented and hypersensitized. My throat was raw and dry.

  And I was more than a little embarrassed. What had happened?

  Uncurling myself from my near-fetal ball took both time and care. It felt like every muscle had locked achingly-tight and trying to get them all to stretch and move hovered on the edge of hurting. I didn’t really want anything more for my senses to deal with right then, but I needed to do this, so I persisted but reminded myself to go slow, one joint and then the next.

  Aryennos let the song end. “Nathan?” he said gently. “Is there anything I can do?”

  I shook my head, but it felt jerky and uneven. “Wait.” Even the one sylble took an unexpected effort.

  “As long as you need. There’s no hurry.”

  No hurry. Good. Because it was taking a frustratingly long time to pull my mind together and make my aching body respond.

  When I finally managed to rearrange myself so I was kneeling instead of curled in on myself, and blinked at Aryennos, he just smiled.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Sort of. What was that?”

  “Drink this, if you can.” He handed me what I recognized as one of my own not-quite-perfect Quickheal attempts. I was going to refuse, but the motion of waving it off brought my lower arm into sight, and I brought the other one up as well.

  There were small neat cuts, mostly in sets of three or four with solitary ones at a different angle, speckling my arms intermittently all the way up to my shoulders, and a quick check showed that there was blood under my cwlike nails. Small spots of pain suggested that they weren’t the only ones. None looked dangerous; some, however, had tiny trickles of blood escaping.

  I fumbled with the cork and hesitantly took a sip of the contents. I’d had one before, because of the rope damage to my hands, but hadn’t really paid much attention. The fvour was mildly sweet with just a hint of the taste of red berries, one of the ingredients, and the texture was watery. I thought I could swallow it without gagging, but it took me three gulps to get it all down, even though it was small.

  I immediately began to feel better, some of the achiness deep in my muscles fading, and the cuts on my arms stopped leaking blood. It didn’t help with the fatigue or make a rge difference against the fogginess in my mind, but it did help with the rest.

  “I can only tell you what it looked like. I don’t know about your world, but it’s common knowledge here that brains work in many ways, and that can include finding some sorts of experiences overwhelmingly vivid.”

  Brains... overwhelm...

  Had I just had a meltdown? I’d been on calls before involving those when they’d turned dangerous. I had needed to cope with patients with other primary issues whose neurodivergence sometimes complicated matters. I’d had the family of patients at a call get overwhelmed by the sirens and lights and fear and disruption of routine. There was some additional training encouraged officially, but the situation was so common that I’d gone looking for information beyond that, not from experts but from people who were on the autism spectrum and otherwise neurodivergent, trying to learn from them what they needed me to do so that I could do my job properly. It had been highly educational.

  Did that mean that my brain structure in my felid form was actually different?

  All I remembered was that there had been too much sensory input and I’d gone in heartbeats from nervous to anxious to that thing that wasn’t exactly pain to all-out fight-or-flight panic. I’d instinctively found a quiet pce without people and just got lost in my own head.

  That certainly sounded like what I’d heard described to me.

  And Aryennos’ response, being here and rgely quiet and just letting me get through it, sounded like the reaction of someone who had seen this before and knew better than to start asking me for information I couldn’t give or adding to the overload.

  “Are you telling me that autism is a known thing here?” I couldn’t quite help the incredulous note in my voice. Or the rasp.

  “I don’t know what that means. Nothing else about people is all the same. Why should every brain work the same way? It’s more common for felids to be sensitive to a lot of noise and activity around them, but not all felids, and sometimes other people can be like that.”

  That was a lot to absorb, even though I was fairly sure he was keeping it simple. He was also keeping his tone measured, a little slower than usual and a little quieter. That was good. I wasn’t sure I could process faster speech right now.

  “Serru?”

  “She talked to the orchard’s owner and has gone to do a couple of things. There’s no hurry. When you feel like you can, we’ll go to an inn and you can have all the time you need to recover.”

  It was only mid-day, we hadn’t even stopped for lunch because we’d been so close to the city and had decided to eat at a restaurant instead of having road food. How long had I been messed up?

  The thought of food was nauseating.

  The thought of being indoors, in a single private room where I could be alone and not be underfoot or inconvenience anyone, that was another matter. I really wanted that. But that would mean leaving the safe haven of the orchard and going back out to where there were people and noises and scents and... no, I could handle it just briefly, right? It would feel like more heat on a bad sunburn, but if it was genuinely not far, I could tolerate it. Right? Probably.

  I really had no idea whether I could or not, or how to cope with this at all. All I could think of was one young autistic woman I’d talked to online telling me that she felt horribly embarrassed about being so debilitated by meltdowns and that there was only one friend she trusted to help her without resenting the inconvenience.

  At the moment, I absolutely got that. And why it was so brutal to be accused of just trying to get attention.