The boy's guilt had a barometric pressure of 1013 millibars and falling. I could feel it in my sinuses—that particular heaviness that preceded his particular storm. He sat in the client chair, twelve years old, hands folded so tight his knuckles showed white through brown skin, and every time he rehearsed his lie the air in my office grew more humid.
"My father never hits me," he said, and a Fib-sprite manifested above his left shoulder. Gnat-class: translucent, six-winged, dissolving already into the sweat-stained air. It would be gone by Thursday.
"Again," I said.
"My father never hits me." Another sprite. The humidity climbed to sixty-two percent. I could taste copper on my tongue—his adrenaline, probably, or mine.
"Third time's truth," I reminded him. "Or third time's charm. Depending."
The boy—client confidentiality extends to names, so I will call him K—looked at me with that expression I'd learned to read as *despair attempting to appear cooperative*. I'd felt that weather before. Low pressure system, warm front of hope colliding with cold front of experience. The resulting precipitation was usually tears.
"I can't," he said.
"You can. You've been doing it for three years. Every time someone asks, you generate a Fib-sprite. Every time you go to school with a bruise, you generate a Falsehood-fauna. How many creatures are following you now, K?"
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. I could feel them in the room's atmosphere—three dog-sized presences pressing against the walls of his perception, visible to anyone who knew to look. The social worker who'd referred him had counted seven last month. K was escalating, and the Fauna were getting hungry. In six months, maybe eight, he'd generate his first Deception-beast. The Veracitors would come then. They always came for the children who made monsters.
"Try this," I said. "Don't say he doesn't hit you. Say something else."
"What else is there?"
I stood and walked to my window. My office occupies the third floor of a building in the Figurative Quarter, where the architecture curves and implies rather than states. The window frame is shaped like an eye. The glass is shaped like a tear. Outside, the city of Allegoria sprawled in its layers: the brutalist Literal District to the north, all right angles and exposed structural honesty; the Idiom Slums below me, where smoke rose in question marks; and above, on the hill, the Simile Heights where aristocrats' taxidermied lie-creatures gleamed in glass cases, status symbols of comparative wealth.
I watched the weather. My own emotional state registered as high pressure, stable—satisfaction with a consultation going well, or what passed for satisfaction in my particular phenomenology. Contentment felt like clear skies. I was, at that moment, cloudless.
"Say what you feel," I told K. "Not what happened. Not what didn't happen."
"I feel safe when he's kind."
The humidity dropped four points. No sprite manifested.
"Again."
"I feel safe when he's kind." The pressure stabilized. The copper taste faded, replaced by something greener—relief, perhaps, or the beginning of hope. In my experience, hope tasted of ozone, pre-storm, dangerous and electric.
"Now the rest," I said.
K's voice went smaller. "I feel scared when he's loud. I feel small when he stands up fast. I feel like—" He stopped. The pressure plummeted. I felt it in my joints, my teeth, the hollow spaces behind my eyes.
"Like what?"
"Like a memory of rain." He looked up, confused by his own words. "I don't know why I said that. I don't know what that means."
I knew. I knew with the certainty of shared weather, of atmospheric conditions that could not be faked or mistaken. I kept my back to him. I kept my voice steady, which in my case meant keeping my internal pressure from dropping too fast.
"It means you're feeling grief," I said. "Grief for something you can't see clearly. That's all. It's a common expression."
It wasn't. I'd never heard anyone say it before. Not in twelve years of consultations, not in twenty-eight years of life—if life was what I had. I was lying to him, and I waited for the Fib-sprite to manifest above my own shoulder. I waited for the familiar sensation of something being born from my deceit, some creature of inconvenience that would buzz around my office for a week before dissolving into nothing.
Nothing came. Nothing ever came.
I turned from the window and smiled at K. "You've done good work today. Practice those statements. Emotional truth doesn't generate creatures. Only factual claims do. 'I feel' is always true because you are always feeling. Do you understand?"
