A Glint of Light

by J. C. Andrijeski

  “Since she got here, Jon,” he said, motioning a sharp shrug with one hand. “More or less since we took her into custody. After the preliminary interrogations, of course… those led by Alyson and the Sword.”

  Jon folded his arms, staring at him. “So… months. You’ve been doing this with her for months. Going into her memories. Getting more and more immersed in her light. Growing more and more familiar with her way of seeing the world.”

  Balidor gave him a hard look. “What are you implying?”

  “Nothing. I just want us to be clear.”

  “Bullshit.” Balidor gave him a hard look. “If you wish me to have someone monitor my light, or assess me for defects, then say so. I’ll talk to Tarsi.”

  Jon grunted, rolling his eyes. “Sure you will.”

  “Why do you care, Jon?” Balidor said. “Even if you think it is a waste of time, what difference does it make? It is my time to waste.”

  Jon frowned, but Balidor couldn’t help noticing the other’s light had shifted.

  Jon had turned a corner on this somehow.

  Balidor couldn’t tell in what way, but he could feel it.

  He could feel the charge dissipating around both of them.

  “Do you really think it so terrible, what I am doing?” Balidor said, subduing his own voice. “Gaos. All I can do is fail.”

  “It’s insubordination,” Jon said with a grunt. “At the very least, you’re conducting an infiltration op without authorization, utilizing Adhipan resources… even if those resources are you.”

  At Balidor’s flat look, Jon shook his head, clicking.

  “Come on. You know the real issue, ‘Dori. You hid this.” Jon studied his eyes, that frown back on his lips. “You fucking hid this. You obviously know what Allie and Revik would say. You knew you weren’t supposed to do it, so you hid it. That’s the issue. If this was all so above-board, you would have told everyone. Hell, to do it right, you should be interviewing us for intel on her, to better accomplish your goal. If you weren’t so dead-set on keeping it all a secret, you’d want our input and advice… especially those of us who knew Cass best. You would have told me. You would have at least told Wreg. Or Tarsi.”

  There was another silence.

  In it, Balidor went back to staring at the table, clicking under his breath.

  Jon sighed again. “Why, ‘Dori?”

  “I told you why. No one else was doing it.”

  “‘Dori––” Jon began, clicking at him again.

  “Are you going to tell them?” Balidor cut in. “Revik?” He felt his throat tighten. “…Your sister? Any of the others? Are you going to tell them, Jon?”

  Jon seemed to think about that, too.

  After another pause, he sighed, leaning his arms on the table. He bent his head, combing his fingers through his sandy-blond hair.

  “No,” he said, lifting his gaze.

  Balidor blinked.

  Surprise hit his light, but he didn’t take his eyes off the hazel-eyed male.

  He also didn’t speak.

  He didn’t want to do anything that might change Jon’s mind.

  Studying Balidor’s face for another long-feeling moment, Jon asked, “Are you making any progress with her? Anything you’ve noticed?”

  Something about the emotion behind the question caused that harder knot in Balidor’s muscles to finally unclench.

  Or maybe it was that he finally believed Jon that he wouldn’t tell the others.

  At least not yet.

  Not until he’d made up his mind what this was, perhaps.

  Thinking about that, and about Jon’s question, Balidor exhaled himself, giving a purring roll of a sigh.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he admitted, refolding his arms tighter.

  Jon nodded, still studying his face.

  Something in that probing stare made Balidor wince, if only with his light.

  Avoiding the other male’s eyes, he clicked under his breath.

  “How are the party preparations going?” he said, if only to get that look off Jon’s face. “Are we going to have a merry Christmas this year, Jon? Our previous attempts have not been… that merry. Although through no fault of our own, of course.”

  There was a pause.

  Then Jon smiled, shaking his head.

  “Revik and Christmas, man.” Jon smiled wider, rolling his eyes, seer-fashion. “It’s… well, it’s an experience.”