He nodded, not understanding. They never understood, not really. They paid me to keep them safe from the Veracitors, from the Lie Economy, from the consequences of living in a world where language had weight and mass and hunger. They didn't need to understand the theory. They needed to survive.
After K left—after I'd felt his atmospheric pressure diminish down the stairs and out into the Figurative Quarter's ambiguous streets—I sat in my chair and tried to generate a lie-creature deliberately. I'd done this before. I would do it again. The experiment never changed, and I never stopped hoping for different results.
"I can fly," I said.
Nothing.
"I have killed a man."
The air remained stable. My internal barometer held steady at 1020 millibars, high pressure, fair conditions continuing.
"I am human."
That one should have summoned a Deception-beast. That was the lie I'd lived for twenty-eight years, the foundational falsehood upon which my entire existence rested. If lie-creatures responded to intent rather than content, that statement should have collapsed the ceiling. If they responded to social reality, to the gap between claimed and actual identity, I should have been crushed beneath a kaiju of my own making.
Instead: clear skies. Instead: the distant sound of actual rain beginning against my eye-shaped, tear-shaped window, weather that was not mine.
I had a name for my condition. I'd invented it myself, researched it extensively, presented papers to medical societies that rejected them for insufficient evidence. *Prevarication immunity*: a rare neurological condition preventing the manifestation of veracitic material. Sufferers can state falsehoods without generating corresponding lie-creatures. Cause unknown. Prognosis: manageable with appropriate career selection.
I'd built my career on it. Truth consultant: specializing in technically accurate statements that minimized creature generation. I was expensive because I was effective, and I was effective because I didn't need to worry about my own monsters. I could craft the precise phrasing, the exact ambiguity, the strategic omission that would keep my clients' Fauna small and their Beasts unborn.
What I couldn't explain—what I never included in my papers or my consultations—was the weather. The way emotions registered as atmospheric conditions. The way other people's lie-creatures manifested to me as pressure changes, humidity spikes, temperature drops. The way my own body responded to statements not with creatures but with transformation.
When I said "I am angry," I didn't generate a monster. I became anger-shaped. My skin temperature rose. My movements became sharp, angular, meteorological. I was not angry. I was *like* anger. I was comparison made flesh, and I had forgotten what I was being compared to.
The rain intensified against my window. I watched it and felt something I couldn't name—a pressure system from somewhere else, borrowed weather, grief that didn't belong to me but had settled in my lungs regardless.
My appointment book showed Councilor Varn in two hours. Political client, Literal District, brutalist architecture of the soul. He needed to survive a corruption inquiry without generating creatures that would prove his guilt. Standard consultation, standard fee, standard application of my particular immunity to help someone else survive their own lies.
I should have cancelled. I would think this later, in the interrogation room, in the moments before understanding finally arrived. I should have recognized the rain for what it was: not weather, but warning. Not meteorology, but memory.
But I was young in my ignorance then, despite my years. I believed I understood my condition. I believed I was human with a rare disorder, rather than rare disorder wearing humanity like a coat against the cold.
I opened my window to let the rain breathe, and I prepared for my next client, and I did not notice that the raindrops on my sill were arranging themselves into words. I did not read what they spelled. I did not want to know.
*Like a memory of rain.*
The boy had said it. The rain had answered. And I, the truth consultant, the expert in accurate statements and managed ambiguity, failed to consult the most accurate statement of all: that some comparisons are not lies, and some memories are not past, and some creatures do not manifest because they are already here, wearing your face, borrowing your barometer, waiting for you to remember that you were never the one who felt the weather.
You were the weather itself.
The consultation with Varn would begin at three o'clock. It would end with my arrest, but not for the reasons I feared. It would end with Doctor Veritas Lumen looking at my office window, at the condensation still spelling words in a language he recognized, and saying with perfect literal accuracy: "The Wars didn't end. We only agreed to stop fighting them."
But that was hours away. For now, there was only the rain, and the waiting, and the high-pressure system of my own confidence holding steady against the gathering storm I could not yet perceive.
I was, as always, like a woman who believed she knew herself. The gap between that likeness and the truth was where my story would finally begin.
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