  “How is that?” Balidor said, smiling back in spite of himself.

  “He’s like a big kid.” Jon shook his head, drumming his long fingers on the metal table. “Of course, his excuse is that it’s all for Lily––”

  “Of course,” Balidor said, smiling wider.

  “You’re coming, right?” Jon said, studying his face again. “To the party? It might be our last shindig for awhile. They want to do it in the morning. So tomorrow, man. Everyone will be there. Allie’d be bummed if you missed it.”

  Balidor nodded, glancing towards the door in spite of himself.

  He wanted to get back to it, he realized.

  Back to that cell.

  Back to Cass.

  When he glanced back in Jon’s direction, the scrutiny in the other male’s hazel irises had intensified. Somehow, Balidor distinctly got the impression that Jon had felt some inkling of what passed through Balidor’s mind just then.

  That, or maybe he’d just read his body language.

  Either way, Balidor pretended not to notice.

  “I’ll be there,” he said neutrally, giving him a wan smile. “…With bells on, Jon.”

  Jon snorted.

  That more penetrating stare of his never left Balidor’s face.

  Eight

  Out Of Time

  Balidor waited for Jon to leave the conference room before he did.

  After that, he didn’t hesitate.

  He didn’t even attempt to examine his own motives, or even his own state of mind. Truthfully, all of that felt irrelevant now.

  He’d heard the underlying message from Jon.

  He’d heard it loud and clear.

  He was out of time.

  Cass was out of time.

  They were out of time.

  Either he found some way to make progress with her––real, at least semi-verifiable progress, progress he could point to, that he could use to justify what he’d been doing all these months––or it was over. Jon would be looking now, to see that it was worth what he felt Balidor was risking, in working so closely with her.

  If Jon didn’t like what he saw, he would eventually tell his sister.

  He would tell Allie.

  Allie would tell Revik.

  Or hell, Jon might just tell Wreg. Wreg would tell Allie, or Revik, or both of them. Wreg might even tell Tarsi and Yumi, not to mention friends of his among the ex-Rebels.

  Now that Jon knew, it was only a matter of time before others on their leadership team found out.

  Balidor was out of time. He didn’t have much longer to convince Jon, to convince any of them, that what he was doing was having some kind of positive effect. He didn’t have much time to persuade them it was worth the risk, despite what Cassandra had done, if only because of who and what she was.

  Therefore, when he approached the security station, and the thick door leading into Cass’s quadrant of the Barrier tank, he barely paused before walking directly to the seer working the security console.

  That seer was, of course, Maygar.

  It was always Maygar.

  Well, whenever Balidor conducted these sessions, it was Maygar.

  Strangely, Revik’s son ended up being Balidor’s one and only true ally in his attempts to reach Cass.

  Even stranger, it hadn’t been Balidor who approached the young seer for help.

  Maygar approached him.

  Balidor wasn’t even entirely sure when or how Maygar figured out what he was up to. All he knew was, Maygar decided to say something when Balidor was about two months in
, and starting to feel the effects of his increasingly long working hours, not to mention his time spent immersed in the draining Barrier spaces required to work with Cass.

  Maygar walked right up to Balidor’s booth in the ship’s mess, and plunked down on the opposite bench from where Balidor sat.

  Balidor had the mess hall mostly to himself that night.

  He ate alone, after a particularly grueling session with Cass ended around three in the morning. He’d been so tired, he barely noticed Maygar enter the room until the broad-shouldered seer was already sitting across from him.

  As for Maygar, he didn’t bother with preliminaries.

  He just spoke.

  “I know what you’re doing with her,” he’d said, meeting Balidor’s eyes when he looked up. “I know what you’re doing down there every night, Balidor. With her.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “…With Cass.”

  Balidor had been eating a bowl of fruit covered in custard, the only thing he could find in the kitchen’s stores that looked remotely appetizing. He’d been exhausted, but so hungry he felt light-headed. He’d decided he needed to eat before he crawled off to look for his bed.

  He hadn’t felt entirely ready to return to his quarters, either, given that Yarli was there, and even at that point he knew she would likely question what he’d been doing.

  He knew that was even more likely once she felt his light in its current state.

  She’d already told him by then that she could “smell” Cass on him, when he returned from his sessions with her.

  Even that early in, Yarli hated everything about his sessions with Cass.

  It struck Balidor as strange again, in thinking about this, that she had never told anyone what he’d been up to.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Maygar had repeated. “You need help.”

  Balidor had stared at him, bleary-eyed.

  He’d been so tired, physically and emotionally, at first all he could do was study those dark eyes, looking for what he assumed had to be a trap. Despite the fact that Revik and his son used to fight like mad, Balidor knew all of that had changed in the previous year.

  Maygar was fiercely loyal to his father now.

  The idea that he might be willing to keep the Cass thing a secret from his father never even crossed Balidor’s mind, not at first.

  “Have you told him?” Balidor asked instead, still studying those dark, light-filled eyes. “Your father. Does he know yet?”

  Maygar grunted a laugh. “No. Are you fucking kidding? No. He’d rip your damned head off, Adhipan. I’m not fucking telling Dad. Not now.”

  Balidor had pursed his lips, staring at the other male.

  At first, he could barely comprehend what Maygar had said.

  “Why?” he said finally.

  “I just told you why––”

  “No. I mean why. Why would you help me with this? Especially if it means lying to your father and his wife?”

  Maygar blinked.

  Then he flushed, which might have made Balidor smile under different circumstances. Maygar had definitely inherited his father’s blush response. It made both of them almost touchingly transparent at times, at least when it came to certain emotional responses.

  Neither of them were particularly good at hiding embarrassment.

  “Look,” Maygar said, exhaling backwards into the fiberglass booth seat with his broad back. “She was my friend, too. She fell off the path. I get that.”

  “What about your sister?” Balidor said, still wary. “What about Lily?”

  “Cass loves Lily,” Maygar said simply. “Have you talked to her about Lily? She may have hurt her, but she thought she was helping her. She thought she was keeping her safe. Cass would fucking die for Lily.”

  Thinking about that, Maygar waved a muscular hand, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Look.” He exhaled. “She did everything wrong. I get that. I get that she joined that evil fuck, and she believed all the shit he told her because she wanted to believe it…”

  Trailing, he shook his head, clicking under his breath.

  Staring off towards the door of the mess hall, he shrugged his broad shoulders, adding,

  “But I get it, you know? I get being jealous. I get thinking you’re doing the right thing for someone, when you’re fucking ruining their life… and yours. I get telling yourself you’re doing the only thing open to you when there’s actually a few hundred other things you could have done that would have been better. I get hurting people and kind of knowing you’re doing it, but rationalizing it and doing it anyway. I get lying to yourself. I get not wanting to admit you’re wrong, much less that you’re the bad guy. I get what it’s like to make a mistake that costs you… everything.”

  Balidor watched the other male as he spoke.

  He watched the blush darken and crawl up the young seer’s neck.

  He didn’t have to ask Maygar what he was talking about.

  After a long-feeling silence, Maygar exhaled, facing him.

  “They’ll find out,” Maygar said. “They always do.”

  Thinking about this, Balidor nodded, agreeing.

  “Yes.”

  “So you need to work fast, old man,” Maygar advised. “For that, you need help. You need someone to watch your back. You need someone to run cover for you. You need someone to run the board while you’re inside, to keep the feed from making it up to the CIC. You need someone to buy you time when you’re making progress… and you need someone close by to keep an eye on the security feeds, so she doesn’t fucking kill you, Balidor.”

  Balidor thought about that.

  He couldn’t find fault with Maygar’s logic.

  He couldn’t find fault with any of it.

  “Yes,” he’d said, meeting Maygar’s gaze. “Yes. I will need help.”

  Maygar nodded back. Watching Balidor shrewdly, he frowned.

  “You look like shit. When’s the last time you’ve slept?”

  Balidor had grunted a laugh.

  He couldn’t help it.

  “No,” Maygar insisted, his voice harder. “I mean it. It’s a dead giveaway, Adhipan. You can’t walk around like a zombie all the time without people noticing. My dad’ll definitely notice. You need more sleep. We’ll have to work that in somehow––”

  “Work that in?” Balidor said, genuinely puzzled. “Work that into what?”

  “Sleep,” Maygar replied promptly. “We’ll need to work sleep into the schedule.”

  “What schedule?”

  “Your schedule, dumbass. What the fuck do you think we’re talking about?”

  Minutes later, sitting across from one another in that fiberglass booth, they’d worked out the beginnings of what would end up being a detailed but highly effective arrangement between them.

  Since then, they’d refined that arrangement even more.

  Now Maygar was more or less in charge of overseeing the security rotation responsible for guarding Cass’s portion of the tank. Balidor continued to add responsibilities to the young seer as he excelled in the ones he’d already been given.

  Now it was accurate to say Maygar had more or less taken over oversight scheduling and functions for tank security personnel as a whole.

  For that reason alone, Balidor was grateful Maygar had approached him.

  He might not have discovered the young seer’s skill at managing others for years, if not decades, if Balidor hadn’t had such a time-sensitive reason to test those skills.

  But Maygar was good.

  He was better than good.

  Truly, he was excellent at the work.

  Maygar had inherited his father’s leadership skills, and moreover, his father’s ability to discern and assess the temperaments and skill-sets of not only seers, but also humans. Maygar had an intuitive grasp of how best to organize others to get them to work well together, and how to motivate them. Moreover, he was less socially awkward than his father.

  The other seers genuinely liked him.r />
  They confided in him. They went to him when they had conflicts or other problems. They looked to him to solve those problems, despite his young age.

  Balidor was tempted to put Maygar in charge of personnel for the entire security branch at this point, if only to test how he did with a larger-scale operation.

  In the meantime, Maygar had been invaluable in terms of Balidor’s “Cass” project.

  Just having him in charge of tank security personnel solved multiplying problems Balidor had been having, trying to juggle too many roles without anyone finding out what he’d been doing. Maygar more or less made all of that go away.

  Maygar also placed a concrete buffer between Balidor himself and that task, making it less likely any staffing questions would lead directly to him.

  Balidor already had Wreg and Revik trained to go to Maygar for such things.

  More to the point, it ensured Maygar could assign himself to security whenever Balidor could carve out time to work with Cass.

  Since then, they hadn’t talked much about what they were doing.

  They hadn’t even discussed how it was going––not directly.

  They talked scheduling and security features, the length of sessions and code words for if Balidor found himself in trouble in there. They didn’t talk about the content of the sessions, or the dangers around what they were doing.

  They didn’t talk about whether any of it was working.

  They didn’t talk about what they would do when Revik found out.

  Still, Maygar remained strangely… if quietly… supportive of Balidor’s attempts.

  He continued to take it upon himself to watch over the tank personally from virtual whenever Balidor worked with Cass inside, and to open the shields and watch via the cameras directly whenever Balidor asked him to.

  Balidor hadn’t mentioned that side of things to Jon.

  He didn’t ask Maygar if Jon had said anything to him, either.

  Jon must have noticed it was Maygar running the console outside.

  Even so, Balidor saw entirely no point in dragging Revik’s son into his own mess––no more than Maygar been dragged in already, that is.

  He had no intention of telling anyone about Maygar’s role when he was eventually exposed to the leadership team. He had no intention of bringing up Maygar at all. He owed the young seer a lot––enough that he was willing to lie for Maygar, if the situation required it.